In this time of budget-cutting, the Georgetown Public Library has been very lucky as public libraries go. In community after community, public libraries have been among the first services that curtailed or eliminated. Libraries are being forced to cut their hours, lay off employees, or close completely due to lack of funding. Georgetown’s City Council has not asked our library to make any of those decisions. While our budget hasn’t increased in many years, it also hasn’t been cut, and we’re very grateful.

However, decisions at the state and national levels of government will affect our level of service in the coming year. We are committed to doing our best to stretch resources, but you may see a difference in two areas.

The Texas State Library lost a significant part of its funding in this year’s legislative budget cuts. One of the programs that will no longer be funded was the Loan Star Libraries Grant to all accredited libraries that shared their resources with patrons of other Texas libraries through participation in the TexShare program. Grant funding was a function of the library’s annual budget—the greater the amount of local support a library received, the greater the grant. Not a bad deal!

Since we moved to the new library building, we have been using our Loan Star grant to pay for temporary-on-call staff—people to fill in when a regular staff person is ill or on vacation. With a staff of 24, many of whom are long-term City employees who accumulate more than two weeks of vacation each year, and a 7-days-a-week schedule, hardly a day goes by without someone being absent for one reason or another. Our large, two-story building makes it impossible to leave any desk unstaffed and the main desk on the first floor can’t operate with fewer than two persons. While in the Big Picture the amount of the Loan Star grants has been quite small—around $16,000 per year—in reality it’s a lot of money that we won’t have after September 30. Unfortunately, City financial policies will not permit us to use volunteers to fill in those vacancies because we handle money at all of the desks.

What the loss of the Loan Star funding means for you will be longer lines at the reference and checkout desks, and less help available on the public computers. And you may have to wait a ring or two or three longer before we answer the phone.

The other area in which we have lost funding is for interlibrary loans (ILL). If you’ve ever used ILL you know what a bargain it has been and what a wonderful way to get to look at a material that may only exist in a specialized library. If you haven’t used ILL, it’s a way that libraries have been sharing resources for many, many years. For the price of one-way postage, a member of the Georgetown Public Library has been able to borrow books, microfilm, audiobooks, and DVDs from anywhere in the U.S.

For as long as the Georgetown Public Library has been a City-supported operation we have enjoyed having basically free access to the national ILL network. Funding from the federal government made possible ILL centers in large libraries such as the Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio public libraries. They hired librarians whose only jobs were processing requests for materials from libraries like ours and they had a budget to pay for the shipping costs. Very occasionally, the Georgetown Public Library would get a request from another library for one of our materials, but we seldom received more than three or four requests per year. The primary work our ILL staff person has done is processing our patrons’ requests for books from other libraries, a job that usually could be taken care of in 3-4 hours per week.

Now, federal support for ILL has been withdrawn and the large centers in the big city libraries are closing. As a result, our ILL staff person is receiving upwards of 50 requests per month from other libraries. Handling each request means determining whether the item is checked in, pulling the item, checking it out, packaging it for shipping, and charging the $3.00 or so postage to our postage account. That process takes at least 15 minutes, which multiplied by 50, is more than 12 hours of work that never existed until now. We are scrambling to figure out how many of these requests we can reasonably expect to fill and how many will have to be pushed on down the line to another library.

How will this affect you? Your request to borrow materials from another library will undoubtedly become part of the huge backlog of requests that small libraries will have difficulty handling. Materials that used to arrive in two weeks may take four or eight weeks to reach you. How postage will be funded remains unknown. Perhaps the borrower (you) will have to pay postage both ways (which would still be a bargain compared to traveling, say, to New Englandto look at genealogy documents).

We’ll do the best we can to take up the slack that these losses of funding have created but we’ll need your patience and understanding.