WA students, teachers and educators have been denied access to valuable materials accessible through the Inter Library Loan Service after the state government cut items earlier this year.
The $1.7 million dollar cut to the State Library of Western Australia, which affected public library book stock and delivery services, came from the 2018/19 state budget.
The service which shares books, audio-visual materials and magazines among 232 public libraries in Western Australia had junior and young adult books, DVDs and audio books removed, along with any items – both fiction and non-fiction – that were less than a year old at both metropolitan and regional libraries.
Shire of Collie information services manager Alison Kidman said the cuts to the service would create a barrier between children and reading.
“There’s no junior items that can be inter-library loaned anymore at all,” she said.
“When children are learning to read often they will get fixated on a particular series and they’re at a fragile age where they’re just learning to read. They don’t need any barrier that stops them.”
Culture and the Arts Minister David Templeman said the State Library was working with public libraries to encourage the purchase of items to satisfy a request, with the average cost of purchasing and supplying a new book to a public library being half that of an inter library loan at approximately $35 per item.
Shadow Minister for Culture and the Arts Tony Krsticevic said telling local libraries they could simply purchase materials they couldn’t loan was unrealistic and shifted the cost burden.
Mr Kidman said regional libraries didn’t have big budgets when it came to buying new materials.
“A lot of the bigger libraries have a very large local stock budget and libraries in country areas usually don’t,” she said.
“We don’t have a bottomless pit of money to go out and buy stuff people are in need of, but at the same time we don’t want to put off any child.
“If you’re living in a metropolitan area and your library doesn’t have something there would be public transport for you to get to another library that might have it but it’s more difficult getting to other libraries in the country if you don’t drive or own a car.”
The State Library of WA website said exceptions would be made for library members with special needs; including people with disabilities, people who are housebound, people from linguistically diverse backgrounds and for small non-metropolitan libraries serving less than 1000 people, such as Darkan.
