Libraries in Illinois Rethink Key Statewide Infrastructure
By Michael Kelley Feb 8, 2011No matter where librarians in Illinois turn these days-the legislature, the courts, their own systems-they are met with uncertainties.
As the state navigates a tempestuous budget landscape that led the legislature in January to approve a 67 percent increase in the state income tax and a 45 percent increase in the corporate tax, the library world is trying to calculate the best way to hold steady.
"We are hoping to adapt and change as necessary to this new economic reality and try and deliver services in a more rational manner," Robert Doyle, executive director of the Illinois Library Association, told LJ.
Regional systems vote to consolidate
The state's ten regional library systems, which deliver more than 30 million items annually and operate the online catalogs for more than 800 Illinois libraries, are a significant concern.
The systems have been struggling for some time, as LJ has reported, but the boards of five northern/central library systems (Alliance, DuPage, Metropolitan, North Suburban, and Prairie Area) and the southern/central systems (Lincoln Trail, Rolling Prairie, Lewis & Clark, Shawnee) voted in January to merge into two systems effective July 1, 2011. Chicago Public Library will make a third system unto itself.
This consolidation will reduce administrative costs, streamline operations, and improve the coordination of resource sharing services. The mergers require the approval of Secretary of State and State Librarian Jesse White.
"In the long run, this will create improved services and a more sustainable system," Tom Sloan, the executive director of the DuPage Library System, told LJ.
The financial condition of the regional systems has improved recently. In November 2010, after a lengthy delay, the library systems received the full balance of FY10 payments from the state. In January, after another delay, the systems received the first payment from the state for FY11 (July 2010-June 2011), amounting to approximately 35 percent of the total appropriation of about $15 million for the fiscal year.
However, the future remains very uncertain, despite the infusion of money and the huge tax increase.
"The state's finances are still not in good shape despite the tax increase," Jan Ison, executive director of the Lincoln Trail Libraries System, told LJ. "And I don't have any real good sense of when we'll get any more funds. There's not a system that's not dipping into its reserves in order to do what we have to do to survive," she said.
In a detailed January 21 letter to Su Erickson, who is chair of the Merger Design Team for the northern/central systems, Anne Craig, the director of the state library, urged the systems to take "small, achievable steps" in order to have an administrative structure in place for the start of FY12. But the fiscal outlook, Craig wrote, remains bleak.
"In recent days, we have learned more detail about the newly adopted tax increase and spending caps. Ultimately, our state will need to cut spending dramatically beginning in FY12 in order to satisfy this new legislation and renew tax rates."
LSTA grant will fund a broader study
In the meantime, as the regional systems finalize their intergovernmental agreements and set up transition boards (the northern/central systems are meeting today and the southern/central systems have a meeting scheduled February 10), the Illinois Library Association (ILA) announced in its February 3 newsletter that it had received a $100,000 federal Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant from the state library to research the most effective statewide service models for cooperative library services, "drawing on successful delivery structures in states such as Wisconsin, Colorado, and others."
"The biggest concern that the state library has is delivery," Pat McGuckin, manager of communications for the Illinois State Library, told LJ. "We have to make sure that we can get materials from library to library as quickly and efficiently as possible. The grant is a way to encompass all that because it is going to be the biggest task we have."
ILA's Doyle said that his group will work with the regional library systems ("as currently configured and as they will be configured in the future"), the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois, and others to develop a workable approach to delivery and other priority services identified in the 2010 Future of Illinois Library Cooperation (FILC) report.
"The association has been working with the entire Illinois library community," he said, "and delivery is the first of five priorities in order to enable interlibrary loan to survive in the state."
The project will also look at shared catalogs, group purchasing, library and professional development, and advocacy and marketing. The study has a completion date of January 30, 2012.
Still, the project is working in a mostly parallel and not always synchronized fashion with what is going on at the regional level.
Ison said the southern/central regional systems communicate with the ILA board, but they cannot afford to work on the same timeline.
"We have to proceed with what we are doing with post-haste if we are going to meet our deadline of July 1," she said.
If the picture were not complicated enough, the First District Appellate Court voided on January 26 in Wirtz v. Quinn the statutory authority that underlies the Public Library Construction Grant Program that the state library administers. The court said the statue violated the single subject rule, and the legislature will likely have to rewrite the law's language, McGuckin said.
"This was a huge bond program the General Assembly and governor OK'd in 2009 and we were just ready to roll it out and begin accepting applications," McGuckin said. "Like many other states our public libraries in Illinois have significant infrastructure improvement needs, and we have been hopeful this program might alleviate some of those critical needs," he said.
The state library had set a deadline of April 15 for libraries around the state to apply for the program, which would have paid from 35 to 75 percent of the cost of major reconstruction and remodeling projects through the sale of state bonds. The decision does not affect the Live and Learn Construction Grant Program which is funded by an appropriation from the legislature and is appropriate mostly for libraries interested in remodeling and additions.
