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Digital access divides John M. Cuelenaere and Wapiti Regional Libraries

Dec 16, 2016 | 9:00 AM

A digital divide separates the John M. Cuelenaere Public Library [JMCPL] and Wapiti Regional Library, and it could result in a costly split.

In June, the City of Prince Albert began a process to create a new municipal library boundary in the province, under The Public Libraries Act. This would be the first time a municipality had moved to create a new boundary since the act was established.

City councillor and JMCPL board chair, Ted Zurakowski, said the move was a natural step for a community the size of Prince Albert, in order to provide the critical services of a library in the most efficient way possible.

“We just really felt that in order to provide a quality, public library service to our patrons, we needed to take governance and control back so we can be a little bit more nimble,” he explained.

Part of the governance model is the two separate boards of the local branches at the region that oversee operations at JMCPL and at Wapiti. While each board is responsible for different things, the size of the community of Prince Albert and JMCPL make it unique in the region.

Under the Public Libraries Act, municipalities and local branch boards are responsible for providing facilities for libraries within the community. Things like buildings, shelves and staffing are handled locally. The regional libraries are responsible for providing services, programs, books and payroll services to help in the administration of each branch.

JMCPL provides its own administration and payroll services.

According to Zurakowski, “that funding model just doesn’t seem to make sense to the taxpayers of Prince Albert.”

Tony Murphy, regional director of the Wapiti Regional Library, said should Prince Albert and the JMCPL form a new municipal library, Wapiti would face financial consequences.

“If [Prince Albert and the JMCPL] become a municipal library, there’s definitely an impact for Wapiti,” Murphy explained. “The main impact would be in our provincial grant funding.”

Wapiti would lose roughly $156,000 per year in provincial grant funding if Prince Albert formed a new municipal library. According to Murphy, each regional library system is fully funded by provincial grants, a lion’s share of which are based on population. As belts tighten across the province, Wapiti has had to make cuts in staffing and find other efficiencies in recent years in order to maintain service levels for all the communities within the region.

Wapiti has a contingency budget to re-allocate contributions from the other communities in the region by $1.50 per resident to make up the short fall if a separation were to occur.

Under the Saskatchewan Information and Library Services Consortium [SILS], the one card, one province agreement helps ensure anyone in the smallest community and furthest reaches of the province can access many of the services the library has to offer.

Murphy said the agreement is meant to give all residents equal access to library services.

“We actually share materials right across the province,” he explained. “Everyone in Wapiti, or all library users, are borrowing from around the province as well, so it is very much a reciprocal kind of process.”

But, this legislation doesn’t explicitly include digital services and software, such as access to databases, online magazine and newspaper services and other forms of online entertainment.

For example, both Wapiti Regional Library and JMCPL both offer access to the online streaming service Hoopla Digital and the digital magazine subscription Flipster. While access to Hoopla is consistent for all branches of Wapiti, including JMCPL, subscriptions for Flipster are different, with Wapiti users getting access to 41 different magazines and JMCPL subscribers getting access to only 13.

For Zurakowski, it’s this sort of software license and technology that Prince Albert and JMCPL want to access through a municipal system.

“Those types of services are what we want to invest in,” Zurakowski explained. “Not just the physical part of the library, not just the physical books, but the technology to download books, the programming, the collections, the databases.”

While provincial legislation allows for shared electronic licensing for public, academic and special technical libraries, only programs and databases for educational purposes are covered. Leaving public libraries in the dark on how best to purchase and share other software licenses.

For now though, Murphy and the administration at Wapiti can do nothing but wait. The creation of a new municipal boundary for Prince Albert and the JMCPL remains a negotiation between the provincial government and the city.

 

shane.oneill@paNOW.com

On Twitter: @stroneill