The Flushing branch of Queens Public Library

Last week Moby Lives reported on the ongoing budget crisis New York libraries are facing under Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s budget proposal.

Yesterday, Reuven Blau of the New York Daily News outlined in a bit more detail the problems NYC libraries are facing, and it ain’t pretty, folks.

New York City is looking at $100 million in cuts and potential layoffs of up to 1,500 people. Blau also reports that last December all 62 branches of the library in Queens froze spending on new books, locking the system into a sort of perpetual 2010.

As Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, said in his reaction to the proposed budget, “Why on earth would anyone even contemplate, let alone propose doing this?”

While libraries have always been repositories of knowledge, the new budget threatens their mission as institutions charged with making available the most up-to-date information from periodicals and new books to their patrons. So now, instead of being dynamic repositories, it seems Bloomberg is content to turn our libraries into time capsules.

The publishing industry will suffer a bit of a blow because of the cuts as well. Last year, the Queens library system purchased 8,500 titles. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s not nothing either. Unfortunately for Queens library patrons it means that they’ll have to try to get excited all over again for the breakout hits of the fall 2010.

Good luck with that, Queens.