Just checked into the website of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners.
Information on its strategic planning process is from May 2005. The Board appears to have kicked off a marketing campaign in 2007, however there is little information available except an outline of weak bullet points such as “parents need to recognize the value of school libraries” and “internet search assistance”. I could not find information about the products or results of the campaign.
The FAQs under “About MBLC” appear to have been created in the mid-late 1990s, when people were first moving online. Questions include “How do I find a book [online]?” and “How do I find a library, its homepage, hours and directions?”
The MBLC needs to catch up with the times in order to effectively achieve its goal to “maintain and strengthen the Commonwealth’s free public libraries.”
The risk to the Beaman Public Library piqued my interest in public libraries about a month ago and I’ve been checking out what other people and organizations have to say. The ALA has been a big disappointment.
Its Library Advocate’s Handbook is buried deep within the ALA website. This handbook is barely worth searching for because it is little more than a bland communications checklist that could be used to sell anything from the pin to the locomotive. There isn’t a single word about what makes libraries valuable.
From the advocacy link on the main site navigation, what are the ALA’s advocacy’s goals returned a Page Not Found error. The ALA’s strategic plan, Ahead to 2010 was published in June 2005. The PLA Blog has a mere 10 posts for advocacy and they’re more than a year old (from 6/23/2006 thru 6/29/2007). Funding is listed near the bottom of the advocacy page and the only thing on the public library page is an obituary list of libraries cut or closed around the nation.
The ALA needs to follow its own advocacy call to “speak loudly, clearly and with a unified voice.”
* ALA Editions is the publishing imprint of ALA. They publish material of interest to the library and information sciences community.
In its excellent 2008 report, From Awareness to Funding, the OCLC cites 2005 data that more than a third of U.S. public libraries are operating with level or declining budgets and “are being forced to reduce staff, cut hours and reduce community services.” Our town has seen this, with cuts to its library budget 4 out of the last 5 years amidst double-digit increases for nearly every other town department over the same period.
The industry has been hard at work and their communications have grown more sophisticated over the past five years, however “the majority of library campaigns have been aimed at promoting library services and driving library use, not increasing library funding.”1 Here again, our town fit the pattern. During the past five years, I do not recall our library staff publicly calling attention to the budget cuts or asking library super supporters to mount an advocacy campaign.
This doesn’t suprise me, for I’ve observed that:
- The library ethos is oriented more toward providing help than asking for it.
- Librarians are resourceful problem-solvers; it makes sense that their response to fiscal challenge would focus inward on maximizing services with shrinking budgets more than outward on lobbying for funds.
- Libraries are gendered workplaces. At every library I’ve known, the staff, Friends and volunteers have been predominantly female—and as Babcock & Laschever have documented, women don’t ask.
Overcoming hardship can be transformative. Let’s hope a by-product of the public funding crisis will be a greater inclination toward advocacy among librarians and industry groups. This will help garner much needed financial resources in the short term, and longer term will help promote the values so many of us hold dear.
1From Awareness to Funding, OCLC 2008.
