The following excerpt is from the Indiana Genealogical Society Blog. If you have Indiana Ancestors, you better read the FULL blog – not just my teaser. This is important!
Indiana House Bill 1001 – the State Budget Bill – includes a proposed 24% cut in funding to the Indiana State Library. According to State Librarian Jacob Speer, the proposal includes elimination of the Genealogy Department at the State Library and a 10% reduction in ISL staff.
As Speer points out, the Genealogy Department at the Indiana State Library has more than 100,000 items devoted to Indiana, states from which Hoosiers came, as well as some foreign countries.
Many of these holdings are not duplicated at the Indiana Historical Society, the Indiana State Archives, or the Indiana Historical Bureau. In addition, the Indiana State Library serves as the “genealogy destination” for patrons of the Indianapolis Public Library (IPL), as IPL made the decision not to have their own genealogy collection.
Almost half (49%) of the reference questions that come to the Indiana State Library are for research from the Genealogy collection.
Thanks to Victoria Davis, Joy Neighbors, Susi Pentico, Judy Russell, et al, for the heads-up…
http://ancestorseekersbytherootbound.blogspot.com/2015/01/important-news-indiana-state-library.html Blogged this yesterday with Judy’s permission.
Hope this bill or at least this funding provision gets shot down. I don’t live in Indiana but much of my research is centered there, so I followed the links in the article to e-mail Representative Tim Brown.
I hope this doesn’t happen as it would be pretty sad. Cut corners somewhere else.
I have emailed until my fingers are raw. I finally received a response from an aide to Gov. Pence. To make it short, the letter said that everything a person needs can be found on Ancestry.com or some other similar site. I talked to Ancestry.com and one of their people agreed with me that this is just not so. However , the way Gov. Pence and his constituents are going, pretty soon Indiana will be no longer have their Genealogical Library and we will lose our history.