Vote Yes for Libraries: A Guide to Winning Ballot Measure Campaigns for Library Funding

Citation

Hendry, J.D. (2002), "Vote Yes for Libraries: A Guide to Winning Ballot Measure Campaigns for Library Funding", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 5, pp. 268-269. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.5.268.2

This book is about winning. Not my assessment but the title of the Preface. And a fair summary of the very positive and direct attitude to the propagation of public libraries, Santa Cruz, in California, in the mid 1990s.

Much of this relates the experiences of Santa Cruz public libraries in campaigning for a local tax increase for the public library. First, in 1994, when the campaigners lost by a substantial margin, 17 per cent of the vote. This campaign, which the director of the libraries service, Anne Turner related, was run on similar lines to that of Fresno (California County), 1988. Both ran a shoe‐string effort because they were sure that voters would react negatively to a “political”, slick campaign that looked as if serious money was being spent on a campaign. Both lost. However, in 1996 Santa Cruz tried again, as did Fresno in 1998. This time with carefully constructed campaigns and which targeted “yes” voters based on professional polling and with strategy and tactics developed with the help of campaign consultants. This time both won. Each achieved more than the two thirds of the vote required by the State of California’s “super majority” law. Needless to say, this lively and enervating book rejects the shoestring and grass roots approach to campaigning. Simply, it does not work.

There are 14 chapters, with titles such as “Getting it organised and making it official”; “Adding up and counting backward”; “The Fund raising plan”; “Ask, ask and ask again”; “The Opposition”; “And if you lose”.

Perhaps librarians in the UK, and indeed in many places beyond the USA and its ethos, may feel that such conduct and campaigning should have nothing to do with local government, and public libraries in particular. Many even find the whole process somewhat distasteful. Yet when I review on one hand the plight of Britain’s public libraries over much of the last 20 years, and on the other, the consistently high level of public support and positive sentiment for local libraries – far beyond the vast majority of other local government public services – I now wish that we could have the opportunity to by‐pass the local politicians, many of whom cynically blame central government for cuts in local library services. This despite the fact that the amount spent on these libraries, in relation to many other areas of public services, is almost marginal. If library chiefs in Britain could take their case directly to the people, and campaign in a well structured way, I for one believe that they would be consistently successful.

And a final thought. What happens in the USA tends, more often than not, to follow in Britain a few years later. Supermarkets and shopping malls are two examples. Perhaps libraries administered by public trusts, operating at arm’s length from local government and with a cross‐section of their local community represented on their board of management, may be the future. I rather think that for public libraries and other cultural services to escape from the dead hand and cronyism of local government while still remaining a public service is an increasingly attractive proposition. Intrigued? You could start off by reading Vote Yes for Libraries.