Trouble in the Stacks

Libraries carry on over cash needs and computer printouts

In California, 22% of the state's 3,857 county libraries have closed down, and in the past year several thousand library staffers have been sent packing. In Hartford, Conn., funds are so short that since 1968 the nine-branch public library has not been able to count and check the half-million books that are supposed to be in its collection. In Fitchburg, Mass., library officials believe they could halt the loss of $8,000 worth of unreturned and stolen books each year by installing a $20,000 electronic detection system. The system would thus earn back its cost in fewer than three years, but the librarians have not been able to wangle the money from the city.

The current crisis is not caused by reader neglect, but is simply a matter of money. Since 1969, the cost of books has soared by 106%. Libraries are funded chiefly by local governments and must compete for their share of revenue with life-and-death municipal services like police and fire departments. "The property tax is a killer," says Edward Chenevert, library director in Portland, Me. Complains Dale Perkins, 46, library director for California's San Luis Obispo County: "We are just one sixty-fifth of the county budget--right in there with mosquito abatement."

To woo the public's interest, many libraries across the country are adding special services and cultural come-ons. The Chicago public library offers a debt counseling service. In Des Moines, the library publishes a monthly newsletter that includes tips on renting apartments. In Ohio, the Columbus-Franklin County library has made available a computer bank of statewide job openings. Richmond has a sidewalk kiosk where browsers can check out bestsellers and paperbacks. "I used to be a real elitist," says Librarian Howard Smith. "But we're trying to get people to read at no matter what level." The Dallas public library lends games and dress patterns in low-income neighborhoods. Some libraries even lend gerbils and hamsters, as well as hedge trimmers and posthole diggers--a development that often upsets traditionalists. Sniffs Mrs. Chebie Bateman, library director for Columbus, Miss.: "I believe in furnishing the books and letting the hardware store furnish the tools."

Just how ardently librarians should press to evolve into all-purpose community information centers was a hot topic last week in Washington among the 911 national delegates at the first White House Conference on Library and Information Services. One vision of the future was on display at the conference's own information center: a battery of computers with which delegates could summon up printouts on a bewildering array of information from more than 100 data banks. Among them: the Denver library's information bank, which stores pollution and land-use data; the U.S. Senate's information pool, named LEGIS, which keeps tab on the fate of legislative proposals; and a computerized reference guide known as the Bibliographic Retrieval System. Delegates had only to press a few buttons to plug into storehouses of information containing such items as the Supreme Court's decision in Regents of the University of California vs. Allan Bakke, or the 1978 median income of U.S. families. Many of the retrieval systems are now available mainly to scholars and businesses. But Participant Nicholas Johnson, a former Federal Communications Commissioner, argued that libraries should spread access to this data among the citizenry. Manhattan Attorney Whitney North Seymour Jr. agreed: "A dramatic change in information dependency has taken place in our country, and the libraries are participants in that."

But finding funds just to keep the place open and buy a few books was a more immediate concern to most librarians. Delegates were united in a call to reapportion library funding from towns and cities to the Federal Government, which now pays only 5% of national library costs. A U.S. Senate proposal to study such a shift has been sponsored by New York Senator Jacob Javits. Like many another U.S. child of immigrant parents, Javits traces his rise from poverty to the hours he spent after school--working away in the neighborhood public library on the Lower East Side.

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