Library Annexation Special Report: KCLS offers huge collection; Renton has local touch

Published 6:25 pm Wednesday, January 13, 2010

If Renton doesn’t annex its library to the King County Library System Feb. 9, it could be several years before the struggling library sees improvements.

Although City Council members could get a levy on the ballot as early as November to pay for upgrades, the economy may not be healthy enough to support a new tax.

“It’s not likely in my estimation to take place in short term,” said council member King Parker of a library levy.

Others are more optimistic.

“If it happens that we don’t join King County, I think I would…immediately get it scheduled as a Committee of the Whole topic,” said council member Randy Corman.

While the Renton library has a clear vision of what it would do with more money, KCLS could satisfy much of that vision in a few months.

Changes could start the day the election is certified, said KCLS director Bill Ptacek. “I think they would see a difference in their library immediately.”

About 25 percent of KCLS’s checkouts consist of holds that are shipped from 44 libraries throughout the system. Patrons would be able to order from KCLS’s extensive collection immediately, he said

“We have a very well-developed delivery system,” he said. “I think it’s a model that’s working really really well.”

While KCLS orders a wide spectrum of materials, Renton librarians order specifically what they think their patrons want, said Renton librarian Laurie Finlayson.

“We don’t buy quite as broadly, but we buy more selectively,” she said. “We’re working with the patrons every day and we know the things that they’re interested in.”

Renton’s downtown building is close to maxing out its capacity for books. Either system could only increase Renton’s collection with a new building, said library director Bette Anderson.

A KCLS annexation would increase library building hours, opening Sundays in downtown and Fridays in the Highlands.

If the annexation doesn’t pass, the city will carry out 2010 budget cuts.

“The mayor has made it very clear that on March 1, he will cut back the hours and employment,” Parker said. “He will do exactly what he did with every other department in this city.”

A hallmark service of KCLS is computer access. If Renton annexed, it would get an upgrade, Ptacek said.

However, Renton isn’t too far behind the times.

“The computers that we have are new. We don’t have out of date equipment,” Anderson said. “The problem is that we offer very few computers. People have to wait a long time.”

The wiring in the downtown building can’t support anymore computers, she said.

Renton’s small library staff is providing an impressive amount of programming, Anderson said. “They are doing an amazing amount of programming, but that’s not sustainable in the long haul.”

An independent library can be more responsive to community needs, Finlayson said.

Renton librarians started a program to help teach people how to submit job applications online, she said.

“That’s very, very need specific to the patrons coming in,” she said.

It’s also easier to implement new programs, she said. “We didn’t have to get permission from some bureaucracy.”

Many of those great ideas haven’t come to fruition, because of short staff, Anderson said.

KCLS would provide the staff to implement more programming, Ptacek said.

With librarians assigned to different schools and people groups, KCLS gears its programming to specific communities within the city.

A switch to KCLS would also make it easier to access its robust World Languages Collection, which has items in about 24 languages.

Renton started a small multilingual collection, with an emphasis on Spanish materials. With more money the collection would grow with a focus on language groups in the city, Anderson said.

With access to powerful databases and one of the nation’s largest collections, KCLS’s resources provide a powerful punch of information.

“It would be really difficult to imagine that an independent library serving about 80,000 could match the resources of the library that serves 1.2 million people,” Ptacek said.

Under a larger system patrons fear the loss of community atmosphere, personal service and local control, Finlayson said.

Local control “lessens the gap between the users of the library and the decisions made about the library,” she said.