Week 4 Readings

Bottoming Out

This article discusses the responses of various libraries to a survey about their budgets. Most respondents said that they had had their budgets decreased in FY10, and some also had to cut stuff, but there was cautious optimism from some libraries that their budgets for FY11 would see some kind of increase.

It was a bit worrying to read about the budget and staff cuts that various libraries have had to make in recent years, but it is good to know that libraries are (were?) optimistic about FY11. There seemed to be a feeling that libraries that were strongly integrated into and involved with their community were the ones who had less drastic budget cuts. Not that there weren't cuts, of course, just that they also had community support behind them.

Vote of Confidence

This article talks about the importance of engaging your community and clearly communicating the services and impact of the library, if libraries want to be able to convince voters to support them.

I thought this article made a good point about researching your community in order to find the best ways to convince them to support the library, and communicating the library's impact on the community in terms that are more easily understood than just numbers. When I read the 'Bottoming Out' article, I was surprised to see that the Troy Public Library had been forced to close, because I've always thought of Troy as one of the better-off Detroit suburbs, and it was strange to think that a community that could afford to keep the library open wouldn't, but it makes more sense if, as Dempsey says, the voters were confused about the library's funding and impact.

Performing Triage on Budgets in the R*E*D

This article also discusses the importance of gaining community support for libraries, as well as going over a few strategies libraries can use to keep their budgets out of the red, including resource pooling, e-commerce initiatives and direct political action.

This article seemed strangely old to me, even though it was written in 2003, but I guess in technology-years, that's ancient history. Even though the technology the author was talking about has been replaced by other technological concerns for libraries, I think that the points he made about ways to help library budgets are still relevant, especially his point about direct action. I mean, I don't know if there need to be protests in the street, but being more vocal about supporting libraries can't be a bad thing. I'm sure most of us have been told at least once that libraries will be replaced by the Internet (something else that has apparently not changed since 2003), but if libraries can effectively market their services, more people might realize that it really isn't just a place for old, dusty books.

All three of these articles seemed (to me, at least) to emphasize the idea that libraries need to better communicate their importance. The statistics we looked at last week, about the various services libraries provide and how much they are valued by the people who use them, are a good example of how libraries can benefit the community, but if people don't actually know about what we do, why would they give us money?