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Funding the public good“We’ve been hearing from people, ‘Don’t raise our property taxes. Don’t raise our property taxes,’” said Alderman Mike D’Amato, a member of the Library Board of Austin, Texas, which earlier this month cast a unanimous vote to close its Villard Avenue branch, the least busy of the city’s 12 neighborhood libraries. ‘Do you want your taxes cut?’ D’Amato asked. ‘Do you want your services the same? Because it’s impossible to do both.’ ”25 “My library’s reputation is predicated on what it owns. How will it maintain that reputation as it moves to digital? A new model needs to be developed.” —Director, Academic Library There has been a worldwide shift in the past 15 years or so from public to private support for and provision of goods and services. This can be seen in a wide variety of sectors, such as telecommunications, railroads, hospitals, public radio, gas and electricity utilities and higher education. Increasingly, costs are moved to the consumer. It is interesting to study the varied approaches to the funding of public programs in emerging economies where historical approaches are either not available to use as guides or are simply no longer adequate to match surging community needs. The following look at the funding of public libraries in the world’s fastest growing economy, China, highlights the variety of solutions that can emerge when citizens, commercial enterprises and governments collaborate and compete for public programs. Along with a general shift to privatization of public services in the developed countries, there has been an increasing emphasis on assessment and accountability—although these are hardly new societal expectations. John Cotton Dana, a key figure in 20th century librarianship, wrote in 1920:
What was true in 1920 still holds today. Accessment and accountability, then, are not new themes. To measure accountability, libraries have traditionally focused on their collections—the size, the variety, the utility as measured by circulation. In a world where cuts in materials budgets are commonplace and where content is not scarce, trends suggest that “clear description and downright valuation” of libraries must place them squarely and unambiguously in the larger network of learning resources that includes museums, public broadcasting and community organizations that are part of a knowledge-based society. Robert S. Martin, the Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services writes:
The challenge, then, is how to continue to adequately fund the public good.
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Libraries as cultural centers in large, new communities in Guangzhou, China
