Libraries across New Hampshire are bracing for potential funding cuts from the state and federal governments.
Lawmakers here are considering cuts to the state library’s budget. On the federal level, President Donald Trump has issued an executive order to pare back the Institute of Museum and Libraries, which provides funding for library services in New Hampshire.
Rachel Baker is the president of the New Hampshire Library Association and the director of Elkins Public Library in Canterbury. She joined NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about how budget cuts at every level could affect New Hampshire’s libraries.
Transcript
What's at stake here for your library and others across the state? What kind of programs rely on this funding?
The state of New Hampshire has 235 active libraries. So we're talking about our big, beautiful city libraries, and we're also talking about our small rural libraries.
I'm a director of a small library. I have a citizen residency of 2,300 people. I had 14,558 patron visits last year. So that's people walking in the door for any number of things. That's for materials, that's for programming, that's for children's services. That's for services like aid and filling out taxes or applying for assistance or applying for a job.
The state of New Hampshire gets funding from the federal government, which is administered through the State Library. The most impact that we will see with a lack of funding is the elimination of the Talking Books Program, which is the way that sight impaired people are able to take in materials. It would also eliminate the interlibrary loan service and also the platform of Libby, by which our patrons throughout the state of New Hampshire are able to download electronic and digital information.
Where will the effects of funding cuts be felt most acutely here in New Hampshire?
Well, that's hard to say. Certainly the larger libraries will feel it, but some of our small libraries in small towns and unincorporated places up north rely so heavily on interlibrary loans. They may not have their own collection, or if they have their own collection of materials, it could be very small.
So if someone comes into Elkins Public Library and asks for a book, I go on to the state system, I order it and it could be delivered within days. But what that means is there are people at the State Library taking in those orders, organizing books, organizing van routes, gassing up the vans [and] maintaining the vans. It's a huge system and it's an amount of money that we really don’t believe we can find elsewhere.
New Hampshire Public Libraries shared 237,000 items through the interlibrary loan system. That's a tremendous amount of materials circulating through the state last year alone.
Is there a place where additional funding could come from if these cuts do materialize?
We just came off of town meeting season. It's just that in the last three weeks, we've been challenged by our town budgets and our budget committees. We've been challenged by the federal government. And then most recently, we were challenged by our own state.
So to be perfectly honest, we've been really scrambling to figure out how we can maintain our certain levels of service. The answer is that although many libraries are the benefit of generous contributions, it pales in comparison to the amount of money that is at stake. But I think what's happened, what I know has happened, is it's invigorated us all to educate the public on the value of the New Hampshire Library. What we're going to do is, we're going to seize that opportunity to make sure our patrons continue to receive the services they've always received.
