Planning & Budget

Douglas County Libraries Long Range Plan 2007 - 2009 (PDF)
2008 Budget (PDF)
2007 Budget (PDF)
2006 Budget (PDF)
2007 Audit Report (PDF)
2006 Audit Report (PDF)
2005 Audit Report (PDF)
2004 Audit Report (PDF)
2003 Audit Report (PDF)

A Message from the Director

Crossroads
Our library district—which has the same boundaries as the county—was founded in 1990 by a vote of the people. Since then, how the county has grown!

In some respects, your library has grown even faster. For instance, in the past five years alone, the county's population grew by 44%, an average of about 7% per year. But the demand for library services in that period – measured just by the numbers of items people have checked out – climbed by 124%, or about 25% per year. That's three times faster than the population! Plus, 79% of the households in the county have at least one active library card. This is far higher than national averages.

In general, we try to maintain a standard of one-half square foot of library space per capita. That's a good guideline to determine how much room we need for books, other library materials, computers, and for our astoundingly busy public meeting rooms.

It's clear we're losing ground. Over the next five years we need at least 60,000 square feet of new space, all around Douglas County.

While our current libraries are well-supported by our patrons, the library district does not have sufficient funds to address our new capital needs. In fact, even if someone built libraries for us, for free, we do not have the money to run them

Faced with a growth of demand greater than our resources, we've spent the last couple of years retooling. Some of these changes have put us at the forefront of the nation:

• We installed self-check systems, based on Radio Frequency ID tags. This allowed us to deal with a 21% growth of checkouts last year, while actually reducing staff through attrition. (Truth in advertising: we have fewer people, but 2.6% more hours of staff help. We think we're using our staff far more intelligently, and we are deeply grateful for them.)
• Today, 90% of our checkouts are handled by the public themselves, freeing our staff to do something far more important: helping the public find the resources they seek. We've centralized other tasks (book purchasing, telephone-based reference service, etc.), becoming ever more efficient.
• We've also spent some time growing our Foundation, which is providing wonderful supplementary support for our efforts.

But this is what I believe: we're at the limit of what we can do with our current resources. So here's the choice:

• continued pursuit of excellence or
• decline

In the coming months, the library will be exploring some options for the future. If you get a phone call for a survey, see a public notice, or are otherwise invited to a focus group, I hope you'll step forward and tell us what kind of library you would like to see in this community.
Meanwhile, you can reach me at jlarue@dclibraries.org, or 303-791-READ.
James LaRue
Library Director
Douglas County Libraries