Burnaby Public Library has had its provincial funding cut by about 22 per cent, part of provincewide cuts announced last month.

Chief librarian Edel Toner-Rogala said in 2009 BPL is seeing its direct grants alone cut by over 13 per cent. It will receive about $504,000 compared to almost $581,000 in 2008, a difference of more than $77,000.

Most of that has already been absorbed by cost-savings that library management implemented earlier this year while they braced themselves for potential cuts, Toner-Rogala said.

Equipment has not been purchased or replaced unless “mission critical”; library staff have been asked to be extra prudent in their use of supplies; the filling of job vacancies has been delayed; there’s been a freeze on professional development; and its public relations budget has been cut back.

“The public shouldn’t see any of those impacts,” she said. There may be times when there won’t be anyone staffing the public help desk, for example, “but there will always be someone on the floor to help.”

However, add in cuts to indirect funding, and the figure rises to at least 22 per cent in provincial funding lost.

The most noticeable of the indirect cuts will be the loss of $1 million from Victoria which covered the licensing costs provincewide of a core set of online databases, such as the Encyclopedia of B.C. Online, Canadian Newsstand and the Auto Repair Reference Centre.

That alone translates to a $30,000 to $40,000 hit to Burnaby library’s budget.

It’s not just the cut in funding that hurts but the loss of the discount libraries got because they were purchasing database subscriptions in bulk, Toner-Rogala explained.

Libraries around the province are still trying to figure out how they can pool their shrinking resources to secure similar bulk discounts.

Without that, for instance, one database alone that Burnaby is hoping to maintain will cost $52,000 as an “a la carte” item.

BPL is reviewing all the online databases it offers—from magazines and newspapers people can read over the Internet, even from home, to research resources, music and downloadable audiobooks—to find ones whose price and usage don’t warrant renewing.

As of last week, it stopped offering the Encyclopedia of B.C. Online.

“By the end of December (when most databases come up for renewal) people will really begin to see the cuts.”

And other programs experiencing cuts, such as Books for Babies, which promotes early literacy, and Askaway, a provincewide question-answering service, also have their futures in question while library administrators across B.C. try to figure out how to continue them past this year.

BPL’s teen and summer reading clubs have not been affected.

As for what the future holds for Burnaby Public Library, Toner-Rogala said,

“The [library] board has been clear to me to be fairly conservative in terms of what we’re anticipating from provincial funding.”