When Jaffrey Public Library Circulation Supervisor Bailey Bernier made a recent visit to Humiston Playground on the library’s Book Bike for a storytime, with a selection of books for children to check out on the spot, one of the attending children told her he wished he could take out a book – but he lived in Rindge, not Jaffrey.

Bernier was able to tell him that he could borrow a book and that where he lived no longer made a difference.

Jaffrey Public Library and Ingalls Memorial Library in Rindge recently marked a month of a new consortium that allows members with a card to either library to access both collections and most services. 

Jaffrey Public Library Director Julie Perrin said the partnership is the realization of a conversation that has been going on for a number of years. Perrin and Ingalls Memorial Library Director Donna Straitiff said that access to greater resources was their motivation for starting their own consortium.

Straitiff said these kinds of partnerships may be necessary to keep small-town libraries vibrant. 

“We don’t have high budgets – our budgets are small,” Straitiff said. “My book budget – and that’s for our entire physical collection, electronic resources, the whole collection – is $18,000. Which you can do a lot with, but by joining forces, you can stretch a lot further. We have authors we always buy, and Julie probably has a subset of authors she always buys. But I can’t afford to buy everything. Partnering gives us much more power in our collections.”

Perrin agreed, saying that while libraries can perform vital services, in the scope of town budgeting, they fall behind essentials like police, fire and road funding.

“Every small-town library struggles with budget restraints every year -- staffing, facility maintenance, there are so many expenses, and when we're in a period of high inflation, the reality is that even though we're essential services in some aspects, when compared to adding another police officer, the library is at the bottom of the list,” Perrin said. “Pooling our resources, and helping each other, I think that's great and is another way for taxpayers to feel like they're getting that much more for their tax dollar.”

Not only have Perrin and Straitiff been able to expand access to library resources for residents in their towns, they were able to do it at almost no cost to the taxpayers.

“We’re trying to keep it cost-free,” Straitiff said. “The appeal is that we’re offering twice the collection, and no additional cost – we’d like to keep it that way.”

Keeping the consortium cost-free is due to staff like Straitiff and Perrin, who are willing to ferry items back and forth on a regular basis. It is easy enough to do, with Straitiff living in Jaffrey and Perrin able to pass by Rindge on her commute back to her hometown in Troy.

Building the collaboration

Straitiff said the biggest obstacle to forming a partnership with Jaffrey Public Library was that the two libraries did not run on the same integrated library system, the software that tracks the library’s collections and checkouts. 

Jaffrey runs on Biblionix Apollo, and Rindge on Koha Library. Ironically, Rindge adopted Koha to match several other libraries in the area years ago, to prepare for a potential consortium agreement, but Straitiff said that partnership never came to fruition, in part because Koha Library didn’t have an easy way to seamlessly integrate.

Biblionix Apollo, however, does have that function, at no additional cost, as long as all libraries involved have it. Straitiff said the software systems are not far apart in price – within $100 – and after discussing it with the Ingalls board, the Rindge library made the switch this summer in preparation for the Jaffrey partnership.

“Many of our patrons work in Jaffrey, or their kids go to school there, so they’re there a lot,” Straitiff said. 

Straitiff said the combination was “seamless” with no need to jump through hoops like new bar codes or new patron cards or numbers.

“It took a little upfront planning, and then a flick of the light switch,” Straitiff said.

And once it was online, patrons were eager to use it.

The combined system launched on July 15, and Perrin said both libraries saw each other’s users exploring the opposite library almost immediately, and numbers of users in both towns have been increasing at a fast rate. In the last two weeks of July, Rindge residents checked out 76 items from Jaffrey, and in the first two weeks of August, checked out another 188 – the number jumping as word got around about the partnership.

In Rindge, Jaffrey residents checked out 65 items in the later half of July, and 87 in the first half of August. In addition to those checkouts, Jaffrey delivered nine items to the Ingalls Memorial Library after they were placed on hold by Rindge residents, and Rindge delivered 31 items to Jaffrey. 

In an average month, there are roughly 5,000 average checkouts from the Jaffrey library and 3,000 from the Rindge library.

Both librarians hope to see usage continue to grow, and said they have had people from the opposite town come to check out the other library, usually just out of curiosity.

“People are pretty delighted. I've been impressed with how much has gone through the system in a short period of time,” Straitiff said.

