Author and historian David McCullough writes, “The greatest of all our American institutions is our system of public libraries. No country has anything like it. If you’ve tried to do research or work with libraries overseas and abroad you are immediately reminded how fortunate we are. We just take it for granted.”
How much would you pay out-of-pocket for your library services? What is the value of having a public library to our community? The library has cultural, social, democratic, informational, and recreational value most understand, yet, how do we determine what having a public library means to us as citizens?
To help answer this, the Maine State Library has a new way to calculate the value of library services. Originally developed by the Massachusetts Library Association, this online calculator estimates services such as books and other materials borrowed, computer uses per hour, reference questions asked, meeting room use per hour, programs attended and online database use and their approximate cost to the library and savings or value to your family. Found on our Web site at www.presqueisle.lib.me.us, patrons may input what services they used and then tabulate a dollar value.
As an example, each book borrowed is valued at $15; a video, $4; meeting room use, $50 per hour; computer use per hour, $12; a children’s program, $6; a reference question, $7; and an adult program attended, $10. For the sake of illustration, let’s say that your family borrows 10 books, one magazine, attends one story time, received help finding a book, and checks out two videos during the month, this amounts to a dollar value of $173 for your family. Over a year’s time, this is $2,076.
The value of the public library goes well beyond anything that we can affix a dollar value to, however. The ability to borrow materials, find information from professionals that know where to look, encourage literacy, and offer programs and events that enrich our lives and empower citizens is crucial to quality of life. The calculator does, nevertheless, give some idea of what a family, in the absence of a public library, might have to pay out of pocket. For some with limited income, this presents not only hardship but also impossibility.
Please take a moment to reflect how and what your family used for library materials and services over the past year and go to our Web site (it take only a moment) and calculate what the library means to you in estimated dollar value to your family. You may access this through our Web site or directly from the Maine State Library at http://www.maine.gov/msl/services/calculator.htm.
Sonja Plummer-Morgan is Library Director at the Mark and Emily Turner Memorial Library in Presque Isle. She can be reached at 764-2571.
