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Sonoma County, a dynamic county combining agriculture and industry, city and country, creating unique and varied challenges for its citizens join us as we present some of the information and services provided by the county of Sonoma to help us as we move into the 21st century. Welcome

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to Sonoma County in the 90s with your host, Dana Enrico and Gina Lash. Hello, I'm Dana d'Errico and welcome to Sonoma County in the nineties. Today we have a great show to present and we're going to talk about the Sonoma County Library and all of the

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great things that are going on there. There's all kinds of programs and I know that you'll enjoy listening to it. So let me introduce my guests, Roger Pearson, director of the Sonoma County Library, is here to join us and tell us all about those great programs.

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That's great. Roger First though, I want my viewers to know all about you. Okay, I don't claim to be a native Californian. I've only been here about a year and a half and I moved here from Illinois where I grew up and I'm enjoying both working

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and living in California because I've learned already that it's almost a whole country in terms of size, cultural diversity, population, politics and it's very fun and very interesting to be living here and working at the library, which is undergoing immense change during the Internet era. So

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it's good to be here and I enjoy all aspects of my job, including this part of it being on tv and talking about the library. Oh, that's great. Well, it's great to have you here today? It's been a little bit difficult to get you here. You're

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a very busy man. Um What are some of the strengths of our Sonoma County library today? Well I think one of the major strengths is that we have several very good sized library facilities spread throughout the county. They are very well distributed. Uh we have very

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good book collections in all of them and compared to other areas of the country and California, we do have quite a few branches, we have about 13 facilities overall our our hours are quite good. Most of the facilities are open a little more than 50 hours

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a week and we are open seven days a week. Not every branch, but you can get to a library somewhere every day. The central library is open on sunday 2 to 6. Excuse me, let me to interrupt. The Central library is the downtown santa rosa library.

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Thank you for clarifying that. Central Healdsburg. Er Central accidental central library in downtown santa rosa is Open on Sunday 2-6 and it's not a secret because a lot of people are in there every Sunday, they know it. What do you have an address? Is it just

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for third in east ST just third in the street and that's the main branch. That's correct. Which would be you know like the main resource library for the whole system when people can't get a question answered at one of the branches with a smaller collection. Uh

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and a smaller staff, they will refer it on to the central library. I c can you tell me you have the mobile library's two. Are they included in the 13 or does that is that non existent now? Yes and no. Yes. We operated our own book

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mobile up until just about a year ago. We had one book mobile that was serving uh the one day a week and it was pretty much parked in Windsor near the town hall serving the town of Windsor. Then the good news was we were able to

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open up a full branch in Windsor last november. And because our bookmobile was about 25 years old and getting very tired, we did sell the book mobile. However, getting back to the book mobile again we do contract with the Mendocino County Library to provide bookmobile service

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to two communities way up on the coast Stewarts point. And uh thank you. See you already knew that. Yeah, I'm an avid reader, that's one of my greatest pastimes is to have a good book and to read. I love to read. One of the last things

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that I have to do to really survey the entire community is get up to Stewart's point and see Ranch next Wednesday. Looking forward to it. Why is it next Wednesday is there something important going on with the library system? No I've just been trying to get

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together with the director of the Mendocino County Library who administers this service for us to go up and see the bookmobile in action. Okay. You're not going to see heavy population of that way. I don't think fairly remote, but it is beautiful. So you'll enjoy your

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day once again. Another good part of my job. Yeah, that's great. What are some of the weaknesses of our library today? I think I really don't like to concentrate on bricks and mortar, but most of our facilities are getting to be 20 and 30 years old.

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They were all, most of the branches were built around 2025 years ago and due to, you know, problems with the Property tax that California is well known for Proposition 13 and everything. We really haven't been able to maintain the buildings as well as we would like

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to. And if you go in the central library in downtown Santa Rosa, you'll notice that the carpet there has really got duct tape on it and holes in the carpet and I don't want to concentrate on the negative. The good news is the city of Santa

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Rosa has provided funds to re carpet that building. But uh, that's kind of the main problem, you know, just roofs and bricks and mortar, things are getting uh maintenance of the structures. Yeah. Also our materials budget, our book budget has not been up to snuff because

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we have add a couple of facilities in the last five years. The rink and valley branch in santa rosa and the Windsor branch. But the tax rate really hasn't gone up. In other words, some people think you add a couple of facilities so the tax rate

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goes up a little bit to support them. Uh Unfortunately that isn't the case and that just means that our existing funds for books are spread among more branches, which means the soup gets a little thinner for everybody in a way and that's a little bit of

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a problem. And we're working on that. Uh also we need to do some staff shifting because we've been geared in the past more to providing books and information and programming. And now we're having to concentrate more on providing and maintaining computers and teaching people how to

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use computers. So we're still in the shifting process of trying to get more uh what we call techie staff or train existing staff to do more techy duties. So that's kind of a problem. We're working with right now as well. All the old file index cards,

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that doesn't exist anymore. We're all going there going to be computerized. You can still see a few antique ones around there. But for all practical purposes, the card catalog is gone. In fact that the friends of the santa rosa library book sale at the fairgrounds a

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few months ago, we sold two of the last card catalog cabinets by sealed bid. Oh my, they are great for, you know, hobbyist, you know, baseball cards, cassettes, things like that, recipes, recipes. I use one for recipes. I have one that there's all kinds of uses.

