Thank you for expressing your concern about the Library of Virginia's closing its reading rooms on Saturdays and Mondays. As I am sure you can understand the choices facing the Library to comply with the 5 percent cut in its operating budget for the current fiscal year were not easy. Because the Library has little discretionary funding, the reduction had to come from salaries. And, it is important to know that cuts were taken from throughout the Library, not just from reading room staff.

The decision to close the reading rooms on Saturdays and Mondays was not made lightly. The Code of Virginia mandates that the Library of Virginia be open for such days and hours each day as may be prescribed for other state agencies at the seat of government which is 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday -Friday.

That being said we are charged with the prudent and wise use of limited resources. A sampling of the usage of our resources and visitation to the Library's reading rooms shows that Mondays and Saturdays generally had lower resource usage and the lowest visitation in the reading rooms, with Wednesday, Thursday, and Fridays having the highest.   Beyond that we also see our support for research and researchers as more holistic than just access to collections in the reading rooms.  We have to think about maintaining our online resources, which are expensive but are very popular and heavily used; processing archival materials to address a huge backlog of accessioned records that are not yet available to users; and digitizing state and local records to make them more widely available.  All of those are areas we have cut heavily in recent years and to do so again now would also have an adverse effect on the research community.

Please know that we will share your concerns with the administration and members of the General Assembly so that if the state's funding situation eases, the Library might be able to receive financial assistance to restore our reading room hours.

Jan Hathcock
Public Information & Policy Coordinator
Library of Virginia




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