By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
As Michigan's budget stands right now, library funding for next year faces a 50-percent cut, Dowagiac District Library Director Evelyn Holzwarth informed Chamber of Commerce members Tuesday evening.
"So we're working on the future," said Holzwarth, who chairs Southwest Michigan Library Cooperative's Task Force on the Future. "We hope it won't stay at that amount, but that's where it is right now."
Holzwarth made that observation during her Chamber After Hours demonstration of MeL, the Michigan e-Library, and how its print and online resources can be harnessed for business.
Holzwarth became Dowagiac District Library's first director in July 2004.
She came here from Marshall and serves as treasurer of the Southwest Michigan Library Cooperative and also chairs the Storytellers Committee of the Dogwood Fine Arts Festival.
The DDL's home page was produced by Alan Fricke.
The library maintains calendars detailing its events as well as a community listing of non-profit offerings.
The community calendar originated as a planning tool because the library staff wanted to avoid pitting its programs against other events.
MeL (www.mel.org) "tries to make it so when you're looking for a topic or for information, you can just go to one place that becomes one search engine," Holzwarth explained. "It takes care of looking out in all the different places for you and brings that information back."
Arrayed down the left side of the page are "Pathfinders."
"A Pathfinder will bring together not only Web sites, but databases the state purchases for libraries and for the citizens of Michigan and also books that are in the various library collections in Michigan. Once you find something, in the case of a book, it will allow you to order it through interlibrary loan. Eventually, it will be delivered to your library. At the moment, about half of the libraries in Michigan are part of the MeL catalog. Dowagiac is not. We are going to be in September. By the middle of 2008 they expect the entire state to be part of the catalog."
Holzwarth pointed out some of the Pathfinders, including automotive industry, business, economics and labor and government, law and politics.
"Each of those tries to pull together all the various information that's available through libraries and information sources throughout the state," she said.
The central section of the page "goes into each of the activities separately," she said. "You can go straight into, say, the newspaper database and pick up an article from the New York Times, the Detroit Free Press or The Detroit News or the Grand Rapids Press. Any newspaper that has been digitized. The St. Joseph newspaper is being done right now. As they are done, they become part of this whole database."
There is a section of topics in which the public has shown particular interest, such as health, genealogy and tax information.
Featured resources change "as they see how many people are using the database and what they're using it for," Holzwarth said. "They're trying to make it as interactive as possible, so where people are spending their time looking for information, the state will be spending its time filling that with information and pulling together more resources. So, in a sense, the more we use it, the more it will pull other information for us. Any person in Michigan can use this. If you are not at a public library when you're using it, for some of the databases, they'll ask you for your driver's license number or state ID number. They do not save that information."
Holzwarth clicked back to the DDL catalog "to show you how you can go through and find whether we have something or whether you need to go out to another place. You can search by a key word or you can do an advanced search that adds together an author and a title. I did a search on Michigan business just to see what kind of materials we have right here in the library," including the children's fiction book "Bucking the Sarge" by Dowagiac visitor Christopher Paul Curtis, how to start a business and businesses in Dowagiac.
"What I suggest to people who are interested in gathering information is to get into your account," which is accessible to library card holders with its 14-digit number, plus a password. "You have the ability to go into a patron menu and look at your account. You can view when your books are due, you can renew. If you have any reserved items, it will show them. If they're ready to be picked up, it will also show that. Whatever day I did this, I was number two on the reserved list for 'Marley and Me.' You can manipulate your records. You can also go ahead and do some searches. You can click and go immediately to federal or Michigan tax forms or to MeL. The Michigan online legal help center is run by the Justice Department of the state. You can put in legal queries. There are two things for very special audiences. What Every Driver Must Know is for kids trying to get their drivers' licenses. There's a database where if you read four in a series and want to know what the fifth is, you can type in the author.
"Once you've done your search and you're inside your account, it will tell you if things are here or checked out. Once you select the item you want, it gives you the choice along the top of reserving the title," Holzwarth said. "We allow you to reserve books from home, whether it says it's available or checked out. If it's available in the morning when we check the reserves, we'll find it and call you and tell you it's ready to be picked up. If we don't find it, we'll call you when we do. We do check those daily, so if you've requested something that's available, you should hear from us pretty quickly. Another thing you can do if you don't find it in our catalog, you can come back out to the search page and go directly into the southwest Michigan catalog of all the libraries in our cooperative."