After a 60 per cent cut announced in the provincial budget, the bloodletting in the libraries begins.
The Wapiti Regional Library announced as of April 10, patrons will no longer be able to access materials from outside of its coverage area.
That means instead of having access to around 3.6 million items, people using the local libraries will only get access to about 500,000. That’s a reduction of 3.1 million.
Want to go digital? That’s affected too. Patrons can only get access to five items from the Hoopla system, which has movies, music and e-books. It was 10 before the cut.
The problem – beside the cuts – is the provincial government didn’t let the regional libraries know there would be a 60 per cent cut as of April 1 before the budget was released March 23. There’s no way anybody would be able to prepare for something like that with less than two weeks – I certainly couldn’t.
Sure, there’s probably ways to reduce the expense of the library system. The one I keep hearing is to merge school and community libraries together, like we do in Tisdale. Yet that’s not something that can be done within two weeks. You’d need to hash out ways for the school and the community to operate, and have separate entrances for the school and the community so that people off the street aren’t wandering the school halls.
As for having municipalities pay the bill, well, the government gave them cuts to their funding too.
The regional library system was a good deal for Saskatchewan. For $5.31 a year, Saskatchewan residents got access to 3.6 million items. You can’t even buy a book for that much.
If you want to keep that good deal, let the government know before the changes are irreversible.
