I am writing to ask for help from everyone I can reach in our service area. Libraries and Library Systems stand to take an 18% cut in funding in the Governor’s budget this year. For the library itself this is not enormous—it means a cut of under $1000 for the Swan Library. Of course, the smaller the library, the larger the impact of the cuts. For the Library System, however, the cuts are devastating. And in that way, the library cuts affect every library in the state.
The Nioga Library System does a number of things for its member libraries. The system provides staff training, cataloging services for library collections, Interlibrary Loan and delivery service, our Online Public Access Catalog, and technical support. New York State mandates Outreach services to underserved populations, and so the system provides that also.
There are two reasons the cuts are so hard on the Library Systems. First is that the system gets the majority of its funding from the state. Unlike the libraries it serves, the Library System does not get local tax support. The local libraries do help to defray some of the costs for maintaining the Online Catalog, but that’s all. The second reason is that the Systems have received no funding increases since 1998. So for the past 10 years, since costs have increased every year, the system has had to cut services. And so the libraries no longer have collection development help; the number of in-service trainings has dropped; the system no longer has much in the way of collections to augment library collections, and most of the collection help that the system provides is in databases that all the libraries can use.
Those few services that are left are the core services without which it would become really difficult, and very expensive, for the libraries each to provide for themselves. The Nioga Library System has been in place for 50 years, this year. The kind of major budget cuts contemplated would risk losing the economies of scale that the Library Systems were created to provide.
It is often stated that for each $1 spent for libraries, the community receives $4 in services. In the case of Library Systems, because of the large costs involved, each $1 gets multiplied to a far greater sum than the $4. Your letters might help to keep the Systems operating longer, and keep the libraries able to provide the services that people in our community deserve and need.