Thank you for raising awareness regarding the crisis facing the Women's Library (Women's archive hunts for a saviour, 1 May). Over 50 years ago the Guardian's Mary Stott was instrumental in founding our organisation – the National Women's Register – the then Housewives Register. Our archive is housed by the library and we would be saddened if access to our history was restricted along the lines proposed. The worry is that this could be the thin end of the wedge with the collection as a whole under threat. Can I urge your readership to join the e-petition and in Sandi Toksvig's words "save this national treasure".
Pam McKee
Chair of trustees, National Women's Register
• When one considers the number of well-endowed military museums (two in the city of Winchester) stuffed full of the celebration of slaughter and toys for the boys, the contrast to the threat to the one national archive recording the struggles of women over four centuries is all the more distressing. Then there is the Trade Union Congress library. It is fitting that these two records of the fight for basic rights and greater equality are housed in the same place and no surprise that it is under the Cameron administration that they come under threat. Could not the British Library take these two nationally important collections under its wing?
Kate Macintosh
Winchester, Hampshire
• We have been coming to the library for nine years, using the fantastic collection to get us thinking and talking. We are a group of women aged from 14 to 80 and it is relevant to us all. The library is a place of history, inspiration and love. Women's voices are important and we women want our voices heard today. The building was once a wash house. It was important to the community then and it is now. Like the suffragettes before us, we will not give in.
Winnie Roache, Rachel Ogunleye, Marion Davies, Roberta Stewart, Alma Ramnauth, Gita Sarkar, Joanna Judge, Sue Mayo, Leslie Pinder, Jules Wilkinson, Holly O'Neill
Women's Library project group, Magic Me
• Malcolm Gillies, vice-chancellor of London Metropolitan Library, sets up a false opposition when he says that more outsiders use the Women's Library than do his own students. Of course they do, because it's a research library. As such, it brings academics, and not only academics, from all over the world to use its resources, and this alone brings great distinction to Mr Gillies's university. Distinction alone will not pay the bills but it certainly raises the profile of the institution. I was working at the library only last week, and was tremendously impressed not only by what it had to offer in the way of holdings, but by the efficiency and professionalism of the library staff. If LMU cannot see a way to support this excellent specialist library, some other institution must be given the chance to do so. To measure the profile of an academic library by the footfall of students is a sad commentary on the university's culture.
Alan Shelston
Cheshire
• The 1980s poster It's Really Good Being a Girl, which was featured, though uncredited, in the Women's Library article on Tuesday, came out of the work that Birmingham Film and Video Workshop was undertaking with backing from Channel 4 and the BFI with young people in the Black Country. Videos such as Girl Zone, Giro – Is This the Modern World?, What They Telling Us It's Illegal For, amongst a host of other films, were made in one of the most participatory of creative ways devised thus far by independent film-makers in the UK. In a week when parts of the media in the UK have been shown up for their venal mendacity, isn't it about time that film and media policy looked in its rear-view mirror for positive solutions for the future of a more responsible and accountable media? The work of this national movement of film and video workshops from the 70s and 80s is sadly neglected by contemporary policy makers; yet its ethos and creative modus operandi is surely a baton to be handed on.
Professor Roger Shannon
Moseley, Birmingham