California Librarians Say Brown’s Budget Proposal Undermines Core Principles

February 23, 2012 By Meredith Schwartz 2 Comments

Since California Governor Jerry Brown proposed in January a state budget with no funding for libraries for the second year in a row, librarians across the state are worried that two fundamental principles, universal borrowing and equal access, are threatened.

Universal Access FrayingTogether, the principles mean patrons of any library in a cooperative can access the collections and services of any library in the system, and the principles are enshrined in the California Library Services Act.  If that act goes unfunded, libraries no longer have a financial incentive to participate in the cooperative systems, according to Rosario Garza, executive director of Southern California Library Cooperative. Garza said the cooperative is already seeing city governments questioning the value of continued membership.

State Librarian Stacey Aldrich said systems that pull out of the cooperatives could charge patrons who live outside their jurisdiction for library cards – Santa Clara is already charging $80. And while the solution to just go to the library in your own jurisdiction seems simple, it isn’t always possible in practice. “We have kids who can’t go to the library that’s in their jurisdiction because they have to cross gang lines,” Aldrich said.

Rivkah Sass, director of the Sacramento Public Library, told LJ that even at its high point, state funding only came to about 2 percent of her library’s budget. But though you might think that number is too small to make a difference, Sass said it’s not so. “It causes us to rethink the whole idea of resource sharing,” she said.  Some of Sacramento’s partner libraries “cannot afford delivery and we can’t afford to subsidize them. Their existence is threatened. We’re facing our own budget challenges with diminishing revenues. It’s not that we don’t want to share, but how can we share when we don’t have enough for our own users and patrons? It’s taking away our ability to look at the bigger picture,” said Sass. “I’m not faulting anybody in these economic times, but I don’t know that we’re ever going to rebuild it.”

Since the cooperatives are much more dependent on state funding than the individual libraries, the loss also means they must reduce, outsource, or even eliminate services such as delivery that make universal borrowing practical. Both the Southern California cooperative, which lost 50 percent of its budget, and the tiny 49-99 cooperative, which Garza also administers, rank delivery as their highest priority, though Southern California is planning to outsource the function. 49-99, which lost 75 percent of its budget, is essentially cutting everything else to keep it.

Executive Director Annette Milliron Debacker said the NorthNet Library System previously coordinated resource sharing, staff training, licensing databases, and ebooks, all of which saved the member libraries money. However, “with the elimination of funding from the state, they had to choose between an office and a staff and a delivery system,” she said. They chose delivery, so Debacker is in the process of working herself out of a job, transferring files and training member library personnel to salvage what they can.

Vera Skop, coordinator of Serra Cooperative Library System, is also working herself out of a job, and the cooperative, which was about 75 percent funded by state money, has also had to switch to a slower hub-and-spoke model for delivery. Maureen Theobald, executive director of Black Gold Cooperative Library System, said the system, which lost about a third of its funding, is moving from four-day-a-week to three-day-a-week delivery and has furloughed staff.

The state library is unlikely to be in a position to step in and hold the system together: it’s facing its own $1.1 million cut on the theory that it no longer needed the employees who had managed the five programs which have been eliminated. Aldrich says the state’s finance department eliminated 13 positions, when in fact only five employees really had been running those programs, and those not full time. The State Library has lost about 50 positions over the past three years, and Aldrich, too, said she was rethinking services, trying to stick to the library’s core mission.

Read the Complete Article: California Librarians Say Brown’s Budget Proposal Undermines Core Principles

Source: The Library Journal