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I have one, I use it for odds and ends and junk helps keep my house cleaner. That's great. Um, what are some of the greatest opportunities facing the Sonoma County Library in the near future? I think you know the internet as I indicated, we're really having

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to switch the way that we have organized the library. We used to be concentrating more on, You know providing books and printed material that people would come into the library to get. And now a lot of people are getting information from the library without coming in

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at all. Well you always used to be able to do that on the telephone and through the facts. But now people can dial in to our computer database or by biographic data base. I have a combination. It sounds like a locker combination or something. It's 24-7365.

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And that means you can dial into our computer and our library home page 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And a few moments earlier I told you most of our branches are open about 50 hours. The good news is the

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Internet branches open all the time and you can get a lot of information off of, you know, our library homepage. You can actually get magazine articles through our internet branch or our home page in the middle of the night? You know, if you're up doing a

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report. So do you have the whole magazine is on on the internet and then you just, you search through that magazine. That's correct. What about books? We haven't gotten that far yet and I don't doubt that it will be here. You know, someday you will be

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able to go to the beach on your summer vacation and instead of reading a paperback book, you'll be able to put a laptop, computer, you know, on your stomach in the hammock and you may be able to read war and peace that way we're not there

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yet technologically. It's possible. I mean with scanners now it's very easy to scan anything, you know, the piece of paper I have here, war and peace catcher in the Rye or Harry the Dirty Dog. And I anticipate that you'll be able to read whole books Probably.

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I keep talking about the year 2001 because of the old movie Space Odyssey. And I think we're going to see a lot of big changes by 2001 and that may be one due to modern technology. I see in my mind when you said the Internet, I

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was assuming that you could just, there were already some of the great classics or the more popular like the 10 best sellers could be on there. But what is that going to do to If we have this access, what will that do to the book industry

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and for writers and etc? Is that how how does that work? A lot of interesting things are happening right now. We are very preoccupied with the fact that our book checkouts are declining one of our key output measures. The way we evaluate our library services has

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always been, how many books did we check out in the last year or so? We have checked out about 2.5 million Books per year. And that has been declining by about two or 3% a year. And we're sitting around saying, are we doing something wrong? What

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do we need to fix? Is this normal? And we know for example that a lot of people are going to these big new mega bookstores, you know the borders, the Barnes and nobles that are popping up all over the country. We also wonder how much information

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people are getting on the internet without having to come in anymore. So, uh, we have to learn to, you know, manage the internet. You know, it's a fantastic resource and we want to be part of it. And I think some of our jobs will be uh

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to in a sense, catalog the internet. Someone said, oh uh, recently that using the internet is very confusing for a lot of people. And it would be comparable to walking into a public library that didn't have a catalog at all card catalog, computer catalog and just

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having to you know, walk up and down the aisles until you found what you wanted. Which could take you days. And so we are taking on that task of organizing and cataloging it. It seems that some of the threats today you've mentioned here and that could

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be the internet to the library due to the decline in the check out of the books. Is our society changing? Also are less people reading? Are they going to the movies? Are they have has there been any research on that? I like to speculate on that

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for people that think that people are reading less. I don't think they are. I think they may not be sitting down and reading you know, novels or the classics the way they did in the past. Although librarians and teachers never felt people were doing that enough.

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But you take the computer itself. A lot of people say that the computer is keeping people from reading. But if you go to the library or any of the big bookstores of the magazine stores, it is just incredible how much reading material has been generated on

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computers alone. I went to one of the big stores recently and I counted 200 magazine titles and uh I counted the number of shelves of computer books, you know the dummy series. Uh And also there's a complete Idiot's guide to computers and the uh dos for

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dummies, things like that. These books are just proliferating immensely. And now I think reading is very healthy. People have been worried about the radio, you know, damaging reading. I mean way back in the 1920s, parents were probably telling their kids don't listen to the radio, you

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know, start reading and then you know, it was the TV and then they said the tv would kill the movies and it seems like movies are sprouting up like, you know, computer magazines there now, just, you know, movie theaters all over the place. So I think

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you know, these perceived threats that reading is in decline are not true. I just think the reading is changing. I love your outlook. That is such a great slant on it that it's just everything just works and it's not going to kill anything because I think

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reading is a wonderful thing. What are some of the greatest accomplishments that you've seen in the nineties with the library in the Sonoma County Sonoma County Library? I'm glad you asked it that way. It won't look like I'm bragging because I've only been here a year

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and a half and it won't look like I'm saying I did all of this will hold the thought because we have to take a break just for a few minutes. Stay tuned, we'll be right back and we'll pick up with the library surprisingly over a lifetime.

