Education Cabinet Secretary Virginia Fox

From the Cabinet Secretary

I am pleased to offer the 2004 -2005 annual report from the staff of the Kentucky Department for Libraries & Archives. KDLA is committed to Kentucky's need to know by assuring equitable access to high quality library and information resources and services. KDLA also helps public agencies ensure that adequate documentation of government programs is created, efficiently maintained, and made readily accessible.

KDLA dates its origin to 1825, when the Kentucky State Library was established by the Kentucky General Assembly to serve state government in Frankfort. Since that time, it has been looked to by educators and learners throughout history as essential components of any form of education.

Libraries are essential partners in building communities and enriching our quality of life, while archives and professional management of the public record ensure the accountability, survivability and effective operation of our institutions and our governments.

KDLA’s mission is fundamental to all this and is committed to “Serving Kentucky’s Need to Know.” Libraries are vital to the health and vibrancy of Kentucky communities. Libraries and Archives provide Kentuckians with opportunities to explore history and enrich the future as they follow a path of lifelong learning and an enriched quality of life.

I congratulate KDLA, one of our Education Cabinet agencies, for its work this past year in helping to serve Kentucky’s community of libraries. I hope you find this report of KDLA’s initiatives and accomplishments during the fiscal year 2004 – 2005 both informative and useful.

Commissioner Jim Nelson with a member of the KDLA staff.

From the Commissioner

We believe that 2005 has been a turn-around year for KDLA and its partners, with economic gains bringing to a halt the multiple years of budget reductions state government has experienced. While still struggling, especially with dramatically lower staffing levels, you will see from this report that we continue to provide leadership and programs which have made improvements in living, learning, and working for the people of our state. A strong cadre of highly qualified and productive staff have pulled together to accomplish significant gains in our programs, but we also look to the upcoming legislative session to make real progress in the 2007-08 biennium.

With considerable support from Secretary Fox and our Cabinet, we are looking to move forward with significant needs of our library and public records customers in the next biennial budget. Our plans are based on the following issues which undergird our budget request.

Over 2 million Kentuckians are registered at their local public libraries. These include teachers, students, parents, children, grandparents, faith communities, and government workers - people from all walks of life. Our libraries are trying to serve this large and geographically diverse population, but local resources are stretched to the maximum. Only 4 % of local library budgets come from the state, while public schools receive 50.5% state support and our public postsecondary institutions receive 50%.

The Kentucky Public Library Association Legislative Committee is recommending a comprehensive library budget package to address the needs of their counties including:

• the Public Library Facilities Construction Fund;
• the Public Library Improvement and Equalization Fund;
• the Library Science Scholarship Fund;
• and restoring cuts made in our Bookmobile program and the Kentucky Virtual Library database licensing program.

KDLA has taken these KPLA legislative priorities and incorporated them into our 2007-2008 biennial budget requests in the following manner – illustrating the need and the amounts we are asking to address these needs:

Public Library Facilities Construction Fund: Kentucky’s public library facilities are 539,718 square feet short of minimum standard, and 78 of the existing buildings are over 20 years old. As major institutions for bringing communities together, libraries need more and better space to address information driven economy and a bewildering array of educational, cultural and social challenges facing us. It would take nearly 95 million dollars just to address the minimum square foot standards shortfall. Using local government bonding capacity, we could accomplish 25% of this unmet need in the biennium with $1 million in 2007 and an additional $1 million 2008.

Public Library Improvement and Equalization Fund: This program was established to assure quality and equity in contemporary library and information services to improve early childhood development; support lifelong learning opportunities; enhance economic development; enrich cultural resource opportunities for all Kentuckians; and, expand adult education and adult literacy programs. Although the statute became law in 2000, it has never been funded. We seek $6 million annually to help local libraries provide the services listed above, as stated in KRS 171.201(4).

Library Science Scholarship Fund: Kentucky ranks 45th in the number of librarians with master’s degree education. Nationally it is estimated that over 46% of librarians will retire by 2008. Clearly we need to be recruiting and educating new professional librarians for our state. To accomplish this, we are requesting a modest beginning of 10 scholarships in 2007 and 20 in 2008 at $5,000 each in order to help Kentucky meet its growing need for a new and diverse professional library workforce. We need $50,000 in 2007and $100,000 in 2008 to get this critical program started.

