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Greetings Library Community!
I'm writing this message from a new office in the rear of the library. Our brand new renovation looks amazing, and the teens have exuberantly expressed their admiration of their new space. Unfortunately for library lovers, these local improvements have been tempered lately by news from Washington. A recent Executive Order has brought the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the crosshairs as "unnecessary."
Federal funding through the IMLS has benefitted our local community in a number of ways, including directly. Two years ago, the Library received nearly $13,000 to offer STEM learning opportunities to Lunenburg. Our Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC) receives more than $3M from IMLS each year, and more than half of the MBLC's staff are at least partially funded with some of this money. The MBLC regularly help our Library and our community in myriad direct and indirect ways. The IMLS, the MBLC, and libraries in general strive to serve in an ideologically independent way.
A number of any of you may be wondering what you can do to help libraries in this moment. Some potential actions are the same as always: communicate to your representatives. Writing a letter or reaching out in another way is one way to participate in representative democracy. You can use these resources to find the appropriate representative:
State legislators: FIND MY LEGISLATOR
Federal legislators: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
I also hope you will participate in another way. Tell a story of how libraries have impacted your lives. Currently there are two similar opportunities, if you wish to advocate for library: Empowered by Libraries (from the MBLC), and Show Up For Our Libraries (from the ALA). We will have printed bookmarks and postcards available at the Library for you to write of the positive impact of libraries on your life, you can share those stories with your acquaintances and on social media, and you can also upload and share your story on lovemasslibraries.com. These stories represent intangible and hard to quantify value delivered by libraries. Sharing these stories is an incredibly powerful tool.
Tangibly, libraries return excellent value to the community they serve. Just the physical items that were borrowed last year at the library delivered a value of $1.137M. Add the value of ebooks and e-audiobooks, online databases, room reservations, and entertainment or education that happens at our library programs, and you see the excellent return of investment proposition LPL represents when our operational budget was about $560,000. You can also see why libraries are so important to so many communities. LPL is here for our community and we want to help, so let us know what you need. And see you soon at the library!
Muir Haman
Library Director
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