Library Budget Continues to Drop

When Central librarian Beth Eilers learned that the library budget would be cut again this year, she was not surprised.  

“This year we just assumed without anyone even telling us that our budget was going to be cut,” Eilers said. 

This year’s library budget cut was a component of district wide cuts. The cut is representative of a steady decline in the library budget over at least the last ten years, according to librarians Eilers and Colleen Nieland. In Nieland’s ten years as a librarian (three at Central, eight at Buffet) she has never seen the budget increase.  

“It’s been similar,” she said, “but it will either stay the same or decrease.” 

Eilers described a similar experience, but said it was possible it increased her second year. 

The budget dropped from $8,500 last year to $7,300 this year. A couple years earlier the budget was “closer to $13,000,” according to Eilers. The OPS library budget was decided by the district, who allowed Library Services to divide the funds between the schools. Library Services calculates each school’s library budget based on the number of students rather than, as Nieland said, “how many books x school is circulating versus how many books y school is circulating.” 

“It’s definitely reasonable,” Eilers said. “The question is, I think for all of us, if our per-student circulation is considerably higher than another school, does that have to be factored into the calculation?”  

But the regular budget cuts have not always been decided by the district. Three years ago the secondary librarians voted to give a portion of their budget to the elementary school libraries who they felt were in more dire need of it. Eilers said that the drop that year was roughly fifteen to twenty percent. 

“At a secondary level we get so much more money because we have so many more kids,” Eilers said. “But we don’t see every one of our kids every week. So the circulation at an elementary school is going to be much more constant, those kids are taking those books home, they have a lot more wear and tear, generally, than our books do here.” 

Nieland said that doing this helps all of the library programs because “If you can grab kids when they’re in elementary school as library users, they’re going to tend to have a positive experience, and that will eventually pay back to us as high school librarians.” 

With a lower budget comes the responsibility for the librarians to make more selective choices in the books they order. Eilers and Nieland have to know what the students are reading and make predictions about the future trends. 

“Let’s say you have five books in a series and the first book is missing,” Eilers said. “Is anyone going to read two, three, four and five without having the first book on the shelf?” 

But Eilers says that if a student really wants a book, there’s a good chance that it is in the substantial digital library in the form of an e-book or an audiobook. 

“The nice thing about a digital book is that it can’t get lost,” Eilers said. “Now, we might only be leasing the book for a couple of years and then it would disappear, but for the most part once we buy a digital book, it’s ours forever, and it’s not going to get lost. The class of 2018 is not going to walk off with it.” 

Unlike in other services, the library budget cuts did not result in any lost jobs. 

“That’s what we’re all afraid of,” Eilers said. “We’re all afraid that were going to lose a para or we’re going to lose a librarian.” 

Overall, the librarians don’t think that this budget cut will make a drastic difference in the way the library is run. 

“Like anything, you work within what you have and you make the best of what you have, Nieland said. “It is what it is.”