Library advocates gathered at the Massachusetts state capitol March 14 to dissuade lawmakers from enacting a provision of Gov. Mitt Romney’s FY 2004 budget that calls for the merger of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners and the Department of Education into a new Executive Office of Education.
Massachusetts Library Association President Krista I. McLeod urged lawmakers at a March 14 budget hearing not to “fix something that isn’t broken.” Citing more than 100 “beautiful new libraries” whose construction the MBLC helped fund, as well as database access and the enforcement of minimum library standards, McLeod asserted that while “librarians are very realistic about the budget situation . . . the dismantling of a small, effective, and efficient public agency that will help libraries weather the economic storm is definitely not the answer.”
A week earlier, MBLC issued a statement emphasizing the necessity of “a visible, strong, independent, and properly funded state library agency [as] essential to the delivery of library services.” Noting that Massachusetts libraries have already suffered cuts in such core services as database access and interlibrary loan, Holbrook Public Library Director Ruth Hathaway said in the March 7 Holbrook Sun, “If we became part of that huge educational bureaucracy, the needs of all libraries in the state would be lost in the shuffle.”
Posted March 17, 2003.