Lasting Improvements:
LSCA at the Rockford Public Library

Grant funds are like potato chips for us. Once we start using them, it's hard to stop. As we start to rip into this new LSTA bag in front of us, we think about the old LSCA ones we went through over the past 30 years. Was it junk food, or did we get real nutrition to grow strong library service? We asked our legislators to build up the funding for library programs over the years because it is an investment in better library service. Can we proudly show results today from yesterday's investments to justify tomorrow's request for more?

Rockford Public Library implemented programs with more than 35 LSCA grants going back to 1966. Our list is not complete because files were weeded several times in recent years and non-essential records were sent to deep storage. In looking back at the list of grants, every one of them served the needs of the time and provided value to the people who used them. But what impresses most is that many of them still have impact today. They live on in high profile programs and services to which we can point. Let's take a tour.

Outreach

Rockford Public Library's Montague Branch is located in the city's southwest quadrant, an area that meets the usual demographic criteria for special outreach programs. The checkout desk in this branch is not very busy from walk-in customers, yet most of the children and families in the area are very familiar with the library from attending group activities and special events. Montague Branch held 492 events inl997, with total attendance of 1,200 adults and 5,300 children.

We recently opened a branch in another neighborhood needing special programs. The Lewis Lemon Branch operates in a public school that also houses after-school activities in cooperation with the Rockford Park District and the YMCA. The blueprint for strong branch library programming and neighborhood outreach comes from a 1972-73 LSCA grant called Special Project III. A number of regular uses of the Main Library tell us that their acquaintance with the library began in Special Project III programs.

This two-year project developed a wealth of research about what the people in the target neighborhoods wanted of library service and what would bring them to the library. It demonstrated that special programming has intrinsic value to the community that is not related with traditional library use and generating circulation statistics. Two of the staff hired for the project stayed with the library after the grant ended. They rose to positions of influence in Rockford Public Library, and through them the project came to inspire today's outreach activities from the Main Library and branches.

Literacy Support

Every Rockford Public Library branch has a special collection of books for adult beginning readers. Our Extension Services Office meets with literacy tutors to inform them about the available materials and helps them find spaces in our libraries where they can meet with students for tutoring. A librarian makes arrangements for tutors and students who have special needs. This service has received support from a succession of grant programs over 12 years, including the Secretary of State's literacy program and LSCA Title VI as they became available. It is now a regular service supported from local operating funds. But it started in 1985 as a Title I LSCA project.

The central figure in this project was a reading specialist working under direction of and receiving support from Extension Services librarians. This person was responsible for close coordination with the Rockford Area Literacy Council. In addition to selecting materials and placing collections in many locations where tutoring takes place in Winnebago County, this person met individually with every tutor and often also with students to discuss appropriate reading materials. The library service to literacy was a regular lesson in the literacy council's tutor training. Rockford Public Library continues to work closely with the Literacy Council. It hosts the annual presentation of Project Write On, where literacy students read aloud

*Joel Rosenfeld, Executive Director, Rockford Public Library.

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their own written essays and stories to family, friends and well wishers.

Job Center

People have no difficulty locating information about employment and careers in the main library. A special display stands in the middle of the second floor on three large cubes with 55 shelves and a newspaper rack. Even though official statistics show unemployment is currently very low, we see a persistent need for employment and career information where people are under-employed, and there is constant need for job retraining.

Rockford's unemployment was among the highest in the nation in 1982 and 1983, when our library asked for $4,565 to build a useful employment information center. We used the grant to replace outdated career information, but training manuals for equipment and trades used in local industry, and to start subscriptions to national employment newsletters and newspapers from major cities where there may be employment opportunities. Establishing the center gave us the impetus to arrange with the Illinois Job Service to place copies of their job listings on microfiches in our job information center.

Even now, the Illinois Job Service in Rockford and Rock Valley College's programs for displaced workers and small business counseling refer their clients to the library for information. We also emphasize employment information in our Rock River Branch, which is located in the same shopping center as the Illinois Job Service and Rock Valley College's center for employment counseling.

Accessible Library Services

I had a phone call several weeks ago from a library in another county, asking for information about enhancing library service for people with physical disabilities beyond what is required for the Americans with Disabilities Act.

"What led you to call Rockford Public Library?" I wanted to know.

"We are getting information for a patron who is disabled and who is preparing recommendations for another library. He said Rockford Public Library is known for going beyond what is required to accommodate disabilities."

Our work on accessibility began with a $10,000 LSCA grant in 1988. We established an advisory committee of representatives from agencies advocating for people with various impairments to guide the project. We hired a human resources professional to lead discussions and workshops for library staff. Two of the most valuable and lasting benefits of the project were a staff that is more sensitive and knowledgeable about serving special needs and established contacts with agencies and individuals eager to help us improve. Needless to say, Rockford Public Library was well prepared for the Americans with Disabilities Act when it came in 1992. We were emotionally committed to the principles, and we had friends to help us through the preparations.

When the library board approved a plan for the Americans with Disabilities Act, we established a permanent staff committee to monitor compliance on an ongoing basis. The committee reviews progress on established action plans and proposes new ones to deal with changing programs and physical facilities.

Ten years later, we are still using the CCTV magnifier and a wheelchair purchased with grant funds. We maintain regular contact with the agencies advocating for people with special needs. With help from the Agency for the Sight and Hearing Impaired, we assembled an Arkenstone Reading Machine with a combination of purchases and gifts. The agency also provides a trainer to help new users learn the machine. We have leveraged a lot of benefit for a targeted population from that first $10,000 boost.

