Gov. Kristi Noem presents her annual budget address to lawmakers in the South Dakota State Capitol on Dec. 3, 2024. Behind her, from left, are House Speaker nominee Jon Hansen and Lt. Gov. Larry Rhoden. (Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight)
John Hult, South Dakota Searchlight
A cut to the South Dakota State Library’s budget would be devastating to local libraries and the citizens who rely on them – including homeschool families – local librarians and library advocates say.
Republican Gov. Kristi Noem proposed a $1 million cut to the State Library during her budget address on Dec. 3, among other cuts in response to the depletion of federal pandemic relief funding and declining sales tax revenue.
Trimming the State Library’s budget would eliminate the vast majority of funding for the organization, which is an arm of the state Department of Education. The library currently has 21 employees; the budget cut would lay off a dozen of them, according to the governor’s proposal.
Nancy Van Der Weide, spokesperson for the department, said via email that the cuts will reduce database access and interlibrary loan support.
The office “will continue to support South Dakota Accessible Library Services (Braille and Talking Books) and professional development programming for public and school libraries” with the remaining nine employees, she wrote.
Seven State Library employees work in accessibility services. The budget cut would keep them but leave just two people to handle everything else. Opponents doubt the state will be able to afford to continue training or professional development if only two people remain on staff to service the entire state.
One program, for example, allows librarians and staff to earn a certificate of public library management through a four-year course whose students meet once a month all year and meet in-person for a full week of training once a year. Van Der Weide did not respond to a message asking if that program specifically would remain if Noem’s proposal goes through.
Elizabeth Fox, president of the South Dakota Library Association and librarian for the H.M. Briggs Library at South Dakota State University, cannot envision the state offering anything that intensive with a dozen fewer people.
“With two people, they cannot do the training,” Fox said.
Fox and others in the library community say Noem’s proposal endangers public access to information and could leave local librarians floundering as they work to serve their communities without an adequately funded State Library to guide them.
“I’d say it would be like chopping them off at the knees, but it’s not even that,” said Jane Norling, vice president of the State Library Board and director of the Beresford Public Library. “It’s chopping off at the head, because three-fourths of the staff will be gone.”
Librarians: State Library benefits all South Dakotans
The state Library Association recently updated its homepage with a link to talking points on how to advocate for the State Library.
Librarians are concerned not just by the proposed $1 million state funding cut, but by the loss of another $1.3 million in grant funding through the federal Institute for Museum and Library Sciences. States are expected to match their grant funding at a 34% rate. Noem’s proposed budget wouldn’t leave enough money to do that, and notes that the budget cuts include a $1.3 million loss of federal funding.
The State Library uses grants to pay for a wide range of educational databases and resources like study guides and practice tests for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
Other databases accessible through the State Library include ancestry.com and Swank K-12 Streaming, which allows schools to stream films for educational purposes without paying licensing fees.
“Without this statewide subscription, schools would need to pursue individual licenses in order to legally stream movies,” Doris Ann Mertz, library coordinator at Custer School District, wrote in an email to Searchlight. “This is so cost-prohibitive.”
Norling noted that homeschooling families in the Beresford area rely heavily on local libraries, ordering books through interlibrary loans and using the databases funded by the State Library.
“We do borrow books for them, so that’s an impact to them,” Norling said.
The State Library offers a courier service for interlibrary loan materials.
The professionally curated databases and information sources like World Book Encyclopedia for general information or PubMed for scholarly publications are important for students and the public, Fox said.
There are other options like Wikipedia or Google Scholar, the library association president said, but those free resources can be manipulated and don’t have the reliability of an encyclopedia. Anyone can edit Wikipedia entries, she said, and Google Scholar ingests scientific research without filtering out questionably sourced materials.
It’s unclear what database resources might remain if the State Library were to be stripped to a bare bones budget. A single three-year state contract with a company called ProQuest that pays for citizen access to databases like the ProQuest Research Library, U.S. Newstream and Heritage Quest has a $512,000 price tag.
Van Der Weide did not reply to a question asking her to elaborate on what database resources would remain available if Noem’s cut takes effect.
Training, coordination
Custer County Librarian Sarah Myers earned her public library certificate through the State Library’s Public Library Training Institute. Myers said the four-year training offered her the kind of education that would otherwise require a master’s degree.
No school in South Dakota offers an accredited master’s in library science degree, according to the American Library Association’s database of accredited programs.
Myers sees the opportunity for librarians like her to train without moving out of state, paying tuition and leaving their local libraries in the process as invaluable to a state where few counties or cities can afford to attract a degreed librarian.
“Librarians need training. They need to know how to do their jobs,” Myers said. “One way to get that is to get a master’s in library science, but that’s not always affordable to everyone.”
The national association’s president told Searchlight that state librarians – all 50 states have one – coordinate a host of services for local libraries, and do so with an eye to meeting local needs.
Beresford’s Norling and others pointed out that the State Library coordinates summer reading programs and trains librarians as each summer approaches. American Library Association President Cindy Hohl said that’s a common role for state libraries.
Beyond state-level help with program set-up, there are nationwide summer reading resources available each year, and local librarians connect with them through their state libraries.
“Educators are always interested in how we can decrease the summer slide,” Hohl said, referring to the tendency of kids to lose ground in literacy in the summer months if they aren’t reading.
Hohl said state libraries are in the best position to make sure citizens have access to the most valuable information to local audiences, through database subscriptions or otherwise offering guidance to locals on content curation.
“Whether it’s helping a small business owner research the market or helping our homeschool parents find resources that are designed for children and their special learning needs, that’s what a state library does,” Hohl said.
Cut could present difficulties for digital content
The State Library acts as facilitator for a consortium of local libraries that offer e-books and other materials through an app called Libby.
Local libraries pay a population-based fee to join the “South Dakota Titles To Go” consortium, with the state librarian facilitating the program and serving as the contact point for OverDrive, the company that owns Libby.
That’s a big concern for Ashia Gustafson, director of the Brookings Public Library. Libby has grown incredibly popular since 2020, she said.
“It got a lot of people through the pandemic, because we couldn’t physically be open,” Gustafson said.
Fox, who works across town at SDSU, suspects the Libby consortium will ultimately survive, but she also expects it’ll take a few messy years for the group to find its bearings without a state-level coordinator.
“The State Library has the expertise to negotiate contracts and to run the sort of behind-the-scenes, techie stuff that many of the librarians involved in this don’t have that expertise in,” Fox said.
Tom Nelson, president of the State Library Board and a former legislator, told South Dakota Searchlight “there’s going to be a fight, or at least a very, very good discussion” on the State Library cut.
The personnel at the library now do more for the state than most citizens realize, he said.
“Each one of those employees has a face, name and a job to do,” Nelson said. “I just think that the people who made these recommendations to the governor either didn’t do the research, or they ignored it.”