Background:
Mr. Chairman and colleagues, the Fairfax County Public Library operates 23 library locations with more than 500,000 active cardholders who utilize a collection of approximately two million items including books, eBooks, and audiobooks. Library users visit local branches, or the digital library collection, to pick out items to meet their educational and recreational needs. Many times they place items on hold because the titles they want have a waiting list. For popular items, wait times can be weeks, months, and in some instances, longer than a year.

The Library continues to be one of the most popular services provided by the county and our Library branches are a vital hub of community information. The Fairfax Library Foundation and Friends of the Library groups continue to provide supplemental support to the collection budget but are not in place to supplant the support from the county. We continue to face issues with meeting the demand for library materials even with the digital formats. Funding for the collection budget has not been robust enough to meet the needs of our residents. With increased demand for popular and new materials, the Library must balance a proper allocation of limited resources for those items with the needs for materials in support of K-12 students, and ensuring that materials are updated, available in print, large print, audio and digital copies and in multiple languages. Additional funds to the collection budget will ensure that we are providing the resources our community demands from our Library and decrease the wait times so that people can access those resources in a timely fashion.

Motion:
Therefore Mr. Chairman, I am putting forward a one-time funding consideration item, to provide an additional $500,000 to the library’s book collection budget.