Like many members of the community, when I heard that SBPL was leaving the Black Gold Library Cooperative, I had questions. What did this mean? And was it really the right direction for our community?
As the executive director of the nonprofit organization What is Love, working to end violence against women and girls through relationship education — specifically helping young people learn about healthy relationships — I’ve worked with Santa Barbara Public Library staff on many programs over the years, so I went straight to the source to ask what was going on. And staff were happy to explain the situation in detail.
Why did SBPL decide to leave Black Gold? SBPL staff had brought lots of ideas for improving the efficiency of services, particularly the sharing of physical library materials, over the years. The existing catalog system and mechanism for sharing materials had weaknesses. It worked well to provide access to specialty items that would only be used by a limited number of people, and older, out-of-print items that a library may have had at one point but were lost or damaged and no longer available at a local branch. But for the majority of new, in-demand items, the system of delivery and shipment was a labor-intensive process that just shipped items around unnecessarily. Splintering of new jurisdictions in Santa Barbara County, first with Goleta and now with Carpinteria, meant that books to these jurisdictions were passed between more hands, increasing workload and wait times.