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

DATE: SUNDAY, October 8, 1995                   TAG: 9510100050
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: G2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LIBRARIES

For half a decade, library budgets overall have been snipped and snipped again, falling before the twin blades of tightening local revenues and whatever rationale was handy, such as that computer technology might make libraries obsolete. Whatever anyone wanted to know, they would find on the 'Net.

Hours were reduced, staff laid off, funds for acquiring books chopped. Some libraries closed.

But among the public libraries responding to a survey this year by Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor reports, 85 percent won increases in their budgets averaging 7 percent. So, what gives?

Many libraries still are having to hold bake sales and auctions to raise operating funds because of municipal cuts. But public demand in other communities is forcing governments to loosen their grip on pursestrings.

Sure, more and more people are zooming around on the Internet. But most folks find it far more complicated and difficult than going to a library, where staff can help - and where there is the opportunity for contact with other people.

In Brooklyn, as libraries cut their hours back more and more, parents found their children had no place to go after school or on Saturdays. By 1992, budget cuts had closed the doors of the library system's 58 branches except for two days a week. A grass-roots outcry led to a doubling of the libraries' funding over the next three years.

And libraries are not simply child-care centers. "We don't see any indication that the use of print materials is decreasing," the director of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners told the Monitor. "In fact, it continues to steadily rise."

Even as localities are realizing that libraries' traditional roles have not disappeared, demands for new services are springing up. Immigration has created a need for adding books and literacy services in other languages.

And libraries can be a public-access ramp to the information superhighway for people who don't have computers at home. In an information age, libraries are central institutions and a potential drag on the trend dividing information have's from have-nots.

The library of the future may look different. But it will need more, not less, support to fulfill a role of continued importance in every community.