The North Suburban Library System which moves book loans around among 28 suburban libraries earlier this year laid off almost its entire staff. Basically all that were left were the truck drivers when State payments fell behind $900,000, more than 40 percent of the NSLS budget. The system's been running on pocket change donations from member libraries for the last three months and so have four others. They plan to merge into one super-interlibrary system to consolidate back-office operations. At some of the systems there isn't a lot of back-office left, though.
"I work part-time 15 hours a week, " said Jan Hayes who is almost all that's left of NSLS's administrative staff. "So is my co-worker and we have a woman who does payrolls 10 hours a week," she said.
"(Interlibrary systems) were created by the State of Illinois and were funded by the State of Illinois," said Tom Sloan, head of the DuPage Library System and leader of the merger team. Now that big money's still owing from the last fiscal year and this year's funding is only conjectural Sloan says the ailing systems have no choice but to merge. "We hope there will be some economies of scale. If that isn't enough then we'd have to find savings in service. The only savings in service left is not to provide them."
One service that NSLS has already cut, for instance, is its program of continuing education for area librarians. As far as interlibrary loans themselves go, stopgap measures are working, according to Hayes. NSLS still manages to move books from wherever they are to where they need to be she said. "If the money came through we could probably do this indefinitely," said Hayes.
2 comments:
Perhaps one way to cut costs would be to have libraries stick to what they do best and leave the extras to other entities? Libraries do things that should be under park districts, schools, state or local govt. etc.
Growing the library system bigger, biting off more bigger and bigger building debt than is needed, and trying to be all things to all people may have caused part of the financial bell thud.
And this is coming from a person who loves libraries and free access to reading material/cds/etc. Send the crafts, the computer classes, teaching, and so on to the places they belong.
Except that many of those things you listed are either grant funded or user funded. I don't mind them having a break-even computer class or even a profitable computer class. Many of the "courses" offered by libraries are budget neutral.
Maybe they need to attach a fee to inter-library loans. I love the system and have used in regularly. It is a great way to help educate the public.
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