Bookmobiles and the Kentucky Virtual Library: Kentucky is still primarily a rural state and our people are spread over a broad geographic region. We need to restore funds used to continue our historic bookmobile program, as well as the grants we give for access to resources in the Kentucky Virtual Library. We need $275,000 annually to help overcome the problems of an aging bookmobile fleet. Of our 101 bookmobiles on the road today, six are over 17 years old and another 29 are between 10 and 16 years old. KYVL serves all Kentuckians, but it is a critical resource for teachers and students in our P-16 education programs. We need $111,100 annually to restore funding cut from that program.

This entire library package would cost less than $15 million over the 2007-08 biennium. This is a negligible amount in the state’s multi billion dollar budget, yet it would make a powerful impact in building the kind of communities which will deliver a high quality of life and with strong educational and economic development foundations. Over 2 million Kentuckians already know how important their local libraries are and more sign up annually to take advantage of this personal and user-friendly local service.

On the Public Records side, our long-standing need for additional space for the permanent records of state and local government has come to a crisis point. In June of this year, we issued a moratorium on accepting any new shipments of archival records because we have simply no more space for them in our Coffee Tree Road facility. To create some new space on the secure and temperature-controlled third floor, we have had to move shelving into the lobby of our facility so that we can move our Braille collection to the lobby in order to free up a little space for archival storage on the third floor. This can only serve as a temporary solution to a critical problem for Kentucky and we are again requesting an expansion of our facility to accommodate the longer term issue of securing paper records in our state.

High elevation, high volume storage characterizes the new archival vault addition at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick (PANB), Canada. The PANB has comparable responsibilities to KDLA's Public Records Division and chose this economical design to maximize storage capacity in limited ground space. In use at more than 40 universities across the United States, this functional design is favored for KDLA's own archival facility expansion.

Archives Expansion Capital Project: The State Archives currently holds 94,000 cubic feet of records (about 235 million pages, which would run 17.8 miles) dating from 1780 to the present. For the past ten years our capital requests have reflected this growing crisis and we have had several consultants examine our situation to verify the anticipated growth. We already have implemented a digital conversion center, along with an electronic records archives, to assure we are doing all we can to use technology to help remedy our situation. The transition from paper to electronic formats will take many years and we have to have the kind of secure, temperature controlled space the permanent records of our state require. We are asking for a 16,000 square foot expansion to our Coffee Tree Road facility which will allow high density storage of these records; 32 shelves in elevation with an “order picker” system to retrieve the records. This solution is being used in more than 40 regional library and archival repositories across the country and will require an $8.5 million investment. Our Cabinet has this project listed very high and the Capital Planning Advisory Board lists it as one of the top projects needed for our state.

We all know how many demands are and will be made on the state budget, so developing priorities in this highly competitive environment is a challenge throughout state government. The library budget package and the archives capital project have faired very well so far and we are hopeful Governor Fletcher and the Legislature will understand the essential nature of these programs to the Commonwealth and include them in the 2007-08 budget.

KDLA on the Web

During the 2004-2005 federal fiscal year, KDLA's website was redesigned in order to accommodate federal, state and ADA usability guidelines. The result has been a doubling of the number of hits received: from 1.5 million to 3 million. KDLA's homepage, http://kdla.ky.gov, averaging about 15,000 visitors a month, is the portal to many services whose online presence has been improved for the general public. Two of the most popular are KDLA's online research request forms and the Library Job Hotline.

"Serving Kentucky's Need to Know," the Research Services page (http://kdla.ky.gov/research.htm) contains easy-to-use forms for genealogical research, as well as the Ask a Librarian email reference service. The Kentucky Library Job Hotline (http://kdla.ky.gov/libsupport/jobline.htm), a resource that originated with a telephone answering machine and a mailing list, has become the source for over 300 library-related job postings for would-be librarians across the Commonwealth.

A new addition to the website is the Kentucky Library Directory (http://kdla.ky.gov/directory.htm). This interactive directory allows for Kentucky's citizens to search the state for public, academic, institutional, school and special libraries, as well as libraries & archives organizations and archival collections. Since its debut in May of 2005, the Kentucky Library Directory has already had an estimated 18,000 visitors.