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Building Community in the Forty-Ninth State
The Institute of Museum and Library Services recognized the community-building achievements of an unusual library in Anchorage, Alaska when it bestowed one of three 2001 National Awards for Library Service on the Alaska Resources Library and Information Services (ARLIS). This award, the highest in the nation, is given to libraries that "demonstrate a core commitment to public service through innovative programs and active partnerships that address the urgent and changing needs within the communities they serve."1
This statement is remarkably descriptive of ARLIS, whose story begins back in the mid-1990s during a time of government downsizing and national budget constraints. It was also a period of decreased oil revenues and a dwindling economy in Alaska, a state that relies heavily on the management and conservation of its natural resources. These resources are managed by federal and state agencies, most of which are head-- quartered in Anchorage. At the time, these agencies operated their own libraries to support their research and decision making. By 1995, however, one of the libraries had closed due to budget cuts, another was threatened with closure, and the services and hours of several others, including one university library, had been severely limited by reductions in personnel.
Realizing just how deeply these events were eroding research activities-and thus sound resource management-librarians from the different agencies and the university began meeting weekly to brainstorm about what they could do to save their libraries. The librarians were keenly aware that although their libraries were small, staffed mostly by one or two people, there were no other resources to replace the collections. Alaska is a book-poor state: "All of the books in all of the libraries in Alaska equal fewer than half the number in the library collections of Stanford University."2 To stretch scarce collection dollars as far as possible, Alaska libraries had participated in cooperative collection development for more than a decade. Conducted both formally and informally, on community, regional, and state levels, such cooperation enabled Alaska's individual academic, public, and special libraries to collect more heavily in certain agreed-upon subject areas than they otherwise would have been able to do. This sharing provided the most indepth resources possible and fostered close day-to-day working relations between librarians....