Contracting out library services

The chairman of the Privatization Committee emailed me a series of questions and the response he received about the experience of other towns with library service contracting. I thought the responses were worthy of discussion and he has agreed to

... let me publish them on this blog.
The questions and answers follow:

My name is Frank Gracie, and I am Chairman of the Town of Dartmouth Privatization Committee here in Massachusetts. Our town, as many other communities, has been fighting severe budget issues for the last several years, and this is expected to continue. One of the things that we are considering is the outsourcing of our library service with LSSI. They provided your name to me as a reference. I don't want to take up much of your time, but I was hoping that you could share any insight that you deem helpful.

We are a Select Board/ Town Meeting structured community, and the Select Board has empowered my committee to try and find ways to help the budget crisis. Since libraries tend to be at the forefront of cuts, police and infrastructure are clearly more important, we have had some feeling-out discussions with LSSI. Quite naturally, our present library administration has great opposition to this path, and has thrown out all types of scare tactics that we need to sift through.

What I am most interested in is a few simple questions:

1. Has your association with LSSI been everything "as advertised"? Better than advertised. Regardless of the issue, they address it in a professional and timely manner.
Were there any "surprises"? The only surprises came from the former library provider and the City of Memphis. LSSI worked with us as we had to deal with each surprise. They stood behind us, and their network of libraries and professionals came to the rescue every time.

2. Has your community saved significant money, which is always good for the taxpayers? In the first four years of operation by LSSI, we have saved a documented 2.6 million dollars. At the same time, we increased hours, increased programs five-fold, doubled the amount of dollars dedicated to new materials, and the customer service at the library increased significantly.

3. Are the library patrons happy? Did they notice a large difference in service, either positive or negative? Our residents love the “new” library. They find it cleaner, more professional, easier to navigate, friendlier employees, more popular books, better programs and I could go on and on. Add the $ savings above and it makes our city administration and board of mayor and aldermen look pretty smart. Our last city-wide survey showed 96% of the residents were satisfied or highly satisfied. In our line of work, that is a winner.

4. Do you have any reason to regret the decision to go with LSSI, and do you expect your association with them to continue long-term? After our success with LSSI, four other cities in the area contracted with LSSI; Collierville, Millington, Arlington and Jackson. Our city is presently going through managed competition in all of our departments. The library is a perfect example of successful outsourcing. After all, our job is to provide the service level requested by our citizenry in the most effective, efficient manner possible. LSSI has made us and our library a shining success of providing a high level of service in an efficient manner.



Germantown is a AAA-bond rated city by both Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s and the expectation level by our citizens is very high. The library is very important to our educated citizenry and we are very proud of the current operation. Our original contract with LSSI was for three years with two one-year extensions. Unfortunately we are in the last year of the last extension and will have to go through the procurement process in the next few months. While we are open-minded in this process, any other provider considered will have to exhibit the same level of competence that has been demonstrated in our library the last four years. I should also let you know that a couple of years ago we had the opportunity to acquire the Genealogical Library collection of over 15,000 books and with the help of LSSI did so and now in addition to the Germantown Community Library we have the Germantown Regional History and Genealogy Center which LSSI also operates for us.



Lastly I am very familiar with the opposition of the library establishment and the “world will end” mentality of the traditional library employee towards outsourcing. I attended the American Library Association Conference in Anaheim, California this year to learn more about libraries as we look towards an expansion of our library. I saw this “attitude” first-hand and it puzzled me. It is contrary to what we try to do as a city, offer high quality services in an efficient manner. The way cities and towns provide for citizens is changing, but it seems the majority of the library world is happy to stay entrenched in the 60’s and 70’s.
( Sorry for the editorial)
Assistant City Administrator
City of Germantown

The Executive Director told the Select Board at the last meeting that the Library Trustees have not issued a Request For Proposal (RFP) about contracting out our library services. He also said that the Library Trustees had contacted Library Systems & Services (LSSI) and that they were no longer interested in responding to an RFP. The reason he stated was vague and had something to do with bargaining units, but I don't recall exactly what it was. LSSI says that they still want to see the RFP and will bid on it.
The potential savings from the contracting out of library services is in the hundreds of thousands. Why wouldn't we pursue that given our fiscal problems?