The province’s inter-library loan service was abruptly cancelled last week after the announcement of budget cuts to the Southern Ontario Library Service (SOLS). The loan service – which allowed libraries across southern Ontario to share books and between branches – was discontinued by SOLS after a 50 per cent cut to its operating budget.
Libraries across the province were left scrambling to recover books lent out through the service, including at the Region of Waterloo Libraries. Last year, the townships saw some 10,000 circulated through the SOLS service.
“It is with great sadness that I have to inform public libraries in southern Ontario that the SOLS interlibrary loan delivery service will permanently cease to operate,” said Barbara Franchetto, CEO of SOLS, in a statement.
“I know this is very sad and disappointing news but given the enormity of the cut to our operating grant, there is no alternative. Even under our previous grant allocation, it was becoming difficult to sustain the service because of ever-increasing operating costs.”
Not affected by the budget cuts, however, is the Region of Waterloo Library’s (RWL) internal loan system, which allows the ten branches across the region’s four townships share books and materials between the separate branches.
“So if there’s a book that happens to be in Elmira, and you’re in Wellesley, you can still order that item and have it brought to you,” said Michele Hopkins, acting manager for the RWL. “It’s items that we don’t have, that we don’t own in our collections that we would rely on our inter-library loan service to get.”
The SOLS inter-library loan service previously allowed township residents access to the wider catalogues books and resources that exist in the southern part of the province, including the vast and specialized collections available in the province’s cities and universities.
“There’s a number of different reasons why people would use inter-library loans,” explained Hopkins. “For example, we have book clubs, and book clubs need multiple copies… of a certain book, so they typically will use the inter-library service.
“Another example would be people doing research. We can borrow from university collections. Also people doing genealogical research as well is another kind of example,” adds Hopkins. “Families who home school might have broader resource needs so that they can fulfill curriculum requirements for their children. … Or you could just have someone who has very unique reading interests, and our library doesn’t happen to have the items that they’re looking for.”
A similar service operating in Northern Ontario was likewise axed by the province after having its operating budget cut in half. The Ontario Library Service – North (OLS) permitted smaller libraries across Ontario’s more sparsely populated north to share resources between them.
The defunding of SOLS and its northern counterpart OLS was criticized by the Ontario Library Association for disproportionately impacting remote and rural communities.
“Public libraries are essential to people and families across Ontario, providing hundreds of services such as job training, access to broadband in underserviced areas, children’s programming, and supporting lifelong learning,” said the association’s executive director Shelagh Paterson, in an emailed statement.
“SOLS and OLS North provide highly-valued services, like inter-library loan, that give all people in Ontario, especially those in rural and Northern communities, the ability to access resources through their local public library.”
In the last two months, the townships collectively received 800 books through the SOLS service, and sent 690 out to other libraries in southern Ontario.
“This is a service that we’ve been offering, it’s a long-standing service. So it’s definitely a disruption for patrons who use this service,” said Hopkins. “Some patrons it won’t impact because they never have used this service, but for many obviously it will mean that they are unable to get materials delivered to their branch, which is just this beautiful service that we can offer.”
The SOLS inter-library loan service ceased operating on April 26, with the organization’s CEO calling it “truly the end of an era in provincial resource sharing.”
“The end of the SOLS delivery service means that 24 drivers (full time, part time and occasional) will lose their jobs,” said Franchetto. “Last year, they drove almost 1 million kilometers to deliver over 710,000 packages to 153 main library branches across southern Ontario.”
The end of the SOLS service also prevents the township libraries from transferring books between the region’s cities, which maintain their own separate library systems. Township library members may still borrow from the cities of Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge, but must now pick up and drop off the books in person.
Whiles SOLS and the OLS have been discontinued, the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport Michael Tibollo affirmed the province would be “maintaining base funding for our libraries across the province.”
