Island Voices
Library already is progressing

By Virginia Lowell
Hawai'i state librarian

Thank you, Buck Joiner, for giving me the opportunity to educate you and other patrons to some of the ironies of library services in our financially challenged libraries, in our geographically challenged state (Letters, June 27).

In Hawai'i, you can go into any public library and get anything that's available from anywhere in the system, and you can return anything at any library anywhere in the system. But, your Mainland friends have both local and state funding for their library services, and we have only state funding. Hawai'i's public library system is funded at $17.83 per capita; the national average is over $29 per capita.

Yes, we could (and we sometimes do) ship library materials via first-class mail so that you could get a requested item in two or three days. But we ship hundreds of thousands of items annually, most of them from O'ahu to the Neighbor Islands. Even at the library rate, that's a chunk of change out of our $21 million budget.

Yes, it takes a few keystrokes now to get to our Web page. But access to the Hawai'i State Public Library Web site will soon be as accessible as any other. And you can reach the site now through the state's eHawaiiGov page. This enhancement is the result of our in-process upgrade of our automated system, which will bring you graphical images instead of text only. (When the library system initiated Internet access, it did not have the funds to provide anything other than dumb terminals; we have over 350 PCs ready to install in libraries as soon as the necessary electrical upgrades are completed.)

Finally, your Legislature has shown a great deal more faith in our library system than you — it gave us money in FY01 to purchase library materials, the first general fund money for that purpose since 1996. This increase was not nearly enough, of course, but we made a good start at recovering from the failed Baker & Taylor contract, at refreshing our collections, adding many more hot titles (in juvenile and young adult collections too), and adding DVDs as a new format to our collections.

So please keep coming to your library, Mr. Joiner. Watch us as we add all that new access in our libraries. Talk to the library staff about the challenges you (and they) face in delivering materials to you, and how we can best serve you, given our limited funds.

And bring your library card — if you are really hot about efficiency and timely service, that's the quickest way to get it.