Isn’t 0.4% of a gigantic city’s budget for just library services really fuckin expensive?
No. You’re talking about something on the order of $3-5 / resident / year. That’s significantly less than residents spend on Netflix - $192 / resident / year - by comparison. And they get access to physical space and materials, rather than having to source their own hardware to access the service.
I did a quick search and the library service in England costs 840 million per year for an entire country.
Or roughly $12/resident/year. Admittedly, England has also been cutting deeply into their social services budgets, with library spending falling by over a quarter over the last decade. The UK has lost over a fifth of its public libraries during this time and continues to cut deeper and deeper into these budgets. So its per-capita cheap, but also a popular target for enormous budget cuts.
Compare that to the city’s police budgets and you’ll find a yawning gap that’s only growing larger with time.
Bloody hell are you a politician?! 😂 I’ve asked two simple questions about the post you shared and your response is a) downvote then b) dodge the question
It’s about a 13% cut in funding. Between the aprox. 207 libraries it cuts almost 300k from each leaving about 1.9 million per branch. These numbers are inflated in straight division like that because some of the libraries are not normal libraries, but research libraries which would have higher budgets so maybe around 1 - 1.2 million per regular branch. If you think that sounds like a lot because 1.2 million sounds like a big number, you’ve obviously never run a business.
I’m not sure this is the big gotcha you think it is. To serve a large population in a big relatively small area, you can easily achieve your goals with fewer, larger locations. This will allow a greater selection per location, which reduces the odds you will have to wait for the desired product to be shipped in. Moreover, land isn’t cheap in New York, whereas it may well be in smaller locales in England. Either way, a reasonable metric is cost per capita to provide services for a region, and England is only about 2/3 as expensive as New York. I suspect the cost of living is higher in New York than England, and it will certainly have an impact of the relative budgets of the two organizations. And we haven’t talked about the climate control requirements in England vs. New York because, frankly, I’m not too clear about the relative climate differences to say whether that’s a significant issue in the first place.
It’s a gigantic library, #1 in the world by visitors by a lot, #4 by number of books, and they’re doing that in NYC in buildings that look like this and a bunch of the books are 600 years old or have George Washington’s handwriting on them, so it’s real fucking expensive.
It seems like a huge amount to me. 431 million dollars?
I like parks and public libraries, they enrich society for everyone. I just would have thought the the library’s budget would be less of the total budget.
Devil’s advocate -
Isn’t 0.4% of a gigantic city’s budget for just library services really fuckin expensive?
Do they mean that their budget’s been cut by 50+ million?
No. You’re talking about something on the order of $3-5 / resident / year. That’s significantly less than residents spend on Netflix - $192 / resident / year - by comparison. And they get access to physical space and materials, rather than having to source their own hardware to access the service.
If there’s 20 million NY residents and the budget is 435 million then that’s $21.75 per resident.
Fair enough. Still incredibly cheap.
I was talking about the actual figures, which I couldn’t find. Did they have their budget cut by 50+ million?
I did a quick search and the library service in England costs 840 million per year for an entire country.
Just wondering what the budget is for a city like that, and why
Edit - apparently there are around 3500 libraries in England, and the budget is twice that of New York, who have approximately 250 libraries
Dunno what people aren’t understanding what I’m asking here 😂
Or roughly $12/resident/year. Admittedly, England has also been cutting deeply into their social services budgets, with library spending falling by over a quarter over the last decade. The UK has lost over a fifth of its public libraries during this time and continues to cut deeper and deeper into these budgets. So its per-capita cheap, but also a popular target for enormous budget cuts.
Compare that to the city’s police budgets and you’ll find a yawning gap that’s only growing larger with time.
Bloody hell are you a politician?! 😂 I’ve asked two simple questions about the post you shared and your response is a) downvote then b) dodge the question
It’s about a 13% cut in funding. Between the aprox. 207 libraries it cuts almost 300k from each leaving about 1.9 million per branch. These numbers are inflated in straight division like that because some of the libraries are not normal libraries, but research libraries which would have higher budgets so maybe around 1 - 1.2 million per regular branch. If you think that sounds like a lot because 1.2 million sounds like a big number, you’ve obviously never run a business.
I’m not sure this is the big gotcha you think it is. To serve a large population in a big relatively small area, you can easily achieve your goals with fewer, larger locations. This will allow a greater selection per location, which reduces the odds you will have to wait for the desired product to be shipped in. Moreover, land isn’t cheap in New York, whereas it may well be in smaller locales in England. Either way, a reasonable metric is cost per capita to provide services for a region, and England is only about 2/3 as expensive as New York. I suspect the cost of living is higher in New York than England, and it will certainly have an impact of the relative budgets of the two organizations. And we haven’t talked about the climate control requirements in England vs. New York because, frankly, I’m not too clear about the relative climate differences to say whether that’s a significant issue in the first place.
It’s a gigantic library, #1 in the world by visitors by a lot, #4 by number of books, and they’re doing that in NYC in buildings that look like this and a bunch of the books are 600 years old or have George Washington’s handwriting on them, so it’s real fucking expensive.
It seems like a huge amount to me. 431 million dollars? I like parks and public libraries, they enrich society for everyone. I just would have thought the the library’s budget would be less of the total budget.