On the Politics of Numbers

“It’s not so good with money as it’s bad without.”
— Sam Levinson

Michael McGrorty writes: “Years from now, when the state and local governments are flush again, when the tap flows once more to local services, when we reach that state of near-equilibrium that passes for good times in the public library, the wiser heads among us will look back at the chaos of this time and wonder if there wasn’t some way to prevent it.

And of course, as with all hindsight, the answers will seem painfully obvious: We should have planned better; there should have been reserves; we should have remembered that the curve always tends downward, that tomorrow always comes.The problem is that, though the answers are simple, the responses required are complex and difficult. For one thing, the ‘we’ of the equation is not composed of librarians, but of administrators, managers and (ultimately) politicians on many levels. Our first problem is that we may run the functions of the library, but we don’t control its lifeblood. Those strings are held in other hands, but then, so are the strings of every other public entity, from garbage collection to street lighting. And so it may be reasonably asked, should we just hunker down and endure as do other public services? Perhaps just take our lumps as we have in this rough cycle of boom and crunch, accepting this as the natural order of things in a tax-funded world?

The question is provocative, but it isn’t the right one to ask-for one thing, the answer is moot: we haven’t any other option under the present arrangements. Which brings us to the crux of the matter, which is that the present arrangements are not doing us very much good at all.

Talking Trash

Though the library is a permanent institution of civic provenance, the mechanism of the service is fragile and easily disrupted. The library is a collection of interconnected systems like the gears in a clock; damage any part and the function suffers immediately.

By comparison, even an essential service like rubbish collection is a model of resilience and adaptability. Trash is collected on a given schedule; the system can be expanded to optimal dimensions or contracted in hard times because it is essentially a linear setup: there is forward and reverse and not much else; reducing service by half would mean collection every other week– essentially the same service with a greater gap of time between applications. For that matter, a reduction in force would impact only slightly. With apologies to the workers involved, trash collecting is easily taught, and not many folks pursue it as a career. The expansions and contractions of the city budget don’t deal irreversible blows to the apparatus. For that matter, contracting out the entire service would have only a minor impact on the community at large.

Compare the library: The public library, here and everywhere else in America works as a collection of systems. The most apparent system is the mechanism through which materials are acquired and maintained for public use. Another system involves the people who operate the library, who provide its essential services; finally there is the physical plant. Taken together these make possible the process.

The library is especially vulnerable in hard economic times because these systems are highly integrated, rely upon the performance of individuals and are not strictly linear in development or operation. The library doesn’t shrink well, it doesn’t grow back arms like a starfish; it is a collection of serial operations like the knitting of a garment: drop a stitch and you will show the gap forever. The classic example of this occurs in the case of funding shortfalls. The available choices for the library are all bad.

Layoffs leave not only blank spots but force re-arrangements of staff, often placing specialists where they don’t belong, while forcing them to neglect their assigned work. The ripple effect is damaging; service suffers, though the public isn’t immediately aware.

Slashing materials budgets immediately puts the library at odds with its responsibility to provide new offerings and maintain the worthy older ones. Dropping serials is a painfully familiar example, but making gaps in reference purchases and popular fiction shoots holes in the collection that aren’t easily mended, either. Books become unavailable; the time frame for the ‘hot’ biography or best-selling novel passes, and with it the chance to give somebody their reading-the reading they expected from us.

The reason libraries tend to cut hours is because the clock is the easiest and least-damaging element to fool with– though the public generally do not see it that way.

In short, trying to determine what to cut from the average library’s budget is like deciding which leg to cut from a chair. This circumstance occurs fairly often with the inevitable downturns in our economy; whether these are the result of inanimate forces or human error hardly matters. There is no way to control the economic or political forces that bring these events to pass. Given the nature of the library and the hard facts of our system, there is no real solution, only mitigation– something to flatten the curve, reduce the worst effects of hard times.

Rainy Day Reserves

Many libraries, particularly smaller ones, have a difficult time finding money to do anything beyond the basic functions-and those only with a lot of scrambling. Larger systems have more leeway, but have the burden of greater overhead. Neither of them have a blank check or deep pockets to draw from in time of need. The idea of maintaining a reserve for hard times is appealing in the abstract, but the reality is that most agencies in local government have a hard time justifying their budgets without having the city council know they possess a nest egg somewhere behind the stacks. Apart from that, reliance upon a reserve merely delays the inevitable day of reckoning.

Looking at California

California, as many have observed, is an interesting place. It is rightly considered one of the world’s great economies; only differing in a few important regards, such as the ability to coin money. The state has a vibrant economy, but the relative wealth of its communities varies considerably, as does their commitment to library funding. Nor is the state inclined to make up the difference, as anyone who reads library funding statistics knows.

California’s public libraries used the past decade of prosperity as a recovery room for the damage wrought in the decade before; some of them caught up, a few got a bit ahead; then the floor dropped away, and we found ourselves at square one with our pockets sticking out like the ears of a donkey.

Ratios

The problem with the funding of public libraries is that the ratio of income to need varies over time to the extent that it creates hardship and damage that subsequent infusions cannot repair. The library is not a pothole, nor it is a policeman. The first is an easy fix, and the second occupies a position in the mind of the public which renders him nearly exempt from fiscal cutbacks.

On the other side, our fortunate librarian finds herself, unlike the policeman, in the position of being considered a Most Worthy Personage, the civic embodiment of unimpeachable service, performing arguably the most desirable non-essential job made possible by tax dollars (even the schoolteacher has gone a peg below owing to her stubborn insistence on a living wage). Nevertheless, the mantle of Belovedness is a thin garment in the harsh wind of fiscal reality, and to further mix metaphor, you can’t take it to the bank.

There probably isn’t any reason to expect that the library will come to occupy a place in the public mentality like the police or fire departments, nor even like trash collection. Those agencies enjoy a set of associations, almost automatic conceptions in the public mind, which keep them protected. We do not; we will not. If you can’t swallow this, remember that the Information Revolution has arrived, and ordinary folks seek their guidance from software peddlers.

Solutions

Somehow, in order to flatten the curve of our finances, we have to go from the resources we have in the direction of what it is we need. The gap between them is vast, but we’re not looking for it to disappear in an hour or a week. Apart from that, we need to put something together, add something to the mechanism of our present successes, that will render a benefit to the majority of public libraries; any other idea is just a refinement of selfishness and will collapse upon us in the end.

To begin with, I don’t think there is any way we can force radical change in the way we are perceived by the public. On the other hand, I think we can help them view us in a more profitable light by establishing some measure that will help our friends to do more than hold our coats in subsequent budget fights.

Without doubt we need a measure, a boundary-line for successful operation. We should eliminate debate on this issue by admitting at the start that no single figure or set of numbers can gauge the success of a library-and then create one or more of them. The teachers of this state have done fairly well by convincing the folks in power that the optimal classroom will contain no more than twenty students. Not 19; not 21. If you don’t think this idea has stuck like gum to pavement, go to your nearest search engine and look it up.

Remember, this figure is as much for us as it is for them; something between a slogan and a mantra, but with sufficient mooring in reality to give it actual content. We can’t fix an idea without something to hook it to. Let’s decide on a reference and hang with it until it does something, or dies. How many books? How many dollars? What is sufficient staffing? How many hours a week? We should take the common vocabulary of our trade and convert it into a message that will resonate.

The only thing we remind the public of now is that they ought to read something. How about if we had posters of movie stars saying, ‘California ranks 42nd in library funding. I’m moving to Cleveland.’ I’d buy a decent dinner for anybody who could put our plight-and our goals-in a sentence that would make people sit up and take notice. How’s that for a National Library Week project?