Derrick Z. Jackson, the great columnist for The Boston Globe, comments today on two trends — the TV watching habits of the extremely young and the closing of public libraries around the country — connecting the dots and sounding an alarm for our future.
What struck me about the column as much as anything was the timing — Jamesburg, as I’ve written before, may ask its voters to close its library as a way of dealing with two realities: its regularly tight budget and a new state levy cap law that limits the growth in a town’s tax levy. Jamesburg says the combination of cap levy and library funding mandate means they will have to cut from other services.
Jamesburg Mayor Tony LaMantia blames the state, but New Jersey has a rather farsighted library funding law. Towns that have public libraries are guaranteed a minimum amount of funding and can only end the regular subsidies by asking voters to “de-municipalize,” or remove the municipal sanction.
Mayor LaMantia wants to see the law changed, but his idea — to allow towns to negotiate with libraries to determine a fair amount of funding every year — will do little more than lead to the closing of libraries in smaller communities. The reality is that there is no such thing as negotiations in this case — it’s the town’s money so it will be up to the town’s governing body to provide as much or as little cash to the library as it wants.
The upshot, as I said, will not be good for libraries in the state — and could result in New Jersey follow the unfortunate lead of Massachusetts, where towns “are closing libraries or severely curtailing their hours because of budget cuts,” Jackson writes.
In Medway, which cut the library staff from 11 people to three and library hours from 40 a week to 20, Wendy Rowe, the chairwoman of that town’s library board of trustees, told the Globe in a feature story, “Libraries are the soul of the community. They’re community centers — not just books. And anybody can go to it.”
Libraries may be the soul of the community, but taxpayers have been willing to sell it, seeing them as less a priority than police or their own pocketbooks. Massachusetts is the state that claims the first lending library, seeded by a donation by Benjamin Franklin to the town of Franklin. The town originally asked Franklin to donate a bell. Saying he wished to spare the town the expense of a steeple for the bell, Franklin wrote that he hoped the town would accept books in the spirit of “sense being preferable to sound.”
The abandonment of libraries is part of a national picture where about half of public libraries in the United States had cuts or flat funding last year. This comes as their use has actually grown nationally. According to federal data in the 2007 “State of America’s Libraries” report by the American Library Association, library visits went up 61 percent from 1994 to 2004.
General circulation increased 28 percent in that time. The circulation of children’s materials went up 44 percent and participation in children’s programs increased 42 percent. Even though many people now go to libraries to use free Internet service, the top reason for visiting a library still remains reading or checking out a book, according to the ALA.
In a report this year for the Urban Libraries Council done by the Urban Institute and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, libraries are an unsung economic engine as a core of a community’s literacy and connection to technology and job opportunities. “Rather than succumbing to obsolescence with the advent of new information technologies,” the report said, “the basic business of public libraries is being recast. . . Public libraries are positioned to fuel not only new, but next economies.”
But they have to stay open and they have to be given the kind of public money necessary to keep their book collections and technology current.
Closing the Jamesburg library — or cutting off its municipal revenue — may offer some temporary budget and tax relief, but it will make Jamesburg poorer in the long run.
Keep it open.
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Hank Kalet 