(Item 8 updated March 13, 2006, to clarify online fundraising limitations.)

LII is facing a fifty percent budget cut to its primary funding as of July 1, 2006. We are running a user survey through midnight, Thursday, March 16, 2006. (Survey here.) Here are ten basic facts to help you understand what's going on.

1. Our primary funding is through the California State Library. Like most state libraries, CSL now faces "too much month at the end of the money," to borrow from a country-western song. California has many good programs and services, costs go up and not down, priorities change, and to the best of our knowledge all state-funded projects are facing cuts of varying proportion.

2. The funding cut will reduce our hours by nearly half, reduce the newsletter by half, eliminate the additional content we add each week beyond the newsletter (typically another ten to thirty websites), stop all technical development, eliminate new featured collections for 2006-2007, reduce the time we have for maintaining our existing collection of 18,000 trustworthy websites, and otherwise pretty much put us on the ropes.

3. LII is a very popular service (to answer the question, "Does anyone use LII?"). We now average 10 million hits per month and have at least 35,000 subscribers to our weekly newsletter (with many more RSS readers untallied). Our weekly newsletter drives much of our service and user awareness, but people who never read "New This Week" use our site, as well.

4. About 20 percent of our funding goes to technical support and administration (costs that have gone down and become more predictable as we have moved to a more stable, professional technical environment). The remainder goes to cover the costs of finding, evaluating, creating, organizing, and maintaining the over 18,000 "websites you can trust," plus activities such as training and presentations.

5. LII is a very lean organization. We have no building, we all work from home, and we devote the vast majority of our work-week to, well, working. We have in the past relied more on volunteers, but as with all library work, the skills, training, and time commitment required for the highly visible work we do make that a difficult proposition, and we believe the quality of LII comes from its stable, skilled, devoted, highly accountable team.

6. LII produces content specific to California. We have thousands of high-quality, carefully-vetted websites specific to California needs and interests. We also produced featured collections for California, covering topics such as the gubernatorial special election of 2004, California wine, and the statewide summer reading programs.

7. LII also has a partnership with Washington state. We produce content for them and feature some of it every week in our newsletter. The Washington project not a great money-maker, but it has broadened our content pool and is a good pilot of services we could offer more broadly.

8. In light of the severity of the proposed budget cuts, we have requested and received permission to run ads and newsletter underwriting. We are waiting to see the response from our user community before we do either. We have discussed soliciting funds online, but this would have to be structured very carefully, due to the nature of our funding source and its federal guidelines; we can't just stick a PayPal link on LII. Despite numerous requests, we will not be producing an LII pin-up calendar, but we are discussing an online store for LII goodies.

9. LII is very interested in broadening its support base nationally (or beyond). Last year we improved our site on the outside and the inside to make that more feasible. We have for years acknowledged that 80 percent of our use comes from outside California (20 percent international). (California still gives us 2 million hits per month--nothing to sneeze at!) We have for long dreamed of a "National LII," and this is an opportune time to approach other state libraries and see if they agree, and to solicit more general funding on our site.

10. In sum, we see crisis as opportunity. This is a crucial time for LII to measure the commitment beyond California to 21st-century librarianship. While all of us at LII are bibliophiles, we are also passionately committed to the belief that through our work here, we model the roles librarians can play in a networked society. We believe that users have a powerful need for high-quality information, and that by providing this information, we also seamlessly educate our users about evaluating all information, regardless of its source or format.