A Library Funding Juxtaposition

Two articles showed up in LISNews the past couple of days. This article is about the Cooperstown, NY Public Library, discussing how they only have enough money to pay for their online catalog for another year or two, and may have to go back to using a card catalog instead. Compare that to a Register Guard article about the Eugene Public Libraries new technology system for reading to the blind. They also have text magnification workstations and a device that translates text onscreen into printed braille.

Now, granted, Eugene and Cooperstown are two very different towns, and it makes sense for a place Eugene's size to have a bit more funding available to it. That said, I still think it's pretty amazing how variable community support for libraries is. Perhaps this is part of what brought me to, and keeps me in, Eugene.

I think this may be somewhat related to general civic engagement. NPR reported this morning that 29% of ballots sent out have already come back, over a week before election day.

This is up from 18% at this point in the 2000 election, and in some demographic groups, it is nearing the percentage of total voting age population who voted at all in the 2002 elections. From US census info.

Granted, fewer voters turn out for federal elections during Presidential election cycle off years, and the comparison is unfair given that the returns only indicate that almost 1/4 of registered voters voted. But given that a very high percentage of Oregonians are registered (1.94 million of 2.6 million voting age in 2000), this seems pretty significant.

A quick look at info on the Secretary of State website - 2.147 million this year. Lane county's at 36% election return as of late Monday.

Maybe I'm completely making up the relationship here, but somehow one makes me think of the other. People in this town, and this state in general, are engaged in politics, they care deeply about what happens in the nation and the world, and they are very involved in what happens in their community. It's quite nice.