If you serve an area of 20,000 or less, read on.

I don’t usually jump on funding opportunities, but I really want libraries to get their share of the recovery money, and just recently the USDA has targeted libraries, specifically, for the $100 million they need to spend by 9/30/2010 on community facilities.  The funds are limited and once they are spent (which could be well before the September deadline) that’s it, so contact your local office now (scroll down to “Guidelines and Strategy” and know that, despite the page title, this is not about broadband).

I’ve been lurking on a listserv that’s been discussing holds ratios.  Books still have an inordinate preference.  While I understand that DVDs and other media may have shorter checkouts, if we’ve learned one thing in the last year, it’s that we need to serve everyone in our service areas, even those who’d rather be couch potatoes – like me at times – and lazily watch movies instead of actively engaging their brains with books.  Yes, libraries as institutions of education are the public’s ideal, but they work just as well as publicly sponsored swap meets - effectively reducing costs (and material waste) for our whole community.

At that advocacy training I discussed in my last post, we also covered local government spending.

The speaker pointed out that when voters show up at local government meetings or contact their legislators, it really does influence elected officials.  They’d rather see your patrons than you.  They know you have a vested interest, but if lots of people turn up to support a new program you’re proposing, it’s easier for them to justify funding you.

Remember too that you need high profile people for your board – their connections will prove invaluable when you need to influence others in your community.  They can rally the troops to write to the mayor or have a quiet word with the town manager highlighting how your new service will benefit the area.

Think outside the box when making your case to legislators and residents.  Safety is a huge priority – we know how often police and fire budgets are increased while libraries must tighten their belts.  So to free up dollars, make the connection between the 85% illiteracy rate in the juvenile justice system and your “ready to read” program.  We also provide a fairly safe place for kids to go after school (which keeps them from destructive behavior because they’re bored).

Certainly the educational opportunities that the library provides have an impact on the crime rate.  Stories engage your listeners, so tell some about at-risk patrons that are now productive tax-paying citizens because of library services.  And surely the city budget committee will be impressed that the library helps businesses start, grow and thrive.  Their additional tax revenues are certainly welcome, as are the jobs they create.

Remind your governments that we’re not just about books – we have the same objective they do – to improve our communities.  Telling stories that illustrate this will help them remember that.

We had some very disappointing news locally from this week’s election. 

Aurora, the city where BCR is located, lost its bid to create a general improvement district which would have given the library dedicated funding.  As their budget will be reduced by about 50%, they’ll be closing four of their seven locations (see Expected 2010 Library Cuts) and about 40 staffers will be laid off.   All this during a time when the unemployment rate means more people than ever are dependent on the resources libraries provide and in a city where over 15% of the residents live below the poverty line.

As of today, it seems that only 20,778 people (see bar graph) made this decision for a city of over 300,000.

Budget cuts are an almost universal problem for libraries.  In the last meeting of BCR’s Public Libraries Advisory Group, we were discussing how different funding models might help and that in some states, new laws must be enacted before libraries will even be able to consider such models (see last paragraph).  I know that in Colorado, libraries that have been able to form library districts are able to best ensure their funding.

We heard about some really interesting programs at our recent meeting of BCR’s Public Libraries Advisory Group. 

Sweetwater (WY) County Library System is holding their 2nd annual Zombie Walk and Prom (?! what a combination).  Sioux City (IA) Public Library got a grant to help seniors with internet literacy via Generations on Line and on Halloween there, kids practiced their reading skills on Reading Dogs in full costume. 

Appropriately, Clifford the Big Red Dog

Slacker Pirate Dog

One library will soon install a vending machine with 300 items at a public transportation hub.  (I’d love to hear how these types of machines are doing – if you have one, please send in your comments.)  Bitterroot (MT) Public Library is heavily promoting downloadable audios and their virtual reference service.  Both these efforts have the added advantage of helping the environment since they reduce the number of cars driving to the library. 

It was great to hear that Multnomah County Library won the highest award for community service.

King County (WA) Library System is opening an unstaffed Library Express at a shopping center in an area far from any branches.  Customers can pick up holds, browse a small collection and get phone reference help.  They’ve also purchased five Sprinter Vans which house materials and computers.  Smaller than bookmobiles, staff can take them into neighborhoods or park them at transit stations.  Since staffers working the Library2Go service will know what their patrons need, they’ll make the decisions about where the vans should be and what items will be on them.

