The Library Value Proposition

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

-- Isaac Asimov

It’s town meeting time in Vermont, and that means that we all get the town Annual Report in the mailbox. In amongst the repairing of the town road grader and the elementary school budget there are short reports from all the local organizations that want a fragment of our property tax money this year. One is from our local library, the Kellogg Hubbard.

KHL was founded in 1896 when Martin and Fanny (Hubbard) Kellogg left a bequest in their will to build a public library in Montpelier. Their nephew John Hubbard contested the will, but later funded the library and endowed it with a significant trust fund. That fund has been well tended for over a century, but since the economic troubles of 2001 and then 2007 the library has had to ask for more assistance from the local towns. Meanwhile, the library belt, never less than snug, has been tightened.

Reading the report, I was struck by the level of activity. KHL is the second busiest library in Vermont, and the busiest on a per capita basis. We are readers here in central Vermont. To quote the report: “This year patrons checked out 288,876 items, staff answered 39,437 reference questions, and nearly 41,000 computer sessions took place.”

Wait a sec. KHL is open six days a week, minus a handful of holidays. Call it 300 days in round numbers. I looked at their hours of operation and did a little rough calculating and that’s about 2750 hours. Run the numbers and that’s 105 items going across the desk every hour and a reference question every four minutes besides. That doesn’t include all the books and magazines that people read while there, the non-reference questions, and the 800 special events attended by 23,000 people. It’s a wonder the place doesn’t overheat from the mass synaptic activity.

The cost for all this, plus outreach programs, children’s programs, interlibrary loan, and heating, lighting, and maintaining a century old building, runs around $950,000 a year.

This is the estimated cost of maintaining one soldier in Afghanistan for a year, or one three-hundred-forty-fifth of an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. I’ll leave the depressing military comparisons at that.

I was remarking on the relative cheapness of the place to The Librarian, and she noted that many people, when paying their late fees, remark, “Well, it’s cheaper than buying books.” How much cheaper? Consider that these days a hardcover averages $26, and a paperback $16. The library circulates audio books all the time, and those can cost more than hard bound books. Textbooks and reference books tend to push up towards $100. Using $20 as a conservative per-book average, those 288, 876 items kaching out to just under $5.8 million, about 6 times the actual cost of having the KHL. One would have to take up a life of crime to get that kind of return on investment anywhere else. Of course, that 6 to 1 return doesn’t take into account all the internet time, the reading room, the meeting rooms, the reference help, or the special events. – readings, discussions, movies – that are there for free.

I am being financially reductionist here, and that’s an injustice to the library. The value of the accumulated and available knowledge, the arena for discussion, the safe place for kids, the locus of an intellectual community, is beyond numbers.

So stand up for your library in town meeting. Stand up for it in any political venue you have. Write a check directly if you can handle it – many drops make a bucket.

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.  I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.  ~Carl Sagan, Cosmos