Funding Our Libraries
I live approximately here, in the blue box:
Around Christmas, the city was forced to close three library branches here in Hartford. Two of those were the only ones close to me, the Dwight Library (in the lower-center of the map) and the Mark Twain branch (right-center). The city has plenty of other libraries and branches (although a study has shown that a steady decrease in funding over the years has led to lesser/worse services and decreased hours across all locations) but none of them are easy to get to from my home. I could use the university libraries at Trinity (bottom-right corner) or St. Joseph (top-left corner), but I’m inconveniently located approximately half-way between both. Further, university libraries tend to be packed 24/7 with students— naturally — and it’s often difficult for me to find an open computer to access their private catalog and database/journal subscriptions. The UConn Law School library (mid-center) is specific to legal documents and resources, and rarely has what I’m looking for. I am passionate about doing research and staying informed academically as an adult, but my options for access are disappearing, both physically and within what I can afford financially. So what am I to do?
Above is a hypothetical scenario that is playing out in West Hartford — which is about 45 minutes from where I really live. Connecticut and its cities have infamously been struggling with budgeting crises in the past ~eight years, and non-essential state services like libraries, public parks, and research funding are being put on the chopping block first. Yet, this scenario is hardly unique to Connecticut — it’s playing out in countless states and municipalities across the country. The evolution of technology and the internet has created a dichotomy in which Americans have easier access to basic/common information (known as ‘ready reference’ lookups), thus decreasing the need for libraries, which in turn limits access to more advanced or academic information. Subscriptions to databases and academic sources are regularly thousands of dollars per year — a price that is simply not affordable for individual citizens.
The suppression of access to information is a dangerous consequence of our current societal configuration and it needs to be addressed. Politicians and representatives frequently get mired in the specifics of hot-button issues like military funding and healthcare budgeting that both states’ and the federal government’s secondary services get overlooked and neglected.
While it’s good and important to regularly debate and reconsider budgetary allocations for large ticket items like the military, healthcare, the education system, and government agencies — the annual changes in their allocations should not come at the cost of the tiny but crucial secondary services, like libraries. In 2003, Connecticut’s state budget was approximately $13 billion, and it allocated $90 million to the State Library department. This was a generous year, yet that still amounts to just 0.69% of the state budget. This amount is so negligible that it’s shocking to think that it has been reduced to $10 million in 2017 while the total state budget has more than doubled to $27.43 billion. That’s 0.036% of the state budget. Although Connecticut public libraries are funded mostly by individual town budgets, the state fund goes towards services like interlibrary loans as well as complementary grants to individual branches that are struggling financially. A decrease in any amount of funding places an extra burden on Connecticut’s (often-tiny) towns.
There ought to be codified protections for secondary government services (like libraries) which do not have the institutional strength or lobbying power that accompanies big-ticket budget items, and thus do not have the ability to defend their budget allocations. The inaccessibility of information is a dangerous social phenomenon that we are in the midst of, and its long-term consequences on general human knowledge, debate, and thought are terrifying.