How it works

While libraries have always had access to a system to loan items between libraries – known as interlibrary loan, a state-run program – Perrin said the wait time for items from other libraries can be as long as two weeks. With the directors making daily drop-offs and pickups, wait times for items between Jaffrey and Rindge are usually as short as a day – or residents can drive to the library themselves to pick up their reserve.

Residents of either town can go into either library to browse collections and check out items, or use the online catalog system to reserve books from either library. Users need to get logins from their home libraries, which will work on either Jaffrey’s or Rindge’s websites to browse their catalog and place holds on books, and users can specify which library they would like to pick up the book from. Or, an option to “search other libraries” will include the other library, and users can browse both catalogs from their home library’s website.

People can pick up the books at either library, or have them delivered to their home library for easy pickup. They can also return items borrowed to either library. If neither library has the item, residents can then use an interlibrary loan to secure a copy. The libraries encourage residents to still make regular interlibrary loans through their home libraries.

Perrin said Jaffrey residents are more used to using the Biblionix Apollo system to reserve books, having been using the system for the past several years, while Rindge residents will have to be educated on the fact that the system exists and how to use it. 

‘A mutual respect’

One of the potential obstacles to forming consortiums in the state is that New Hampshire libraries often operate autonomously under an elected board, and that autonomy is important to most libraries in the state, said Perrin. The Jaffrey-Rindge consortium lets the libraries maintain that autonomy, with each board maintaining control of the individual libraries and each library’s policies holding over items checked out from there.

Straitiff said open communication has helped the combination go smoothly.

“Julie and I work well together, and that's kind of key. You can't expect the computer to do it all, there has to be a mutual respect,” Straitiff said.

Straitiff said some questions have come up since the system has launched – protocol for situations like when a resident of each town might request the same item at the same time, and who gets priority – and Straitiff said the key to working them out on the fly is that good relationship.

“We’re open to riddling things out on the phone immediately – you have to be willing to troubleshoot. It’s not a huge time commitment, but you have to be open to it,” Straitiff said.

While the majority of both libraries’ collections will be open to residents of either town, some items will be kept solely for the individual members. Electronic services, such as access to the state library’s collection through the Libby app, and memberships to Mango Languages and other virtual programs, will remain accessible to only the residents of the individual libraries, as libraries are charged for their use based on the number of users.

Some physical items, purchased for the libraries by their individual Friends of the Library groups, such as hotspot Wi-Fi connectors in Jaffrey, and telescopes in each of the libraries, will remain for their individual patrons’ use. Other items, such as Jaffrey’s Launchpads and metal detectors, can be checked out by members of either library.

Newly purchased items will remain in their own library’s circulation only for the first 30 days – compared to the six-month wait period before new items are usually released within the state’s interlibrary loan system. 

While both Straitiff and Perrin said they’d like to see the consortium grow, connecting other nearby libraries, they acknowledge the further afield they go, the more complex that drop-off system becomes. The towns have previously discussed consortium partnerships with towns such as Troy, Dublin and Fitzwilliam, and Marlborough has expressed interest in joining the current consortium.

Perrin admitted that adding a town like Marlborough would involve more logistics than the short jaunt between Jaffrey and Rindge, but said she has had some preliminary discussions with the state library about using the interlibrary loan van to transport materials, or making trips themselves to drop off materials. While unlikely to have the kind of one-day turnaround that is now common when reserving books between Jaffrey and Rindge, Perrin said it would still likely be faster than using the state system.

Another model

Perrin said the idea of small libraries sharing resources isn’t new, The Greater Manchester Integrated Library Cooperative System, is a consortium of 13 public and academic libraries that share resources through a combined system, 

Dianne Hathaway, director of the Goffstown Public Library, said Goffstown has been part of the GMILCS consortium for about 30 years. Goffstown pays annual dues to the system of about $28,000, Hathaway said, which covers two consortium employees, a courier system that runs three days a week to deliver materials between the libraries and costs such as the software all the libraries use.

Hathaway said despite the cost of annual dues, access to that much-wider collection makes the consortium worthwhile for Goffstown, as it is a collection of materials that would require a budget topping $500,000 to collect, which Goffstown has neither the space nor budget for.

This article is part of the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript’s participation in the Solutions Journalism Network program, which is designed to look at how people are trying to solve problems and what others can learn from their attempts. 

Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172, Ext. 244, or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on X @AshleySaariMLT.