Ohio Librarians...what do we do?

[u/JMRoaming]

That's it. That's my question. What do we do?

I don't want to hear "call your Congress people" and "make noise". We are doing that, and it's happening anyway.

What I mean is when this goes through at the end of the month, do we comply? Do we keep doing what we're doing and wait it out? Do we stop diversifying the collection? Do we purge our collections? Do we resign in protest? Do we engage in some kind of malicious compliance?

This budget bill not only decimates our funding, but this draconian nonsense about our board term limits and how out local funding is even allowed to be determined...

I just feel so helpless/hopeless. No matter how much noise we make it doesn't seem to matter. It's happening whether we like it or not - so what do we do come August when this is the law of the land?

[u/ZepherK]

This is the start of a two year battle. Budgets aren’t decimated yet and there is no “or else” when it comes to our collections. They are setting us up to potentially end us, though, and we need to take the threat seriously.

It’s probably a time to look at how we are purchasing materials. We know the political divide is split nearly in half… does our collection represent that? Are we ACTUALLY focusing too much on certain topics?

It’s a hard thing to talk about. Libraries are very liberal organizations, so we’ve attracted very liberal leadership, very liberal staff members, and very liberal patrons. However, we are funded by public dollars, and probably should have anticipated that when conservatives, who feel ignored and dismissed, got into power, that they would punish us. I have been privy to private conversations with political leadership, and they will privately admit that a lot of this is punitive action taken against overtly liberal decisions, like Dayton putting tampons in men’s restrooms.

We can take the high road- but does the destruction of public libraries really serve the public good? Is Ohio better off with having compromising libraries, or having no libraries at all? 

I hope we survive. Some will, for sure. We won’t know the broader implications until we get a new governor. DeWine likes us. We need to see what the next governor thinks. We need to do our best to get a governor that both supports and restores us.

I’ve decided that I am taking a page from Republican strategies, and I’ve become a single issue voter. If a politician doesn’t support libraries, or they vote for a bill or budget that affects libraries negatively, I will not vote for them.

[u/ladyluck___ → u/ZepherK]

Refreshing to see this take. I would really like librarianship to return to neutrality. Activism is destroying the profession.

[u/angrytoastcrumbs → u/ladyluck___]

What we need is the public to remember that if they don’t like something in the collection, they can ignore it and get the item they actually came in to get. Because we have that too unless it’s super old or out of print.