Remember last year when the administrators at the Cleveland Public Library announced and then rescinded decreased service hours at the branches? Well forget about that. The new strategic plan approved by the library board and released in December is now available online for your review at http://www.cpl.org/strategic_plan.html It calls not for fewer hours, but for more, and for a year-round schedule that is predictable and consistent. That’s the first good idea. There are lots more.
This is one of my favorites: implementing a mobile library that will serve day care centers and other early childhood programs. Very wise. Making sure that preschoolers can access library materials regularly — even when weather and distance preclude field trips to the branch library — is perhaps the best way a library can support emerging literacy.
Youth services in general are at the top of CPL’s new list of priorities. This has long been a shortcoming of CPL, especially in comparison to the high quality of services and materials available to children through the suburban Cuyahoga County Public Library system. Regarding itself as a premier research facility, CPL for many years neglected to notice that a huge percentage of the population of Cleveland are under 16. In fact, CPL has more young patrons than other comparable systems they studied as they prepared the strategic plan. It’s time that kids were offered the same level of service as adults.
Other proposed service enhancements include improved services targeted to the Hispanic community and to educationally disadvantaged adults. Or how about increased use of library assistants who have a computer emphasis, so that patrons who need assistance in accessing electronic information resources can get the help they need? Carnegie West Branch has already begun to implement this idea, and it has had a noticable positive impact on service delivery.
But the big question involves capital improvement. The strategic plan calls for keeping the branches we have, but making them better. Some may be expanded, others will have their space rearranged and upgraded. In a few cases, most notably Broadway and tiny Garden Valley, a new location may be necessary in order to better serve their neighborhoods. Increased space and services would also mean increased staff. These proposed improvements will cost a lot, but are by no means extravagant. If anything, the board seems to have done whatever it can to make the most frugal use of presently available resources.
All of these good ideas must be funded, of course. Now you must begin thinking about whether you can afford to vote for an increased library levy this spring. So okay, they haven’t even asked yet. But with convention center talk getting louder, who has time to wait around for someone to put it on the ballot before beginning to make a case for improving a neighborhood asset as vital as the library?
As you may know, the money for Ohio’s libraries comes mostly from a 5.7% share of the state income tax, doled out at the county level. It’s a pretty great system — the “Ohio model” is the envy of the nation, actually — but it is not without its problems.
For one thing, it’s not a simple per capita distribution throughout the state. The law which established the funding in 1986 guaranteed that libraries would not be funded at a level lower than that which they had received from the old intangibles tax. Typically, this has meant that urban areas like ours — where more “intangible” stocks, bonds and so on were sold — already receive a higher amount of funding per person than suburban and rural counties. Some critics have seen this as unfair. Most librarians disagree, since Ohio’s high level of interlibrary cooperation means that the materials and professional resources concentrated in urban areas are a resource to a whole region. CLEVNET, the consortium of which CPL is the anchor, allows member libraries as far away as Perry, Clyde and Orrville to benefit from its automated catalog in sharing resources consortium-wide. Moreover, the formula used is designed to correct the imbalance with annual adjustments. But it will take a while before a rural/urban balance is achieved, especially since recent fiddling by the General Assembly to fill in holes in the general budget drastically reduced the total pot of money available to libraries statewide.
A more obvious pitfall of the funding system is that in boom times, the revenue from income tax is high, and libraries are sitting pretty. But when things go bust, they can be left high and dry.
Many communities supplement this state funding with local levies; some do not. Cleveland is among the systems that does have a levy, and it has helped it to weather the present economic downturn without great loss of service. Contrast this with the Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County which, without a local levy, relies almost entirely on what it gets from the state. Although it receives more per capita than any other system in the state ($63 per person, contrasted to $51 in Cuyahoga County, or $42 in Franklin County), it was so devastated by a drop in state funding last year that it was forced to abruptly call for the closing of five branches. Public outrage was considerable.
In general, Ohioans tend to pass library levies. But when Cleveland’s came up for renewal in May 1998, it was a squeaker, passing by just 244 votes out of more than 55,000 cast. So library officials are going to be weighing the issue carefully before deciding whether to ask for a simple renewal or an increase this May. Based on the ambitious and worthy strategic plan they have made public, an increase will be necessary if we want to see the level of quality in neighborhood services on par with its established excellence as a research facility.