County of Simcoe council’s decision to dissolve the Simcoe County Library Co-operative last week has left some former local library CEOs scratching their heads.
Ken Haigh, formerly the CEO of the Collingwood Public Library, and before that The Blue Mountains Public Library, said the dissolution of the co-op will have the heaviest impact on small libraries.
“In Collingwood, it will have less of an impact because (the library) is fairly big, but even in Collingwood, it is going to affect us," said Haigh, who was CEO at the Collingwood library for eight years before resigning in March 2021.
The Simcoe County Library Co-operative was formed in 1948 and until last week it served 14 public libraries (29 branches) by allowing them to share services, resources and funds to pool purchasing power for specific collections or items.
Haigh said the major benefit of the co-op is it allowed all the libraries to participate in consortium purchasing.
“We could go to a vendor, as a group, and get a reduced price. For example, we did that for our circulation software which all of the county libraries use,” he said. “If we had tried to purchase it individually, it would have probably been outside the budget of most of the libraries,” he added, noting the same process was used for county-wide purchasing of e-books, downloadable audiobooks and database systems.
“This affects us two ways: in one way, we had bargaining power, on the other hand we would get money from the county system that allowed us to purchase things we could all share,” he said. “With dissolving the co-op, now everybody is on their own.”
Haigh said he wonders what will happen when the contract runs out for the circulation software.
“Will each library have to go out to market to find their own individual software? How will that impact their budgets?” he said.
Simcoe County council voted to dissolve the co-op and instead spend $280,000 from its reserves on the Information Library Service, which staff said will save money in the long-run. The Information Library Service will apply mostly to IT support, including cloud-based e-services IT platform, cyber security threat protection, and IT HelpDesk.
No physical branches are planned to close as a result of the decision. The county's library CEO retired, but there are still four staff members that were attached to the co-operative.
Nina Bifolchi, mayor of Wasaga Beach and chair of the county's library service delivery review task force said "procurement of some items will still be coordinated at the county level as needed," and there would be "continued support with regional procurement efforts."
"The library co-operative has an annual budget of $807,000. Starting in 2023 the County anticipates an annual budget of $512,000 to support IT licensing and new IT staff. This results in annual savings starting 2023 of $295,000," said Bifolchi in an emailed statement from the county to CollingwoodToday.
Details from the county on exactly how much the new ILS will fill in the gaps left by the co-op are scant, as the decision to move to the model was discussed in closed sessions of county council and the county’s service delivery task force, and no official reports on the change have been made public.
Haigh noted the Simcoe County Libraries Immigrant Hub project was spearheaded by the co-op. The program won the Minister's Award for Innovation at the 2018 Ontario Public Library Service Awards in the large library category. The project brought resources and programming to newcomers across Simcoe County such as multilingual materials including books, e-books and DVDs and brought cultural competency training for all staff. Orillia and Barrie libraries also took part in the project.
“What’s going to happen with that now? Who is going to take over leadership of that?” said Haigh.
The County of Simcoe has said that existing collections of materials owned by the county will be donated to library branches for public access at no cost to the individual municipal branches and will include multilingual collections.
“The county's local immigration partnership program which can continue to support with immigrant and newcomer-related services,” said director of public affairs Allan Greenwood in a statement to CollingwoodToday.ca.
However, Haigh still wonders what that will mean for future purchasing of materials.
“Libraries that can afford to, will, and ones that can’t will have to rely on inter-library loans if they want to provide those services, which won’t be as efficient,” he said.
