[12844] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Subsidies and Re: What is required for information access?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Seth Rothberg)
Tue May 31 14:02:53 1994
Date: Tue, 31 May 1994 10:13:53 -0400
From: Seth Rothberg <SROTH@ucsvax.ucs.umass.edu>
To: com-priv@psi.com
X-Vms-To: @com-priv
Henry Schaffer responds to my earlier post:
|Seth,
| You posted to com-priv:
|> ...
|>How do you know that we haven't been fund-raising? Over the last two years
|>we've lost something like $50,000 in our materials budget. Staffing is down
|>to the minimum, below minimum in at least one department. But yes, we do
|>have an active Friends of Library. They've raised a good deal of money this
|>past fiscal year, but cannot, and should not, be expected to repeat their
|>effort year after year. Fund raising $10,000+ every year for connectivity
|>would be an inordinate burden on the Friends.
|>
|>Our library currently costs each citizen of the town about $0.41 a week.
|>This $0.41 comes from property taxes. Property taxes are approved at
|>town meetings. Overrides over the allowed 2.5% increase must be approved
|>at town meeting and again by voters in a general election.
|>
|>No one likes property taxes but the decision making is fairly democratic.
|>Everybody gets to decide on taxes. More than that, because the library budget
|>is a public concern, the public can decide what kind of library it wants.
|>It decides this every year.
|
| And then you later posted something about the hard times the library
|is having.
|
| It seems to me that you're in a double bind:
|
|I) The funds coming in from public taxes, voted by the local citizens,
|aren't enough - which means that the local citizens don't consider the
|library to be a priority; and
|
|II) The library Administration doesn't consider networking to be a high
|priority for spending the funds that it does have.
|
| So we get into the semi-philosophical question of why *anyone* else
|should be forced to give money to the Library. E.g., why should the
|citizens of NC be taxed to give money to your library for a networking
|subsidy? (Yes, our state has embarked on a project to network our
|public libraries - so our local tax money is going to be spent on this.)
|After all when you ask for the Federal Gov't to provide that subsidy,
|the money will (partially) come from NC - so I'm not really distorting
|the situation.
|>
|>Whether you're a socialist, libertarian, objectivist, syndicalist, labor
|>unionist, democrat, republican, etc., etc., the library is a pretty good deal.
|
| Oh, I love libraries, contribute to them, am a member of the Friends
|of the Library for both my university and our county public libraries -
|and do feel that they are a very important aspect of our civilization.
|However they also are often stick-in-the-mud. Our county libraries pays
|much more attention to keeping Harlequin romances and best selling trash
|in large numbers of copies than in providing networking - so that's why
|I'm working to change their attitude. (But our county library director
|proudly points to how much circulation there is of these 'dime
|novels'!)
|
| Best wishes,
|
|--henry schaffer
Henry,
Double-bind gets it exactly. It's like the movie Field of Dreams: "If you
build it, they will come." But in order to build it, you need to convince
the community that it would benefit. In order to convince the community it
would benefit, you need to build it.
We do have patrons who, like you, are pushing us into the 21st century. It
will happen, slowly, and probably in a more ad hoc way than I would like.
If we get federal money for a network and internet connections, and if we
use that money to place ourselves on the net (we're there in part already:
telnet carl.pac.org and look for the Jones library) your libray will be
able to access our catalogue and request books from us through ILL. So it
is possible you will benefit from supporting us and we from you.
I'll be back at the library tomorrow and not able to reply as quickly as a
3-day weekend allows. Thanks for your posts.
Seth
speaking for himself.
