SCRUTA, says the online dictionary I access through Darlington’s library service, means “old, broken stuff, trash” in Latin.

A scrutator was a person who searched through the old, broken stuff – “even through the rags” – hoping to spot something of value. This is where our word “scrutiny” comes from.

This week, at the eleventh hour, opposition councillors managed to stay the decision to close Darlington’s Crown Street library by calling in the papers for scrutiny.

While rifling through the rags of what will be left of Darlington’s library service, I hope they spot a thing of real value: the Centre for Local Studies.

Of course I am biased. Very biased. But the plans for the centre are devastating. It is currently open six days a week, from 9am to 6pm, with two members of staff and instant access. In future, it will be open five days a week, from 9am to 3.30pm, shut for lunch, with one member of staff and everything will be booked in advance. There’ll be about a third less floor space and nearly all of the material will be housed in adjoining buildings.

So people will have to be able to predict where their research will take them weeks ahead; no one will be able to have a spur of the moment thought and just drop in, the one experienced librarian will spend all their time gophering around looking for stuff; the preservation of items for future generations will end. The practicalities are appalling and the precedent is disturbing: in the early 1990s Darlington museum shut and some of its treasures just disappeared.

The only certainties are that frustration will rise and usage will fall. Then, because usage is falling, there will be more cuts.

This is probably only important to boring old gits like me who enjoy sifting through the rags of time.

Yet there are a lot of us about. History has never been more popular – look at this week’s top TV programmes: food in Edwardian times, great historical fibs, people named Ben, the secrets of Italian cities, famous family trees, strange men in flamboyant jackets riding around on railways…

Darlington council knows how important history can be. It played hugely on the history of its fabulous theatre to get a £4.5m heritage lottery grant to do brilliant things at the Hippodrome.

And yet rather than enhance access to the town’s general history, it is to be reduced as the council jettisons the historic, and beautiful, library building.

But this is access to Darlington’s history. This history is what gives Darlington its identity, what makes its unique, and if Darlington as a town doesn’t cherish it and Darlington as a council doesn’t care for it, no one else in the world will or can.

Of course, the council is being cut mercilessly by central government. This year – October 1 to be precise – is the 150th anniversary of its creation and its future as a viable, independent concern has never been in greater doubt.

And, of course, wider library usage is changing – I use my library card to look up words online rather than bothering with the unwieldy volumes in the reference library.

The councillors I know feel boxed in, having to make desperate decisions. However, this one is ill thought out and wrong.

A comment left on the council’s local studies webpage says: “Not since Julius Caesar burned down the library at Alexandria has such an act of vandalism been perpetrated on a community.”

That was 48BC in Egypt; I hope the 21st Century scrutators in Darlington can save the town’s rags.