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Michael has started an Endangered Library List on his blog. Let him know if you have additions.
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31Jan05 . . . . endangered libraries 21Jan05 . . . . salinas! At ALA Council on Wednesday, Council passed a resolution that was strongly critical of the Salinas library system closing and written by Michael McGrorty. Eventually the resolution in its final form will be online, in the meantime, the situation in Salinas is still looking pretty contentious, as are other libraries getting severely reduced hours such as the ones in Philadelphia.
Councilman Sergio Sanchez, who cast the lone vote of opposition to the libraries' closure, said Salinas residents should practice civil disobedience and physically take over the city's three library branches to keep them from closing. "We got to prepare for another fight," Sanchez said. The libraries are scheduled to close this spring, sometime before June 17, the last day library employees can work.
5Jan05 . . . . as Salinas goes, so it goes @ your library Salinas California is going to be the largest city in the US without a public library, setting a bad trend, I think. Mike McGrorty has a few suggestions of how to help. [thanks dsdlc]
15Nov04 . . . . Buffalo/Erie County PL opinion I sent around some email about the Buffalo PL crisis yesterday and got this interesting note back from a Buffalo non-librarian resident.
The library closing here is political brinkmanship by the county executive. He wants an increase in the sales tax but has to go through this. It might happen to some extent, for a brief period of time. They are threatening to close the zoo, the symphony, etc. You know those things that the middle class and weathly have come to expect. There is a legitmate question as to whether there are too many libraries with the reduced population. But that is a different question requiring a different discussion.... The church we are attending, along with others, are aggressively advocating on behalf of the libraries.
14Nov04 . . . . libraries in Buffalo are more popular than ever, so why are they closing? You can't put it more plainly than this "After January 1, 2005: Your Library Will Close" Buffalo and Erie County NY libraries are looking at 80% budget cuts. They have very good advocacy pages set up like this "contact your legislature" page, but is it too late? I know that sometimes libraries consider closing [along with turning off the OPAC] as a tactic to raise awareness of funding cuts and their affect on libraries, but having a budget that is cut 80% really does seem like an irrecoverable budget slashing, doesn't it? The budget is being debated and acted on this week, contact your local officials. As a side note, do you know why the county needs more money? It's not because citizens are getting a tax break, it's to cover rising Medicare costs.
8Oct04 . . . . AK state library drastically cuts hours State Library Illnesswatch: Alaska State Library hours are being cut in half though they're still available full time via phone and [I'm guessing] email.
5Oct04 . . . . Save and Burn, a film about the destruction of libraries Film librarian Steve Fesenmaier has written a lengthy review of the film "Save and Burn" about the destriction of libraries and the corresponding destruction of culture. Can anyone help me track down independent information about this film other than this review and the posts that cite it?
6Jul04 . . . . Providence Library Defense Also from the Juice, and many other places, the Providence Public Library workers who are incensed over staff layoffs and administrator pay raises now have a snappy website and URL.
24Jun04 . . . . save which libraries, and how? SaveOurLibraries.org used to be the domain for the Save America's Libraries campaign that now has this little page with a crap URL on the ALA site. Now there's another site at SaveOurLibraries.com that addresses some of the recent issues surrounding the San Francisco Public Library. I see the unlinked acronym RFID there, I'm interested to see where this goes.
19Jun04 . . . . Providence Library becoming "popular" with mass staff layoffs Providence Public Library lays off workers, gives admins big raises.
uring the week of May 24th, the administration of the Providence Public Library announced to the staff that because of financial trouble they would be forced to lay off over 60 people. This would include the entire unionized custodial staff whose jobs would be outsourced to non-union labor. Forty more would be cut from Central and 10-15 from the branches.
27Apr04 . . . . what is wrong with uk [and other] libraries? How are UK libraries failing users? A new study entitled "Who's in Charge?" by charity group Libri proposes some questions, and some answers. Long document, but worth a read.
"Performance management is poor and planning is disconnected from the preparation of budgets. The extent and nature of the problems are such that the heads of library services do not have the authority to act and resolve them. Because costs in other areas are difficult to reduce,whenever savings are needed it is the book budget along with opening hours and buildings maintenance which bear the brunt of cuts. Alternatively, library closures are proposed, even though these measures inevitably result in a reduction in service to the public.Cost control is not directed so as to improve or maintain the service,but rather to avoid making difficult decisions with which public servants feel it unfair to task their staff." [thanks all]
The headline Heinz Museum cuts employees due to budget cuts deftly skips over the fact that most of those employees were library and archive staff.