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Your child is in less danger being out in the water than out in the sun One out of five Americans develop skin cancer. Don't let your child be the one. Welcome back to Sonoma County in the nineties. I'm here with Roger, person director of the Sonoma

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County Library robert. Tell us about those great accomplishments that the library has performed in the nineties. Some of the great accomplishments of the 90 happened before I got here. So I can't take much credit. As I indicated earlier. I've only been here about a year and

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a half. And going back to the early nineties, seven years ago in 1989 the library introduced the integrated automated library system and that was the one that put all of the books on the computer catalog. And we got rid of the card catalog. That was just

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an immense improvement because number one, that old card catalog was very labor intensive to type the cards and file the cards and pull the cards. And another thing, the card catalog was just in one place in the library and everybody had to go to one place.

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Now, you notice in libraries that we have catalog terminals throughout the library. If you're working in one end, you don't have to run back. That's what we call multiple simultaneous access. That means that many people can be using the very same catalog drawer at the same

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time. And when you add to it, the fact that now people can dial in with their computer into the catalog from remote locations from, you know, Occidental and Cloverdale and in the middle of the night, you know, that was an enormous achievement. It's just made the

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library far more accessible and that is from a home computer, business school, whatever all you need is a computer with a modem and you can find out what's in the library and you can also indicate to get a lot of hard data. That was a major

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accomplishment. Another major accomplishment, I think uh kind of a negative one away in a way, we were losing a lot of books that were walking out the door because they weren't being checked out. And we did install a materials detection system, We don't like to call

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it a theft detection system. We like to be more positive. It's a detection system at all of our branches and that's helped reduce losses a lot that takes us back to the computerized library system, which also checks the books out with a bar code and a

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wand or a scanner, just like the supermarkets do do. So that computer system has just had immense, you know, impact on all of our operations in our cataloging department, our public service department, maybe you're gonna ask me later, what are we going to do next. But

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that even ties into our ability now to install a self checkout system. And people at the Central library later this year, we'll be able to check out their own materials and this will free the staff up to answer questions, help people, you know, find their way

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around the library, answer the phone and that sort of thing. Also now it's the internet. Uh we had the internet probably earlier than most libraries available. That was text based only and that happened probably about four years ago. And that opened up, you know, the library

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world of Sonoma County to the rest of the information world. More recently, we have been introducing in our libraries graphic access to the internet, which is good and bad. You know, you can see the moon rover or whatever it is out there now on your pc.

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But a lot of parents are concerned because they also think that their Children will be seeing what they find to be objectionable material on the internet. And so that's making our job very difficult to trying to keep the entire, you know world of information and knowledge

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open and still, you know, work with parents that they were concerned that they will be finding what they don't think is proper politically correct. That would be a very tough job. I'm glad to see that you don't feel that the internet is threatening books and reading

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books and the use of the library. It sounds like it's going to enhance it in many ways. We just need to learn to change. Where does the library get its funds to do these changes to make the changes? That's the good news and the bad news

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on that. We get it from property taxes, 80% of our income comes from property taxes. In a way that's good news. It's a fairly stable, but it also means, you know, when there are drops in the economy and property values, you know, drop or construction, you

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know, lags or something like that that are funding doesn't keep up. And we've pretty much been going through a period like that the last few years. Uh, we've had pretty much what we call maintenance budgets. I read in the paper yesterday, property taxes are going up,

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which may be property owners think it's bad news. But from the point of view of operating the library, we think that's good news. Something's going on in sacramento right now. The assembly and the Senate, they are talking about, well, they've actually gotten to the governor's desk

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a bill that would allow libraries to have a retail sales tax, which might allow us to spread our revenue base out a little bit so that we wouldn't be too dependent on the property tax and for worried property owners that would have to be passed by

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a two thirds vote of the Sonoma County voters. In other words, it's not the kind of thing where if they pass it tomorrow, we'll have a retail sales tax, but that's where most of it comes from to answer another question, do we get much of our

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revenue from fines? Not much. Probably 5% of our budget comes from those fines. How is a branch site determined? Is it by the use, is it by the population? Because that could vary. Maybe one area doesn't use the library where as another will, it's pretty much

