The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

This week is National Library Week and in going with that theme i’ve decided to blog about it. First a little note on a neat feature of SocialSparks, something that they have introduced called “sparks”. These are where people can submit ideas for posts that they want other people to write on and often offer to blog a response to your post. I love these little themes as it gives me ideas for what I want to write on and can open it up for some friendly debate.

A fellow blogger raises the question on whether or not libraries are a bit outdated and that defending their budgets by claiming that they are there to provide internet access to those who cannot afford it is not a valid argument. The blogger’s post on the matter can be found over here.

Now, the situation that he describes not only applies locally to his neck of the woods (in Morgan Hills California) but is one that also applies across the country as library budgets have had to be defended in the wake of an economic downturn.

Based on Aahz’s analysis, the public library funding in his county results in each household paying $179.84 per year in order to fund public library services! That number was actually surprisingly high as I never would have expected the individual tax burden per person to be so much for just the public library. The question is, where does the bulk of the funding for the library system in Santa Clara come from?

Looking over the Santa Clara County Library website, it looks like they have 8 actual branches with extensive hours. I did not find any information on where the bulk of their funding comes from (property taxes, vehicle taxes, local income or sales taxes to support the library or corporate taxes etc) on the actual library website. However, after looking at Santa Clara County’s website itself, I found information on their 2008 budget documents.

If you look over those budget documents in section 1, you will see that the County Library Headquarters line shows revenues from 2007 of around $32.6 million dollars with expenditures in 2007 of $30.8 million dollars. Looking around some more in that same document, I found a breakdown of the library revenues as shown in this picture:

It looks like a good majority of the library system’s revenues do come from property taxes, but they also get a portion from other investments, charges, fines and fees as well as donations (which is what ‘other financing sources’ probably is).

The point I am trying to make is that the entire tax burden is actually a good bit less than Aahz predicted from his calculations and I do think that public libraries are a worthwhile investment, even if it is involuntarily taxed to fund portions of their budget.

According to the Wikipedia page on the Santa Clara County Library System, it has been highly ranked as one of the best public library systems for several years now. I think I would be proud to have the extensive services of their library system in my local area, as where I live in a mountainous area of North Carolina we have extremely limited access to public library resources. The primary library I have access to is at a University, and most of their focus is on the acquisition of scholarly works, instead of items of popular fiction.

In these times of internet knowledge, libraries often seem like a thing of the past but I think they have done an admirable job of evolving over the years with the technology to try to keep providing some measure of public service. Once teachers and students realize the differences between an expert source and a peer-created resource such as Wikipedia, I think more emphasis will be placed on libraries once again.

Besides, if we didn’t have libraries, how could we lose our library cards?

Edit:  Aahz points out in his comment below that there are actually multiple public library systems for his area!  That is a bit over the top and probably causes some redundancies in the services offered.  In my county and prior ones i’ve lived in, there was only one centralized county-funded public library system and it seemed wholly sufficient for the area so what is going on there does seem excessive!

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