This has been an interesting year for California librarians. The recent Supreme Court decision regarding CIPA comes as the latest smackdown in a series which has included severe funding cutbacks and a continuing wrangle over the effect of the Patriot Act. For a library student, these past few months have served as a living laboratory of the connections between publicly-funded libraries and the larger society.
This has been an interesting year for California librarians. The recent Supreme Court decision regarding CIPA comes as the latest smackdown in a series which has included severe funding cutbacks and a continuing wrangle over the effect of the Patriot Act. For a library student, these past few months have served as a living laboratory of the connections between publicly-funded libraries and the larger society. The more interesting term papers and theses will be written about the federal government’s incursion into the contents of library records, but the heavier consequences will come from the duller impact of funding shortfalls. Perhaps some clever student will take a long look at the situation and conclude that the CIPA problem and the diminished state funding of libraries represent the same difficulty in differing form.
At first glance CIPA seems to be a problem of censorship, or more properly, of the assumed right to use the Internet without interference. That is the situation on its face, but the deeper reality comes down to a funding problem; as the saying goes, it always comes down to money.
Failure to comply with CIPA will result in loss of funding under the E-rate and LSTA programs. It is natural enough and certainly necessary to oppose CIPA on this basis, but when all is said and done, the matter’s core lies a layer deeper than this.
The potential or actual loss of federal funding through non-compliance with CIPA is not the illness itself but a symptom of the same malady which plagues public libraries: dependence upon variable funding schemes, reliance upon a sort of serial beggary in order to pay for things which ought by reason and right to be regularly funded by some agency of government. The library in many localities is held together with a ragged net of grants, special programs and donations laid upon a base of ‘regular’ funding which experience (and especially recent experience) shows is about as reliable as rain in the Sahara. These programs, supposedly intended to put icing on the public library cake, are too often relied upon to make up the batter; the process, as anyone who has sweated over a budget knows, involves a desperately ingenious sleight of hand; the public sees a Potemkin-village library and assumes all is well, but the staff know otherwise, and the sweating never ceases.
Your larger library systems keep somebody on board simply to chase down grant money; the smaller ones do what they can to plead poverty or some other element of uniqueness or singular intent to qualify for the largesse of some private foundation or public entity. This is not the way to run a library. The process is not only unreliable but pits one institution against another in a sort of beauty contest, a musical chairs arrangement that ensures losers, bleeds the resources and energy of the library and diverts attention from the real problem. Right now many of our libraries are participating in a lottery; their opposition to CIPA arises as much or more from the government’s threat to ban them from buying a ticket to the next drawing as from any revulsion over the loss of civil rights. This is wrong; we have come to a bad place and should expend some energy trying to get out of it.
The solution to this is to work toward the creation of a genuine and universally understood per-capita standard for library funding which would function as a reliable, permanent reference mark and floor of support. Even if the level initially set was below current funding, the adoption of a universal concept and a design for funding would form the basis for increases and eventual adoption of a higher permanent standard. Only a fool would underestimate the difficulty of such an endeavor on the statewide level, but we would be more foolish to continue on the current path, playing a sad lottery in order to support this most worthy of publicly-funded institutions.
Michael McGrorty
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