A defense of Library Funding

The Texas Legislature’s budget proposal will cut 70 to 98% of funding for state library programs, gutting services and displacing higher costs onto local libraries. Libraries are essential places in our community, especially in small communities like ours.

Here is why libraries are so important:

Libraries enhance the future of our country by supporting the education of our children. Libraries extend learning by making knowledge both available and valuable.

Libraries make readers. In a library, even reluctant readers can find something that sparks an interest, lights a fire, matches or challenges their growing abilities, makes them want to read and know more.

Libraries build community. Bulletin boards, paperback swaps, children’s story time, book clubs, civic group meetings, educational workshops, reading support, job training. Libraries are a place for people to connect to other people. When my children were small, Mr. Kippy’s Story time was a place for me to be with my children and meet people with shared interests. Story time was a high point in our schedule and a valuable stop on our learning journey.

Libraries provide safe, cozy, and reassuring places to gather. Places to learn, to study, to work, to contemplate. Quiet places of knowledge, set aside for thinking and reading and learning.

Libraries are portals of knowledge. To the past and to the world outside our physical reach. History, novels, foreign language resources, newspapers, magazines, music, photography books, encyclopedias. The library is a place we can expand our knowledge reach and to keep learning even if we’re no longer in school.

Libraries provide resources and expertise for personal and professional development. Computer work stations, testing spaces, professional development books, self-help books, printing and copying resources, a place to check email, prepare for college entrance exams, or figure out how to find a better job. In a down economy, the library becomes an even more important place for people struggling with economic displacement or limitations.

Libraries are sources of reliable, credible, and stable information in a world where the internet sometimes flies too fast. While some would argue that a book doesn’t update fast enough to be reliable, the stability of information in a library means we have credible data when we need to make critical choices.

Libraries employ experts who know how to find information and media. We can sift through that data more efficiently with the assistance of librarians, who are trained to know how the information is organized, where to find the answers to our questions, and how to get our hands on resources that we need. Librarians are priceless.

Libraries are essential repositories of information in a democratic society. The free access to information allows citizens to make informed decisions and to fulfill civic responsibilities.

As author Philip Pullman so aptly put it in a recent protest of cuts to his local library, “Leave the libraries alone. You don’t know the value of what you’re looking after. It is too precious to destroy.”

Please oppose these drastic cuts to library services in Texas. Please protect the essential services that Texas libraries provide.

What can you do?

* Share this message.

* Contact your state representatives and local media.

* Visit your local library. Check out books. Read the bulletin board. Talk to the librarians. Be involved.

* Get more details through the Texas Library Association.