“We’re broke,” Jeffrey B. Rudman, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Boston Public Library, told the Globe last week, in what has become a familiar refrain. A $3.6 million budget gap may force the closure of as many as ten branch libraries in the coming year. The only other alternative, according to BPL President Amy E. Ryan, is to slash the budget across the board, crippling the whole system.


It’s an awful lot of hysteria for what is essentially a pittance in the private sector, where companies like Genzyme, which receives generous tax breaks from the state, post profits in the billions and individual bonuses in even failing companies still easily exceed the entire annual budget of a typical branch library.

In a climate of growing income disparity, where “starve the beast” is still the order of the day, closing 10 badly-needed branches in vulnerable neighborhoods would be a failure of both morals and imagination. Is the public sector in crisis? Yes. Is it ever not? It’s a cliché that every crisis is an opportunity. What’s called for is strategy and chutzpah.

In recent comments on the current budget crisis Mayor Menino said “closing branches should be our last resort. But I think the library also has to have a transformation in how they serve the public.” While I disagree that closing branches that serve already underserved communities in which they are most needed should be on the table at all, the Mayor is right that branch libraries can’t be left to languish in outdated technologies and outmoded resources, either.

Rather than closing branches we should be encouraging individual donors and big corporations to step up and be good citizens of the communities they are a part of by not only stewarding public libraries through crisis times but contributing to their ongoing upkeep and relevance. While the Boston Public Library Foundation has explored a variety of funding sources, the time is ripe for a much more aggressive approach that embraces not only stakeholders in the library system but in the community they vitally serve. At the same time, public-private partnerships should be explored.

Boston is not alone in having to make difficult choices about budgeting priorities. When Jackson County, Oregon, faced a budget shortfall in 2007, the public was unwilling to support another tax levy on a system it had paid nearly $40 million to renovate only five years before. The entire library system was shut down. After half a year, in a desperate bid to keep libraries open, Jackson County handed over operations to a privately held library management company with a proven track record of providing services while lowering operating costs. Today, County Administrator Danny Jordan boasts, library attendance is up 200 percent, costs are down. In fact, the current five-year contract is projected to net more than $20 million in savings. And all 15 branches remain open. “What is more important in a library than anything else,” poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish once said, “is the fact that it exists.”

Our branch libraries are too important, and the populations they serve already too vulnerable to abandon them when the going gets tough. And despite what many who can afford home access to the internet and for whom a trip to the local bookstore has replaced dropping by the library believe, the role of libraries will become more, not less vital in a future where much of the knowledge we have access to in them now is sequestered behind pay walls. The digital divide aligns with the income divide. The folks who most need access to what public libraries can provide are obviously those who are most vulnerable to branch closure.

Andrew Carnegie, that great entrepreneur and philanthropist, once said, “There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library.” Libraries are not luxuries, and their closure wherever they still serve a population that needs them, is not an option.

It is easy enough to lament the crisis as a sign of the times, and to forget that the Boston public library system has survived a storied history to flourish to this day. The City of Boston established the first publicly supported, free municipal library, and the first branch library in America. Rather than wallow in a culture of perpetual budget crisis with no end in sight, we must find the opportunities in new strategies and services, funding and development, to meet today’s challenges and move the library system – from Copley to Eastie, Lower Mills to Orient Heights – into the 21st century.
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*From an op-ed piece I submitted to the Globe last week.