This week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate contains an article (“Park Ridge officials consider coffee sales in the Public Library,” December 24) about a suggestion by two Park Ridge Library Board trustees that establishing an on-premises coffee shop might be a way of increasing the number of Library visitors while also generating additional revenue.

New trustees Pat Lamb and Dean Parisi both raised the possibility of the Library’s working with a private coffee vendor. Parisi cited as an example a coffee chain in a Chicago hospital that shares proceeds with the hospital, while Lamb noted the small Starbucks located in Macy’s. That’s pretty outside-the-box thinking for Park Ridge Library Board members, and something the Library needs after years of lethargic, bobble-headed boards annually whining about not having a bigger new building and then rubber-stamping the same old way of doing things, all the while hoping for different results – or perhaps not even caring whether the results were different, or better.

Lamb and Parisi were reacting to the recent marked decline in Library in-person visits (v. “virtual” on-line visits), circulation (i.e., more materials being checked out) and program attendance.

Library visits and circulation in FY2013-14 were the lowest in 5 years, but 7 years into FY2014-15 both visits and circulation are tracking even lower this year.  And year-to-date program attendance is also on track to be the lowest in the past five years, even though the Library continues to offer in excess of 900 programs that are still free of charge and accessible on a drop-in basis with no reservations or advance commitment required.  So if visits, circulation and program attendance matter, that downward trend would not appear to be a good thing.

Staff has tried to blame the decline on “The Recession,” or on the “recovery” from The Recession. Although circulation did increase during The Recession, it actually continued to go up in the first four years following the official end to The Recession – in June 2009, according to the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of such dates. And while Library visits increased precipitously during the 18-month duration of The Recession, until last year they had dropped only slightly from The Recession’s end, while remaining well above pre-Recession levels.

So if maximizing visits, circulation and program attendance are valid goals against which the Library’s effectiveness in serving the community should be measured, “The Recession” doesn’t appear to be a realistic or even useful alibi for the recent decline in the Library’s numbers.

Whether getting a private coffee vendor to come into the Library proves to be do-able remains to be seen. And even if it is, whether such an idea will be successful in significantly increasing visits, circulation, program attendance and revenue is, at best, speculative at this time. Given the recent emergence of “bookless” libraries-of-the-future such as the Bexar County, TX public library and the Hunt Library at North Carolina State University, “circulation” as we have known it might be losing its prominence as a benchmark of successful libraries.

Much as we applaud that kind of creative thinking, it probably should not be coming from the part-time unpaid volunteer trustees – especially from the two newest ones – who are supposed to be focusing on overall Library policy and long-term Library operations from 30,000 feet rather than doing boots-on-the-ground micro-managing.  Such ideas, instead, should be coming from the well-paid full-time library professionals who already are “on the ground” on a forty-hour-per-week basis.

But full-time staff seems content to keep doing basically what it has been doing for years, give or take the occasional nip and tuck like the planned $15,000 “Digital Media Lab” that is intended to provide patrons with free access to hardware and software for creating media presentations, converting digital content from one format to another, and editing photos, music and video – at least some of which we understand are currently available from that local taxpaying business on Northwest Hwy. known as Kinko’s, albeit at a cost to the users rather than at a cost to the taxpayers.

That’s because the stereotypical government approach to increasing usage is with giveaways.  But when you’re the Library and you’re already giving away your visits, circulation and programs, new giveaways need to take the form of new services – even if it means unfairly competing (free versus paid) with an established, tax-paying business.

Which brings us to the title, and point, of today’s post.

We’re inviting you to offer your ideas for increasing the visits, circulation and program attendance of the Library.  And while ideas that could generate revenue for the Library and thereby reduce the funding burden on taxpayers would be preferred, we’ll publish whatever comes in.  As always, however, we reserve the right to criticize and, under appropriate circumstances, ridicule.

But don’t let that stop you…as if it ever has before.

[Note: The editor and publisher of this blog, Robert J. Trizna, is a member of the Park Ridge Library Board of Trustees.]

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