The Olympia Library Board is (heading to being) dead. Long live the Olympia Library Board.

I sat in on the Olympia City Council's General Goverment Committee meeting this afternoon at the library. After a broad discussion of our library, the committee (Joe Heyer, TJ Johnson and Jeff Kingsbury) decided to recommend to the city council to end the library board, which hasn't been active in four years. And, when it was active, it was apparently a strange creation.

While folks on the board wanted to be involved in some way in terms of influencing the services provided at the library, and there was a mandate to comment on services to the council, the council's only role was in terms of the library building itself. That relationship, it seems, can be better served by direct contact from the library staff to city Public Works staff and the council.

Also, the role of a library board, in its most broad sense of citizen input into the library, could more effectivly be served by a body underneath the organization of the Timberland Regional Library. The city owns the building, but the TRL runs it.

There already is a very healthy and active Friends of the Olympia Library which could serve this role (and from what I heard, already do in a way), but they are not exactly the most easy to get involved with group. They meet at 10a on Tuesdays, for example.

Jodi Reng suggested the idea of a "Friends auxilary," that would meet at a more convenient time and try to accomplish many of the goals that folks would want to see in a city-sponsored library board. That was a very good suggestion, I thought.

One last note, Ms. Reng also pointed out that for every dollar collected in the city limits of Olympia, $1.87 goes into services (etc...) in the Olympia Library. This is because Oly's library serves as a regional hub for folks coming in from the county and other towns.

Which, of course, is a reason we need a bigger library, and why maybe, we should see if there is some other help out there for us to build it.