Yesterday, Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio announced his plan to slash budget funding, and particularly funding for state sponsored libraries. This is too good to ignore, so I am going to tell it like it is.
First: cutting funding for the library system will not reduce the number of books in libraries. It will, however, reduce the number of anal-retentive librarians that use their iron fists to eliminate all talking in the library.
Okay, so that might be a problem… no one wants a loud (or disorganized) library. However, who said that the funds need to come from the state government anyways?
Ostensibly, the budget cut will hurt libraries. I beg to differ.
The State Government of Ohio is nearly 1 billion dollars in debt. Moody’s Investment Service just lowered the State’s bond rating. No one wants Ohio as their primary financier: the state has no money.
Strickland is giving libraries the opportunity to find new funding sources: maybe municipalities? Maybe foundations? Maybe something else entirely! If people really care about libraries then what is going to stop them from banding together and funding them? Isn’t that the same logical basis of the state anyways? A social contract between citizens?
If the libraries are truly valued, then I am sure the affected citizens will cough up some money to support the libraries.
Imagine: a non-profit 501c3 library, where every dollar you donate ends up being a tax write off. Well, that kind of system would preserve the Ohio library system and prevent the State’s fiscal-apocalypse.
The point is that the libraries do not have to die. In fact, they can survive as independent institutions, separate from the large bureaucracies, regulations and technicalities that all come with State level funding.
Yesterday marked a dawn for the Ohio Library system. It was that kind of independent library that afforded Benjamin Franklin “the means of improvement by constant study, for which I set apart an hour or two each day, and thus repaired in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended for me.” And yes, when Benjamin Franklin formed America’s first library, it was completely independent of the state.
