System to be funded mainly through library district tax

The librarians are out to get you.

They’re hatching plans to hook you with best-sellers, free Wi-Fi, DVDs and more.

In July, the Tucson-Pima Public Library System was officially consolidated and the budget increased amid some grumbling that residents paid for the system twice – in a countywide property tax and in city general-fund revenue devoted to the system.

Now that operations have shifted to the county, the city will phase out funding over three years and the system will be funded mainly through the library district tax. A higher tax levy went into effect last month.

Though some may see it as double-dipping, the 50 percent increase in funding promises to be well worth it – if the library director and her newly hired deputy have their way.

For starters, the book-buying budget has jumped to $4 million from $3 million. So you can expect to see that best-seller in the library the same day it appears in bookstores.

“We were never able to buy enough copies of what’s popular,” said library Director Nancy Ledeboer, who came to Tucson from the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District at the start of 2005.

Buying books falls under the leadership of Melody Ballard, who started Sept. 18 as the library’s deputy director. Ballard came to Tucson from the Washoe County Library System in Reno, Nev., where she was associate director for public service.

“It’s about giving people what they want, not what we think they would need,” Ballard said. “This library has the vision I’m comfortable with. It’s a customer service-based organization.”

Ledeboer and Ballard see an opportunity to reshape the library system.

“We’re in an exciting time,” Ledeboer said. “The library has been at a standstill the last few years. We can bring the library back to prominence. For a time, the Wilmot Library circulated more books (for a library its size) than any library in the country.”

Don Bittner, who just moved to Tucson at the start of September, doesn’t know anything about this administrative excitement, but his enthusiasm matches that of the Nevada duo.

“I see it as one of our most sacred institutions,” Bittner said while looking at the banned book exhibition at the Joel D. Valdez Main Library. “This is where you can learn to do whatever you want to do. This library is great. There’s an incredible amount of books, and you can order books from other (branch) libraries.”

Friday, at the Valencia branch, Al Robles checked a Lexus repair guide, Bridget Machado surfed for comics for her son and Clare Gengarelly of Benson returned a pile of videotapes.

“We get lots of videos,” Gengarelly said. “I think the library is critical. You get the new book and you have a good hold system.”

“I like to check out movies and books for my older son,” Machado said. “He has to read every night. Right now I’m looking up comic books (on the Internet).”

“I’m working on a car for my daughter,” said Robles, who stops by three or four times a month.

The library goes beyond books for Ledeboer and Ballard.

Since the start of the year, each branch library and the main library have offered free wireless Internet, or Wi-Fi, access. The library’s Web site now allows people to download audio books, and soon people will also be able to download videos. Ledeboer also wants to increase the number of story time sessions.

Ledeboer, 49, is in talks to launch a Fit for Life program for teens, funded with a $20,000 grant awarded in September by the MetLife Foundation’s Libraries for the Future. She plans to partner with the YMCA, where teens would be able to try out the program’s recommendations on how to live a healthy lifestyle.

But books remain the mainstay. Ledeboer and Ballard are establishing a new way to acquire books.

They are working with a large-scale book distributor to get new books that are ready to go straight to the shelves. Now, books can sit in a truck for weeks before library staffers process them, attach the call numbers and put covers on them.

Ballard, 59, is a key ingredient to make all this work. For the past year, Ledeboer has headed the library system without a deputy director.

“I was doing three jobs: director, deputy director and managing the transition from city to county operation,” Ledeboer said.

Ballard also had a split life the past two years. She worked in Reno, but she and her husband, Glen, started building a home in Sahuarita 2 1/2 years ago. She has commuted twice a month for long weekends in southern Arizona.

Ballard, in her earlier years, lived in Arizona for 10 years and did much of her undergraduate work at the University of Arizona.

Library management was a second career Ballard launched in 1993. After a vagabond Army life with Glen, a retired lieutenant colonel, the Ballards launched a vagabond library life, taking them to Montana, Alaska and, for the past eight years, to Reno. She pulled all Reno’s branch libraries together to work cohesively to the extent that they now share staff and dollars as needed.

“She survived eight years working with 12 energetic, creative, independent and bright managers,” said Nancy Cummings, Washoe County’s library director. “She kept everybody happy and things moving forward for us.”

That entailed bringing major changes to the organizational structure in Reno.

“I’m a big-picture person,” Ballard said. “I bring excellent organizational skills. This library will be able to make ‘it’ happen seamlessly. ‘It’ stands for forward-moving direction.”

Along with the changes may come a new name. Ledeboer figures there must be something better than Tucson-Pima Public Library.

BY THE NUMBERS

Tucson-Pima Public Library

July 2005 to June 2006

1.5 million books at 23 branches

6.2 million items borrowed

3 million individual visits to the libraries

7,368 students received tutoring assistance

28,466 children took part in summer reading programs

76 new computers were installed

700,000 people used library computers

462 school visits to libraries

LIBRARY UPDATE

● Operation of the library system passed from city to county control on July 1.

● Free weekday validated library parking ended that day. But library garage parking is free after 5 p.m. weekdays and all day on weekends.

● Expanded hours added to midsize libraries four nights a week.

● Free Wi-Fi now available at all library branches

● About a dozen computers for public use were added at the Mission and Columbus branches.

● Martha Cooper Branch Library and Learning Center added to library system at 1377 N. Catalina Ave.

PARKING

Free parking may be coming back to the Joel D. Valdez Main Library – one hour’s worth, at any rate.

City Councilwoman Nina Trasoff is proposing to bring back partial parking validation for patrons at the main library.

“We would cover the first 3,000 validations each month and that would be just for the first hour,” Trasoff said.

Trasoff is introducing the idea Tuesday to the City Council. She and Richard Elias, chair of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, have discussed entering into an intergovernmental agreement regarding parking.

Validated parking for the Main Library ended June 30 as operation of the library system passed from city to county control. The parking garage is a city facility.

Library Director Nancy Ledeboer said the body count passing through the library has dropped 5,000 since then, but she had no statistics on how much of that is due to “loopers” – people validating their parking stubs but not using the library – or the rainy summer.

“The parking garage is full quite often,” Ledeboer said. “The best outcome would be if we could reinstate free parking.”

Previous annual library budget:

$22 million

New annual library budget:

$34 million

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ON THE WEB

For more about the Tucson-Pima Public Library: www.lib.ci.tucson.az.us

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 30th, 2006 at 12:01 am and is filed under Calendar, Family, Local. Tags for this post: Books, Calendar-Books, Calendar-Books-Local, Family-Home/Garden, Family-Home/Garden-Local, Home/Garden, Local-Sci/Tech, page-a01, Sci/Tech, Teya Vitu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.