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Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Mayor David Miller
Toronto City Hall
100 Queen St. West 2nd Floor
Toronto ON M5H 2N2

Dear Mayor Miller,

I’m shocked and severely disappointed to read of the huge reductions in services that the Toronto Public Library has had to make in response to your government’s funding cuts.

I am cognizant of the fiscal difficulties facing Toronto, but if we lose sight of the big picture — of the things that make Toronto great — the consequences will be severe.

The value of libraries in education cannot be overstated, but that’s true in any city. What makes Toronto so special is its multiculturalism — and it is in our libraries that newcomers to Toronto learn about the city and its traditions of inclusiveness and peacefulness. When you force library branches to curtail their hours, cut back on acquisitions, and freeze hiring, you are doing severe damage to the fabric of what once was, and can again be, the greatest city in the world. I urge you and your council to find another solution — because the current one is untenable.

I speak not just as a library user, but also a past writer-in-residence for TPL, and the current recipient of the Toronto Public Library Celebrates Reading Award. I am a writer today because of Toronto’s libraries — and I’m a better citizen today because of them, too. Do not allow the great institution that is TPL to be whittled away by fiscal shortsightedness. Find the funds; don’t let literacy, multiculturalism, learning, and fun fall by the wayside in David Miller’s Toronto.

Respectfully submitted,

Robert J. Sawyer

CC: Josephine Bryant, TPL City Librarian; Kathy Gallagher Ross, Chair, TPL Board

However they are also the best equipped for students’ needs and in my opinion the easiest to access via public transit. Closing them on Sunday will mean greater demand on them in the evenings and Saturdays, when they have fewer staff scheduled.

TRL and NY-Central’s Canadiana Dept. have closed stacks, meaning that staff must fetch the books requested. With increased evening and Saturday demand and fewer retrievers scheduled, patrons will longer than 30 minutes for the requested material.

Increased number of patrons plus fewer hours means more reference questions per hour; but the reference librarians (fewer during evenings and Saturdays) will have less time to spend answering them (and less patience with questioners who don’t know exactly what they want – and with patrons who insist the librarian to do their research for them.)

Added to that are the cuts in the materials budgets. Books not bought. Subscriptions not renewed. Not good for people who can’t afford to buy them from Indigo or Amazon.ca. Not good for students who depend on the public library (especially TRL, NY-Central and the larger branches – the ones now closed Sundays) because their school libraries have been so underfunded they resemble famine victims.

Also the internet access: That’s in high demand, and the larger libraries have more computers. Closing them Sundays will save money in electricity; but it is going to impact on the small libraries that are open. Anyone with a bus token who wants a free computer will swarm those branches. Users living in those neighbourhoods – neighbourhoods the library says need to have branches open Sundays – are not going to like that. Has there been a library who has not had at least one incident of a user or group of users refusing (sometimes violently) to yield a terminal when their time was up? (Maybe Chief Blair will cite that as a reason not to cut the police budget.)

So, the service will not be as good as it was. There will be more confrontations, more staff burnout and sick leave (meaning lesser service for more money), and more burnt patrons more badly burnt.