“History is not only philosophy, teaching by example; its true purpose is, also, to illustrate the general progress of society in knowledge and the arts, and the changes of manners and pursuits of men.” Daniel Webster, 1852.
In studying the manners and pursuits of the people in the state of Georgia, I would have to comment that while our state as a whole lags in educational statistics, our people have cared about education and literacy. As I mentioned in previous posts the majority of our libraries were sponsored by private groups and supplemented with WPA funds. Our limitations to education and library service have been due to scattered population over a large geographical area and a lack of funds to adequately develop these services.
In addition to our private citizens showing their concern for bringing books to our people, the state of Georgia has had moments in history where they led other states in public library development. In 1974, 32.6% of funding for Georgia public libraries came from the state, 10.8% from the federal government and 56.6% came from local resources. Only four states surpassed Georgia’s percentage level of state funding for public libraries: Hawaii, Kentucky, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania. On a dollars per capita basis, Georgia ranked first.
State ------------Dollars Per capita
Georgia ---------1.41
New Jersey-----1.25
New York-------1.24
Illinois ----------0.90
Pennsylvania---0.62
Brown, Patricia L. & Beverly A. Rawles. “Public Libraries in Georgia: A Working Paper.” Battelle,1975.
Harris, Susie M. "Regional Library Development in Georgia." North Georgia College, 1948.
1 comment:
I think many in Georgia would also argue that our library technology in recent years has led the nation's.
GALILEO was one of the first statewide virtual libraries, and serves as a model for effective collaboration among different types of libraries.
Georgia was one of the first states to provide high-speed Internet access to every public library facility.
PINES & Evergreen are both groundbreaking projects--
PINES is the largest consortium in the world (that we know of) sharing a database of items and users with common policies.
Evergreen, developed by GPLS, is getting international attention as the first really good open-source software product for libraries, and is being implemented in other environments (see http://pines.bclibrary.ca/ for an example).
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