Reducing library hours... makes sense because the number of authors, researchers, genealogists and students using the library is not growing. The number of people using the library's collections and images online has increased, he said. [thanks barbara]
30Mar04 . . . . more libraries in trouble - Hawai'i's new director New State Library director in Hawai'i struggles with not enough staff and not enough money. [thanks brandon]
Due to what is being called a "critical staff shortage" the American Museum of Natural History Library's Speciall Collections are closed to the public.[thanks carol]
23Mar04 . . . . for just $24 a year, you can help Georgians continue to read Field and Stream! "Where did the magazines go? How can I help?" Athens-Clarke County library system is sponsoring an adopt-a-magazine program to try to maintain its magazine collection after having to drop 150 subscriptions due to budget cuts. [thanks katia]
26Feb04 . . . . there are NO library jobs... I repeat.... Placement stats from ALAs report on Midwinter. Jobs down almost 40%, job seekers up almost 40%.
"Jobs: 196 (The highest number, 31, was for general reference positions.) This compared to 318 jobs last year in New Orleans. Job-seekers: 293 (The highest number, 203, interested in reference positions.) This compared to 214 job-seekers in New Orleans." [thanks tj]
Miss Eli shares a Stanford University Libraries memo regarding strategies for trying to staunch the hemorrhaging serials budget.
"Libraries are encouraged to scrutinize the pricing of journals and to drop those where pricing decisions have made them disproportionately expensive compared to their educational and research value. Special attention should be paid to for-profit journals in general and to those published by Elsevier in particular."
10Feb04 . . . . who is the villain here? serials mess University of Hawai'i library suffers horrible budget cuts to their serials budgets. Apparently the serials budget is inflating at faster than teh rate of the cost of living, substantially. [thanks brandon]
15Jan04 . . . . in your present lifetime, if you want the da vinci code, move out of denver Denver Public -- probably my favorite Big Beautiful Library besides Vancover -- is asking the mayor to form a special tax district to keep the library regularly funded.
"If you want to read 'The Da Vinci Code' in your lifetime, the Denver Public Library is probably not a good bet for you," [city librarian] Ashton said. That's because there are still more than 800 names on the waiting list for the recent best-selling novel
30Dec03 . . . . how far we've come Pennsylvania was the state that had the first lending library in the US and now its public library system ranks 40th in the nation... and this is an improvement over a few years ago, apparently. [thanks stessa]
15Dec03 . . . . sell the books to raise the cash? Tough decisions with falling stock prices. Do you sell the nice books to fix the library? The library director of the Providence Athenaeum didn't think so, he's resigned and the debate is growing ugly.
4Dec03 . . . . some news isn't all bad, VPL gets more money and more hours Vancouver Public Library, one of my favorite Big Beautiful Libraries [with a kickass website], but one with a severe budget shortfall, is finally getting the funding to not have to close for a week in the summer, and expand hours.[thanks andrew]
27Oct03 . . . . enhancement is not basics State funds for school library enhancement were completely cut in Alabama after the failure of the Governor's tax referendum. As a result school libraries are watching their budgets shift to zero while the stadards for accreditation are [rightfully] staying the same. Also, one of the saddest little library pictures I have seen. [thanks mac]
8Oct03 . . . . well-paid librarians Multnomah County's new head librarian will finally get the full salary that was offered to her, though some of it will come out of the County's risk mangement fun. The Oregonian gets a bit tongue in cheek about it all
5Oct03 . . . . hawaii! Hawai'i's libraries are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. With their budget restored they are filling 86 jobs and expanding their hours. [thanks brandon]
2Oct03 . . . . suck Anchorage library laying off 22 higher-educated librarians, hiring ten new workers at lower pay. Whenever they ask me about the "librarian shortage" I point them to stories like these.
[the mayor] described the library's layoffs of upper-end employees and the hiring next year of 10 new workers at lower pay as a restructuring.... they will not receive severance pay but will be able to cash out unused leave... Some can choose whether to accept the layoff or to exercise "bumping rights" to move down a step, pushing other workers further down. [thanks bill]