Book waitlists could get longer under St. Charles County library’s budget plan

ST. CHARLES COUNTY — Officials here are preparing to slash more than $306,000 from library district’s new-book budget — a decision that could result in longer wait times for patrons wanting to read popular titles.

The move comes as the St. Charles City-County Library District grapples with tight budgets. The district floated closing branches last year, and it’s facing higher personnel costs after filling key public-facing staff positions and giving employees raises last summer, said CEO John Greifzu.

But officials said Wednesday that the proposed cuts are unrelated to the higher staffing costs.

The cuts are “a symptom of the district being underfunded,” Greifzu said. He said the library system is the third largest in the state, but ranked seventh in per-capita funding when compared to other library systems in areas with more than 200,000 people.

“We are very careful to purchase what we need and not what we want,” Greifzu said on Wednesday.

The library district spent almost $4.4 million of its $27.2 million operating budget on new printed books, and expanding and maintaining its digital collection this fiscal year. Of the more than 6 million items checked out last year in St. Charles County’s libraries, roughly one-fourth of them were digital items such as audiobooks.

The draft budget presented to the library board Tuesday shows the library cutting its collection and materials budget by 7%.

“So when you get down to it, we are cutting significant amounts of out of the digital budget,” Greifzu said. “I can’t call them savings, because we are reducing service.”

The library expects to cut two databases from the library system’s research and reference collection, switch to a smaller newspaper database and spend less on buying printed books, music and video games.

About half of the library district’s collection management budget is spent on digital materials, he said. About 30% is spent on printed materials and almost 20% on cataloging and database software, he said.

While Greifzu said there “will be some impact” to library patrons, that library staff “will be monitoring it to try and minimize pain points” that emerge if the cuts are enacted.

Carol Schrey, the library’s collection service director, said the most obvious impact will be longer wait times for eBooks. The current average, she said, is 29 days.

“We really don’t want to have our customers waiting much longer than that,” she said. “If we see that creep up ... then I think we will need to review that and see if there are alternatives.”

For popular book titles the library orders multiple copies to meet demand. For example, the library bought 150 digital copies and 58 printed copies of the best-selling fantasy novel “Onyx Storm,” by Rebecca Yarros, which was released in January with a digital waitlist of 1,000 library patrons.

The digital copies have been checked out 840 times, with 150 patrons still on the waitlist to read it. The printed books have been checked out 185 times, and there around a dozen holds on the printed book.

Another book, “The Nightingale,” by Kristin Hannah was used as an example of why the library district needs to purchase multiple copies of a digital book. The library has already purchased 14 copies of the book this fiscal year — even thought the novel came out in 2015, Schrey said.

Each digital copy costs around $60. Since the book’s release, it has been checked out over 3,300 times, including more than 700 times this year. The book still has 149 active holds, according to the library district’s catalog.

The library system utilizes a number of online platforms to build its digital collection, including Hoopla, Kanopy and Overdrive.

Hoopla largely houses the library’s collection of audiobooks, music, and ebooks and is used by roughly 17,000 patrons annually. Kanopy is primarily used to view movies and television shows. Both services charge the library a fee per play, which ranges from $1.04 per play to $2.21 per play, Schrey said.

The largest of the proposed cuts — $120,000 —are directed at Overdrive, which houses more than 53,000 unique book titles. Of those titles, 21,000 are on a subscription or metered model that means “they will either leave the collection or have to be repurchased,” Schrey said.

The proposed budget is set to be voted on in June.