THE LIBRARY HAINES BUILT

摘要

"Community involvement," the standard cliche, doesn't come close to capturing the spirit and action that have structured the building, programs, collections, and services of the Haines Borough Public Library (HBPL), AK. Those achievements make HBPL the winner of the first annual award for the Best Small Library in America, cosponsored by Library Journal and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Haines is a remote community of 2600, about 70 miles northeast of Juneau as the crow flies, but that takes either half an hour by bush plane or three to five hours by boat. About 20 percent of the people who live there and use the library are members of the Chilkoot Indian Association or the Chilkat Indian Village, both Tlingit tribes native to the region. The facts of the library, impressive by themselves, only hint at the huge investment by nearly everyone in Haines. The library's circulation, now at 112,520, has increased 77 percent in the past five years, 27 percent last year alone. Free, unfiltered public Internet access, coupled with a variety of technology training and software applications, has meant more than 28,000 user sessions a year, tripling in five years and up 70 percent last year. The library budget of $293,000 comes from Haines Borough citizens, who tax themselves to the tune of $113 per capita for library service. That also covers use by tourists and seasonal residents. The library spends about 11 percent of that budget on collections. Most of the money ($270,000) comes from property taxes. The rest is revenue from book sales, fines, and small donations. HBPL is visited roughly 67,000 times a year. "We didn't [include] in our [award] application that Haines has tax resistance," says Director Ann Myren, "but, of course, we do. We have to work pretty hard for our budget, especially in the last year." The community, in a newly combined government of town and borough (like a county), passed a tax cap. The amount collected had to be reduced. Myren thinks that might make it harder to sustain the budget.