On a darker note, almost everyone is seeing or anticipating budget cuts and reductions, though luckily most libraries have avoided laying off staff so far.  Even the normally flush WY libraries seem to be affected as Sweetwater took a 13.5% cut.  Washoe (NV) County Library System has been devastated – they’ve lost half their funding in the last two years.  Let’s hope the customer testimonials their advocacy group is recording help their funders see how important a well financed library is to the community.  And King County will be able to help libraries reduce costs.  They got an IMLS million dollar grant to assist other libraries with implementing the Evergreen open source ILS software. 

We also discussed how to help libraries retain and increase funding.  It seems libraries that get the biggest budget cuts are the ones competing for funds with other public entities.  We need to know how to articulate to local government and politicians that the library is a service worth funding.  We also felt that in many states, we need to lobby for new laws or models that allow libraries to be funded independently, so they don’t have to compete for monies with police and fire departments.

I just couldn’t believe that there was actually the possibility that the library would close on October 2.  How could this possibly happen in these desperate times?  Well, hurray, it won’t!  I just saw that legislation was passed which will allow them to remain open.  Check out some of the comments on the blog - it will reaffirm your faith in what we do (as if you had any doubt).

So many libraries and librarians are so very frugal.  They are careful to stay within their budgets, not ask for too much, supplement operating expenses with grants, donations and volunteers and keep salaries low.  When times are bad they accept budget cuts that other local goverment agencies refuse to consider.

So it’s really upsetting to see that some New Jersey libraries are being asked to return surplus funds to their municipalities.  Particularly when the surplus funds are carefully built up reserves earmarked for important projects or needed for tough economic times when business is booming (since unlike for-profit corporations, increased use doesn’t translate into increased revenue for us).

Be careful that your state or community doesn’t pass such a law.

There have been so many articles supporting libraries lately, but this one from Kenneth C. Davis (of the Don’t Know Much About _____ books) really does a wonderful job of making our case.

Thanks to Linda Tillson for posting this on the Utah Library Network listserv!

Trying to get usage statistics has long been the bane of electronic resources collection development librarians.  Some databases are so costly that you want to make sure they are really being used and serving the needs of patrons.  And these days, with our tight and shrinking budgets, any expenditure is reviewed closely for its effectiveness, so good, reliable data is more important than ever.   Statistics can also help with vendor price negotiations.  Use data that shows how much your resources are accessed (and needed) can also help justify expenses and assist in advocacy efforts.  Legislators love hard numbers.

For a long time some vendors wouldn’t even provide statistics so libraries had to try to collect their own.  Now that providers usually do send statistics, it’s still hard to compare one database’s use to another’s as their measures for collecting the data often vary.  Some libraries get around this by comparing use of the same database from year to year (if use is increasing each year, that’s got to be good), but even then, the vendor might change the way they are collecting statistics at any point, leaving the library without comparisons from previous years to measure the current year use against.

So I was excited to find out about COUNTER and listened to two paid audio conferences on it from NISO (National Information Standards Organization) over the last two weeks.  COUNTER’s mission is to develop an international code of standards and protocols (see Release 3) governing the recording and exchange of online usage data that’s agreed upon and used by both publishers and libraries.  This will assist the vendors and publishers too as producing useful resources and including them in their database offerings can help them with staffing decisions and marketing their products (to say nothing of their bottom line).  Currently over 100 journal and database vendors/producers of over 15,000 journals are COUNTER compliant.  In addition, 13 vendors of books and reference works are compliant.

Unfortunately, though vendors who followed COUNTER protocols (and allowed themselves to be audited by COUNTER approved auditors) provided good statistics, actually getting your statistics was an extremely time consuming procedure.  No mechanism existed for automatically retrieving, combining, and storing COUNTER usage data from different sources.  So SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative – love the acronym) was born.  SUSHI greatly reduced the amount of time and effort required to get usage statistics and put them in a usable format.  (See BCR’s Free Friday Forum on this – though it’s from 2007, and there have been updates since then.)

In the future, COUNTER will be looking at such issues as providing benchmarks so you can see how your database usage compares to others’ and user retrieval (what keywords  are used to find the articles).  There is a mailing list for those interested in keeping abreast of this topic.

So tell us - are your database usage statistics acceptable for your needs and how are you using them?