Sinnissippi Valley (Computer) Information Network

Sinnissippi Valley Information Network operates a Web site for Rockford area community information called SinnFree. It offers dial-in service on 17 telephone lines. Dial-in users have free e-mail accounts and access to local information on the SinnFree server as well as connection to government information Internet sites. It boasts of a unique service connecting users to county property tax and court records. The SinnFree server is averaging more than 1,300 contacts per day. SinnFree was voted Rockford's best Web site in the Rockford Register Star 1998 readers' poll.

This community computer network was established with a 1995 LSCA Title I grant. Its founding mothers and fathers included a hospital librarian, a school librarian, a special librarian in private practice and a doctoral student who had been formerly children's services consultant with the State Library. With their help, Rockford Public Library proposed establishing a "freenet" for North Central Illinois. After the grant was approved, the founders organized as a private nonprofit organization, fulfilling one of the grant objectives.

The technology in common use at the time was bulletin board architecture using "Gopher," "FTP," "Archie," and "Telnet" for Internet access. The project was into the implementation when the Technical Committee decided to construct our bulletin board as a World Wide Web site using the Lynx text browser.

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The project received a great boost when Northern Illinois Library System (NILS) contracted with the Sinnissippi Valley Information Network to provide Internet access and training to its member libraries. Although the service had technical difficulties during that first year due to weak security and malicious hackers, it effectively introduced a number of area library staffs to the Internet.

Today, SinnFree continues to provide Internet access for people with old Commodore, Texas Instrument, Radio Shack and Apple II computers because the Lynx and Pine e-mail programs are functional without modern computing power. At the same time, it provides a modern, graphical, World Wide Web presence for Rockford community information and local organizations.

This project also established Rockford Public Library as a force for computer network development in the Rockford area. In many ways, SinnFree is just beginning to grow because many local nonprofit agencies are just getting started in computers. SVIN's project is helping by taking in used computers, fixing them up, and placing them in schools and nonprofit organizations to help them get online.

Structure and Infrastructure

There is an element of surprise in demonstrating the lasting benefits of LSCA Title I grants funding. There is no surprise that the concrete in Title II grants for construction will still be around after 30 or more years, but we cannot ignore their impact on today's library service. Rockford is justly proud of its 80,000-square-foot main library, which grew with the help from two very important construction grants. The first was LSCA. The second was Illinois, all the way.

Only a section of the cornerstone that was built into an entry wall remains visible of the Carnegie library that was build in 1902 and enveloped by new construction in 1969. The present main library was put together in two phases. First, in 1966, a new building was built adjacent to the Carnegie library. Then the entire library, including all the offices, moved into the new building to make room for the second phase, which reconstructed the Carnegie library to match the new wing. Phase I received help from an LSCA grant. Thirty years later, the same space contains a radically different arrangement of departments, new kinds of media, computers, telecommunications and network wiring undreamed of in the 1960s.

The new arrangement came about in 1986 in a project that we called reconfiguration. It was based on studies that showed the subject department arrangement created extra effort and other inefficiencies for customers and library staff functions. Those studies created a desire to be more flexible in deploying new services and to be able to operate the building with skeleton staffing in the event of funding cuts. The Secretary of State awarded this project a State Library construction grant and extended the liveliness and freshness of the 1966 project.

Converting old catalog records to MARC format is about as exciting as writing out the multiplication tables. Yet the MARC catalog has become very important to a modern library's infrastructure. The State Library wisely made retrospective conversion a priority and awarded Rockford Public Library a Title I grant in 1990. It helped pay for converting bibliographical records for this library and the Northern Illinois Library System materials housed at this library. We can show off our new OPACs and Web access to library catalogs. We can promptly point out locations of titles for interlibrary loan and automated tracking of transactions based on computerized bibliographical records that grew with impetus from LSCA grants like ours that also went to libraries all over the state.

Collection Development

Collection development can also be described as infrastructure. But we can also point to specific achievements in collection development credited to LSCA grants for Major Urban Resource Libraries. As a major urban resource library in the Northern Illinois Library System, Rockford Public Library would confer with system staff to assure that grant funds served regional needs based on interlibrary loan requests from member libraries. Most of the nearly $200,000 received for MURL over a span of 18 years was spent on books most needed by students in Rockford and across the Northern Illinois region.

People who have moved to Rockford from other countries are pleased to find literature in several non-English languages on display in the main library. Selections were rather thin until we decided to devote the 1985 MURL grant largely to foreign languages, particularly Spanish. Now, we routinely buy new titles in Spanish for the main library and the Montague Branch. In 1994, selectors decided to dedicate the MURL grant to self-instruction materials on a variety of topics, but with emphasis on language instruction.

As a resource library, Rockford Public Library is often a pioneer in new information forms. Our newest collections are CD-ROMs for reference and for circulation. The 1997 MURL project built up a decent collection of circulating CD-ROMs from a meager beginning that grew from a private donation and a small investment of general library funds. Finally, we used the 1998 MURL to add to the available reference databases on CD-ROM and online. Some of these

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databases support service for business. Others add to the sources for full-text articles to serve students' research papers and general reference services.

If one knows what to look for, the lasting value of LSCA is clearly seen at Rockford Public Library. A good share of the credit for this belongs with the staff who have chosen well the targets to be served and who have faithfully used the grants for meaningful service developments. The staff of the Illinois State Library and their LSCA advisory committees gave important direction toward lasting impact by emphasizing continuation as a criterion for grant approval.

Rockford Public Library received valuable advice about grant management from a succession of consultants employed by the State Library. We particularly wish to thank Amy Kellerstrass, who has been a steady presence in the grants program and who has given us encouragement and patience when we need it. Illinois is foremost among the states in using LSCA to improve library service out in the libraries across the state and using state funds for salaries in the library development office. In this, library service was well served by the leadership in the Office of Secretary who put the needs of the public first.

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