RESTON, Va. – Fairfax County Supervisor Walter L. Alcorn, Fairfax County Public Library (FCPL) leadership and dozens of library supporters were on hand Wednesday, June 8 as the FCPL Board of Trustees accepted a $200,00 gift from the Friends of Reston Regional Library.
“The Friends of the Reston Regional Library are amazing, hard-working community advocates who donate generously." said FCPL Director Jessica Hudson. The group’s funds are raised primarily through used book sales.
The gift will be invested in FCPL’s collection, benefitting cardholders throughout the county.
"At $3 million, county funding for collection building is below the recommended level of 20% of the library's total budget," said Frances Millhouser, chair of the Fairfax County Public Library Board of Trustees.
A majority of the gift will be invested in FCPL’s digital collection, which experienced explosive and sustained growth in recent years. FCPL’s collection budget is unable to meet community demand in large part because more cardholders are checking out digital materials.
In May 2022, just over 51,000 unique users checked out items from the library’s physical collection while the digital collection saw about 46,150 unique users in the same time period. Those digital users are all borrowing from a collection of slightly under 228,000 items while the physical collection contains more than 1.8 million items.
These numbers show the digital collection works hard; digital titles are placed on hold and checked out more frequently than their physical counterparts. Laws around eBook licensing mean digital materials also cost more than their physical counterparts.
FCPL collection services staff plans to invest the gift in ways that benefit the maximum number of cardholders, including purchasing Simultaneous Use eAudio packages, acquiring more perpetual use licenses and expanding the Lucky Day collection, which offers popular titles to cardholders for two weeks and does not permit holds or renewals.
Some areas of FCPL’s physical collection do work as hard as our digital collection; FCPL collection services staff plans to spend a portion of this gift on board books, Read-Alongs and other materials for young readers as well as Spanish-language materials.