Most PA State Library jobs could be history

The State Library could lose nearly all of its staff under Gov. Ed Rendell’s proposed budget for 2009-10, and the proposed cuts are startling researchers who rely on the library.

Fifty of the library’s 57 positions would be eliminated, with one person transferred elsewhere in the state Department of Education, which oversees the library.

That would leave a staff of six, presumably to maintain public access to the facility, which the administration has indicated it wants to try to keep open.