Queen’s Park must be in the grip of this same “modern” thinking. What else could lie behind budget cuts halving Southern Ontario Library Service funding, from $3.1 million to $1.5 million, resulting in cancellation of interlibrary loan and book delivery services across the province?
Once, a Muskoka library could offer patrons only the books under its own roof. But peoples’ quest to read and expand their horizons, combined with limited local budgets, produced an innovative solution. Sharing books between many libraries expanded what was available for local readers.
This cooperative approach between libraries became a pragmatic, win-win model that, in the early 1980s, took off dramatically with computer technology. More recently, when this system was merged with the Internet’s comprehensive reach, the sky became the limit. Needed titles could be tracked down and sourced from over 150 other participating libraries.
The interlibrary partnerships enabled Muskoka library patrons to get otherwise unavailable books and, as the system was perfected, to also get them faster and more efficiently, too. Courier service became twice-weekly, then was upped to thrice-weekly, speeding the loaned and borrowed books around the province to keen readers.
The extent to which interlibrary loans became integral to Ontario’s library institution is shown in a Bracebridge example. At the start of the 20th century, the only books available were the ones in town, owned by the Carnegie Library, and on the library’s shelves. By century’s end, the town library was borrowing 1,805 items and lending 1,223, in exchanges with other libraries.
Interlibrary activity continued to grow. By 2017, as Alison Brownlee reported last week about the sour impacts for Muskoka’s readers of aborting interlibrary loans, the six largest Muskoka libraries borrowed 8,521 items and lent out 8,081 through the provincially-funded interlibrary loan program.
Such numbers highlight how a library institution serves the public best as a working part of a larger system. They are testimony to a successful, cost-effective institutional arrangement as part of Ontario’s wider educational system. They underscore the enduring reality that people still want and need paper-printed books.
Queen’s Park’s quest to reduce Ontario’s deficits needs closer study. For example, the cost saving from eliminating this library service can be measured against increased provincial spending in Ontario Treasurer Vic Fedeli’s North Bay home-town for more dubious cultural benefits: millions of taxpayer dollars for movie-making that significantly benefits prospering American corporations like Netflix and Hallmark for production of U.S.-market films, including a number filmed in Muskoka.
On December 21 Mr. Fedeli pledged $5.6 million for post-production (the editing, music, visual effects and other work that follows filming) in North Bay. The amount subsidizing three U.S.-audience movies, “Christmas in Love,” “Sleigh Bell Sweethearts,” and “Astonishing Tales of Terror,” equals Ontario’s now vanished subsidy for our interlibrary loans.
Only a rigorous, holistic view of Ontarian’s cultural well-being can prevent such counterproductive measures.
Meanwhile, once again, as before, a Muskoka library can offer patrons only the books under its own roof.
