In Spite of Budget Cuts
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of the web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. In 1993 Georgia experienced a very severe budget decline. Attempts were made to furlough staff and library book budgets were decimated. Then in 1995, librarians in Georgia took advantage of this new technology to launch GALILEO and deliver to patrons an unprecedented amount of content that could be accessed from anywhere in the state. Today as we continue to celebrate the increased capabilities the web has for delivering information, we find ourselves again in the middle of an economic crisis. Our libraries are swamped with patrons and students seeking job and career information, as well as using our resources for study and learning. At the same time, library budgets are being reduced. The GALILEO user communities are seeing decreases in funding ranging from 10% to 15% and if the state revenues do not rebound soon, there could be additional reductions.
The GALILEO 2.0 Collection Development Committee, led by Rachel Schipper (formerly at Georgia College and State University and now at the University of Florida), Shawn Tonner (North Georgia College and State University) and Bob Glass (Piedmont College), along with about 60 others from all types and sizes of libraries, affirmed the need for the core resources in GALILEO and identified additional needs : more full text, more ready reference, more for elementary children, language learning programs, e-books, etc. While we may not be able to add those needed resources for some time, we can be sure that we learn as much about the resources in GALILEO as possible so as good stewards of resources, we can meet patron needs.
Years and years ago, I worked evening reference part-time in a small academic library. They had a very limited reference collection, so to answer questions it often meant going upstairs to the stacks and finding answers within monographs or bound journal s rather than turning to pull the reference book that would more easily have provided the answer. As library staff, we need to be sure that we understand the range of content available in GALILEO, learn key tips for general and advanced search options and share that information with colleagues and users. It means getting familiar with the A-Z listing of journals so that you can determine if something is in GALILEO, maybe an electronic version might suffice for many users in these budget times. It means advocating for GALILEO as a part of the core of services and resources that each library or media center provides.
During this next fiscal year, GALILEO staff will be working with libraries and our database vendors to offer more training in a variety of ways to ensure that staff have the information they need to help patrons. They say the new cool is “frugal”. Libraries have always been pretty frugal as we have always needed more to meet diverse patron needs that limited budgets have allowed, but we created resource sharing networks to help meet those needs. In order to provide a more cost effective and efficient way to deliver resources, we took advantage of technology like the web when it became. Who knows what opportunities newer technology and the global crisis will bring, but our libraries, including our states’ virtual library will meet the challenge. After all we were here before Google!
