Funding: A mixed bag

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Funding problems continued to plague America’s public libraries in 2005, and several cases gained notoriety in the news media. In the hometown of John Steinbeck, contributions enabled the three branches of the Salinas (Calif.) Public Library to remain open, albeit with reduced services, until voters came to the rescue in November 2005 by approving a half-cent tax to fund libraries and other essential city services. Libraries elsewhere had to impose drastic reductions in hours and staff, and one, in Bedford, Texas, shut down for about a month. In Pennsylvania, a judge issued an injunction blocking more cuts following an initial round of shortened hours and layoffs at the Free Library of Philadelphia, which opened in 1731. The 114-year old Hampden (Mass.) Free Public Library was not so lucky: It closed June 30 after a budget measure failed.

In 2005, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell signed a state budget that included $61.3 million in state aid to libraries, a 6 percent increase over the previous year. Although the budget fell short of the $75.3 million that the state’s libraries had received in 2002, the increase represents a national trend toward the restoration of some of the funding lost during the last recession.

Many school library media centers, however, suffered budget cuts.

"School budgets are taking a hit, and, in turn, so are the school libraries," reported Carl Harvey, library media specialist for the North Elementary School in Noblesville, Indiana. Although he was referring to fiscal conditions in Indiana, where, he said, "some districts have cut budgets while others have eliminated positions," Harvey could have been describing the situation in scores of school districts across the country.

Continuing budget cuts mainly affected resources and materials but also had an impact on school library staffing levels. Meanwhile, studies in 16 different states found that students at schools with well-developed libraries consistently score from 10 to 18 percent higher on reading and other tests. This is true whether the schools and their communities are rich or poor, and whether the adults in them are well or poorly educated.

An Illinois study in 2005 found, for instance, that eleventh-grade ACT scores are highest when there is a high degree of true collaboration between library media specialists and classroom teachers in a wide spectrum of activities. Higher library staffing levels are linked to higher reading performance for all grade levels.

Many school librarians felt that the financial pressure on school libraries in 2005 grew out of the demands made on school systems by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Still, given the limited allocation and the number of competing interests in fiscal 2006, libraries fared reasonably well in Washington as Congress raced to finish its business at the end of 2005. The Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill for fiscal year 2006 provides $210.6 million for the Library Services and Technology Act, a $5 million increase from the previous year. As part of the LSTA funding, $23.8 million went to the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Initiative, which supports efforts to recruit and educate the next generation of librarians and the faculty who will prepare them for careers in library science, as well as grants for research related to library education and library staffing needs, curriculum development and continuing education and training. While the LSTA fared well, the Improving Literacy Through School Libraries program was level-funded at $19.5 million. The issue of funding for school library media centers remains a top priority at the state and federal levels.

Federal E-rate funding continues to be an essential program for libraries, having provided more than $350 million dollars in telecommunications discounts for libraries over the past eight years. Although libraries account for only a small part of the Universal Service Fund for Schools and Libraries Program, as it is formally known, those that receive the discounts count on them to provide the services—such as Internet access—that patrons have come to depend on. Critics of the E-rate program continue to attack it, and the ALA will play a key advocacy role in protecting the program, as the Telecommunications Act is re-opened. College and research libraries also felt budget pressures in 2005, with libraries at large public universities reporting a tighter squeeze than institutions with healthy endowments. Still, all experienced the following trends to varying degrees in 2005:

• Increased use of consortia and collaborations to maintain services while controlling costs. More and more college and research libraries negotiated joint licenses for the use of specialized materials.
• More extensive use of technology in areas such as access to information, reference, archiving, preservation and interlibrary loan. More institutions are creating institutional and discipline-specific repositories. Digital collections are expanding.
• More emphasis on advocacy issues, including the importance of physical libraries for community and collaboration and the importance of information literacy across the curriculum.
• Increased collaboration with faculty to ensure that students are adept at finding, critically evaluating and using information resources.

Technology itself was responsible for pressure of another kind. The University of Texas at Austin created a stir at mid-year when it announced that by fall, almost all of the undergraduate library’s 90,000 volumes would be dispersed to other university collections to make room for a 24-hour electronic information commons. And in fact, many campus libraries followed a broader library trend of redesigning spaces in order to create new learning environments, facilitate group or team learning and increase opportunities to teach information literacy on the spot.

All of 2005 played out against the backdrop of the experimental Google Book Search, introduced as the year began, and the Open Content Alliance, which made its debut in October and set about "building a permanent archive of digitized text and multimedia content"—not new ideas for libraries, which have been engaged in digitizing text for years.

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