By Billy Davis

The director of First Regional Library delivered a new twist to her annual funding request for the four public library branches in Panola County.

Catherine Nelson and a procession of library employees made the annual trek Monday to request county government budget $321,000, the same budgeted for the current fiscal year, for the upcoming year.
Nelson told county supervisors that people using the library for job searches are putting money back into the economy when they eventually draw a paycheck.

First Regional’s statistics show 78 percent of library patrons use the library for their only access to the Internet, and 37 percent of those on the Internet were looking for a job or filling out an online application.

“Then those paychecks turn into taxes,” Nelson said, “and it all comes back around.”
Nelson read a testimonial from the Batesville Public Library in which a patron thanked a library staff member for a successful job search.

The staff member, Deborah Kelley, had helped the job hunter set up a resume on the computer’s desktop and showed how to move the resume to a flash drive.

The county board also heard testimonials from the branch managers at Batesville, Sardis, Como and Crenshaw.

“We’re very stingy with public money. We stretch it as far as it will go,” said Tanna Taylor, the branch manager in Batesville.   

Alice Pierotti, the Como branch manager, teared up when she described the work at Emily Jones Pointer library.

“We truly believe this is our life’s work,” she said.

Nelson pointed out that the Como branch is a 2012 winner of the John Cotton Dana award for its “Elders Remember” oral history project.

Nelson also used First Regional figures to suggest the cost of providing books, magazines, movies, music and computers to the public would cost approximately $3.6 million annually for those services.

Other figures from First Regional state that 32,000 attended library programs last year and 4,816 signed up for the popular summer reading program during the same period.  

The fiscal year begins October 1 for Panola County government and supervisors discussed briefly Monday that time is nearing to begin entertaining budget requests for county departments.

The budget for the 2012-2013 fiscal year is usually adopted in mid-September.