Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 5, 1990                   TAG: 9003052108
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: T 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

In February, however, the board relented enough to allow Wise County to use its own money to continue buying videos just for its library. Wise County contributes more to the regional library than any of the other participants.

The regional library headquarters is in the Wise County Public Library, which is where materials are ordered for all participating libraries. The others got videotapes whether they wanted them or not.

The state has gotten involved in the controversy. The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission began looking into management of the system in January, at the request of Lee, Scott and Dickenson counties and the regional board, with the video purchases at the heart of the probe. The investigation is expected to be finished in May.

All this prompted the Virginia Library Board to ask its staff to study the pros and cons of stocking videos. A report on that study is scheduled for the board's next meeting Thursday in Richmond.

Theda Gibson, the regional library director in Wise, said having the videotapes is beneficial. "It's also brought people in who are getting books now, who probably wouldn't have come in," she said.

The annual report of the Lonesome Pine Regional Library for the 1988-89 fiscal year shows the system with a whopping 13,469 videotapes.

But Gibson noted that the system also has one of the largest book collections of any region, with 370,200 volumes, and she said the proportion of tapes to books was not unrealistic. Besides, she said, a library is supposed to cater to the desires of its users.

There is no question that users want the tapes. Norma Ferguson, supervisor of the Lee County Public Library, said patrons check out an average of 200 a day there alone. Sheila Phipps, supervisor at the Jonnie B. Deel Memorial Library in Dickenson, said it is not unusual to see 300 to 350 go out over weekends and all come back on Monday "so it's going to keep two people busy."

That is one of the problems. Some of the libraries in Lee, Scott and Dickenson counties have limited staffs and have to spend a lot of time on the videos. And there is a concern that reading is discouraged by the availability of videos.

"My feeling is that they do take away from books," Phipps said. "Of course, the videos do bring a crowd in . . . but it's getting to the point that some families, that's all they do."

"And really our book collecting has suffered," she said, "especially our adult non-fiction - it needs to be updated - and the children's books."

Another problem with the videos is their frequent use in so many different videotape players wears them out quickly, and some people fail to keep their players in good condition. Commercial video rental stores have more control over the use of their tapes, she said.

"We'll have a real popular video that may have gone out 150 times. . . . They are so expensive and then the life of them is not very long at all," Phipps said. "In fact, we had to discard one fairly new one the other day, `The Princess Bride.' "

"Sometimes they don't last but three or four showings, and they cost as much as $90," said Sheila Hensley, a Dickenson representative on the regional board.

Hensley made a study of her own about the size of the region's videotape collection, and said it has more than 10 times as many as systems of comparable size. Lonesome Pine had been spending 5 to 6 percent of its state funds on videos, compared with 1 percent for the other libraries, she found.

The 1988-89 statistics show Lonesome Pine circulating 455,979 adult books, 194,640 juvenile books, 48,096 paperbacks through a mail program, and 477,566 audiovisual materials.