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determined by the expressed needs of the incorporated communities. In other words Sebastopol, you know, has to say we want a library or you know Granville has to, you know, indicate to the library commission that they needed library. We operate under a joint powers agreement which was

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established in I think it was in 1970 for and the original members of that agreement were the basic, you know, established communities in Sonoma County like Sebastopol and Sonoma and Petaluma in our arrangement, the communities that want a library have to provide a building. So in

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a way it could have nothing to do with planning. You know, if a new community emerges like Windsor where they provide the building and then Sonoma County will provide the library. That's right. That's exactly what happened when Windsor started growing, the people there, you know didn't

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want to travel to Healdsburg, they didn't want to travel to santa rosa. They did incorporate as a town and then they provided a building which I think was the former water agency building or something and then they provided the money to furnish and equipment, the tables,

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the computers and everything. Then we Take over the operation, we pay for the staffing, we pay for the ongoing acquisition of the books and that kind of thing. So that's how it happens. I see how how does one become a librarian, how does one become a

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library? And I would say today unlike 25 years ago when I went into the field, first of all you get real good at computers and searching. But even then you have to get a really good liberal arts education. The Bachelor of Arts is the best preparation

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for the library degree. Then you do have to go on and get what is called a Master of Arts in Library Science which is all about a year and a half program. It's kind of interesting right now library schools are going out of business at a

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rate of about one or two per year because people don't seem to be as interested in going into the field as they used to be. And maybe that's a sign that people don't like books they're reading as much. I don't know. But it is a hard

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fact. We've been losing library schools every year. It seems like somebody with a library science background and computer that there's going to be vast opportunity and employment area. I would think they should be in a very good position in the job market. Although you take our

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situation here, you know our staffing is very stable and we're not adding, you know a lot of new positions and that has pretty much been the case all over the country. There are a few areas, you know where the population is really expanding florida Arizona and

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some communities in California. But people at the mls and good liberal arts background, good computer background should be able to find a rewarding job as a librarian. Tell me about your T shirt. What does it say? Glad to have good books, good friends. Some summer reading

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program. What is the summer reading program Every year we have a thematic summer reading program at the library that focuses heavily on Children. And the idea is to keep them reading all summer long because it's pretty well documented that kids who read in the summer do

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better in school the following year. And uh I don't even think they have to be reading good stuff. You know, a lot of people thought the nancy drew books weren't you know, very good literature or the hardy boys. And now people may think the R. L.

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Stine books aren't so great but I feel very strongly that you're better off having them read anything just to get them in. You know the reading habit and this does that. We have lots of programs that go along with our summer reading program. We had a

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woman do a program at the central library on bats last week and she brought in a real bat. I believe it was binky the bat. And oh yeah, and we have puppet programs going on in the summertime. And uh we have fun things like we had

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Clifford, the big red dog. He came to the library and cloe will be, I think everybody knows Chlo she's coming to the library later this year to pass out ice cream. So you know, we do use a few gimmicks to get the Children in. How does

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one? Is there a phone number where you can call and get the information so you can participate in this program. Now there's no special phone number, just call your local branch or go down to your local branch and you do sign up to register in the

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summer reading program, it doesn't cost a thing. And we give the kids a reading record and they write down, you know, the books that they read. And then at the summer, I'm sorry at the end of the summer they can even win certificates uh for, you

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know, pizza and ice cream and things like that. So we really try hard to keep them interested all year long. And another thing we introduced this summer, very quick teen reading program. So if you have teenagers hanging around the house, you know, and you want them

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to engage themselves more productively send them down to the library and get them to sign up. So you have a teenage program. This is the first summer of that and we're very excited about what's included in that teenage program I'm interested. Not that I'm a teenager,

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I'd love to be again uh it's pretty much the same thing as for the younger kids they do, you know, keep a reading record of the books they read. One thing that's kind of nice. If you check on our library home page right now, we have

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a special little uh Place Fourteens and we're putting in their capsule book reviews in other words when they read a book, they write, you know, three or four sentences about it and we're including them on the library homepage. So they can dial into the homepage or

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key in or whatever you do and they can, you know, find out what somebody else read that look good or you know, somebody might say books dunk so you can get a critique from peers who are also reading, reading, that's great. Then it gets them using

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the internet, which is almost as good as reading. Well, I think that that evaluated that. Yes. Yes. How can people improve the library? How can people improve the library? I'm repeating the single best thing they can do is use it, make sure they're getting their tax

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dollars worth. I think for people with kids, I see kids, you know, in supermarkets and in oh, you know, discount stores and they're always bringing something to the parents. Give me this, give me that at the library, Get a library card. So that sounds great. And

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join the friends of the library group. Friends of the library. We're out of time. Thank you. Roger for being on. This is great. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you again next time. I'm dana d'Errico and this is Sonoma County in the nineties.