Winds of change let misinformation sweep in

News of our intention to leave the Winnefox Library System shared catalog has been met with shock and misunderstanding. Coming to quick conclusions can be deceptive. Like buying a new car, you can’t judge by outward appearances. You have to kick the tires and look under the hood to know what you are really getting.

Let me put some rumors to rest. We did not, nor did we ever consider, leaving the shared catalog to pay for the opening of the Express branch near Festival Foods. The branch has been in the works for about three years, with the parked bookmobile our market-tester. The majority of costs to operate the branch will be met by moving the existing Festival staff, materials and communications indoors and by closing the two bookmobiles.

Believe it or not, we’re going to have more material available to Fond du Lac library users as a stand-alone library.

While the methods of getting the material may change, users still will have the Winnefox catalog as well as all the holdings of all the public libraries around the state available to them. Users will have to take a different path to reach their titles, but – eventually – that path will be available online.

So how will leaving Winnefox make more things available? This part gets complicated. Stay with me. Budgets in libraries around the country are falling (ours will be cut some time next year). The trend in U.S. libraries – including those we share with – has been to deal with declining budgets by buying less new material. So sharing makes sense, right? But a growing practice – “XYZ Library hold only” – used to protect materials for home-town customers defeats that purpose of the shared catalog. We’ve been paying Winnefox more than $100,000 a year for the convenience of having all our material mixed together. The $60,000 we’re saving by going standalone will free up more dollars for materials, which will allow us to stay true to our core mission: getting people the materials they want when they want them.

We’ve worked hard over the last 10 years to build a collection that fulfills the “I want it now” needs of our patrons. People want to walk through our doors to pick up the latest James Patterson or an up-to-date Grand Canyon travel guide. They don’t want to be put on reserve lists. So we buy multiple copies of the most-popular items, and we get them on the shelf as quickly as possible. Other libraries don’t buy as many copies, and since all items are shared equally in the Winnefox catalog, this means our customers are waiting longer because our copies are being used to fill holds elsewhere.

Ten percent of our patrons’ holds come from other libraries. We think a good chunk of those holds are of titles we own but came from another location because it was next in line. It’s not at all uncommon for a Fond du Lac customer to receive a Menasha copy of a book today because the Fond du Lac copy went to a Menasha customer yesterday. Shipping books is costly.

We’ll still have the Interlibrary Loan system to get special-purpose material, such as a resource book for home school parents or the sixth edition of King Lear for that term paper.

This is a time when libraries, like all public institutions, are being asked to spend money wisely. As a library director, I have to make service recommendations to the Board of Trustees based not only on what is right for today, but on what will put the library in the best position for the future. I believe that going standalone will give the taxpayers of Fond du Lac the biggest bang for their buck.

That advantage might not be readily available as we enter the transition period – August 1 until we go live in November. It’s going to be clunky and not a little frustrating. But I’m confident the proof will be in the final product.

Kick the tires and look under the hood before judging this car. The new catalog will have more substance, and when you get a chance to see it, perhaps even a little extra glam.