herbiehancock

The men in my family left this morning for a five day Cleveland Indians baseball/fishing/Lake Erie/visiting husband's relatives combined vacation. Of course, Max and Charley and the crickets (who are singing to me at the moment) are still here to keep me company. I stayed home because I have to work for three of those five days that the fellows are going to be gone. That's a good thing, though. It means I still have my job--- at least for now. Our state budget proposal was decided upon this week. Although cuts in funding for libraries were not as deep as originally proposed, they were still severe. Our library is losing an additional 11% in funding instead of the original additional 32% that was proposed. Coupled with the 20% that we lost earlier this year, our funding has been cut 31%. As a result, on August 1st, the staff at our library and our branch libraries which now totals 54 employees will be cut to just 28 employees. I still have my job, but many of my cowor...

Although, I try to keep things light on this blog, today I have something important to me to talk about. I hope you will indulge me with a few minutes of your time. As many of you know, I am a librarian. My local library made front page news again yesterday, and once again it was NOT good news. You can click on the picture to enlarge it if you'd like to read the article. At work yesterday, this is the flyer we were passing out to patrons requesting them to read it and take action if they would like to continue to have the library services be available to them. I think these things are self explanatory, so I won't go on and on about them. I do want to say that since the downturn in the economy, our library has had a 20% increase in usage, and yet, we have already been forced to take a 20% cut in funding. This new proposal will increase the cuts an additional 32%. Not only am I a library worker, I am a library user. Even if I weren't employed by the library, I would be extr...