The issue of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's financial distress and need to close local branches came up in a thread on the Pitt sports message boards. Someone proposed that the city let Pitt and CMU take over the Carnegie Library System which I think would be a bad idea because all the branches would be a big long-term drain on their own library systems.

I came up with a proposal to make it worthwhile for Pitt specifically to get involved. Pitt has needed to expand Hillman for since the 80s (it was in the last Master Plan ten years ago and never got acted on). Here is my proposed solution.

Sell the Carnegie Library building to Pitt (say $30 million). Take that money and put it in an endowment for supporting the system and local branches (forget Andrew's intent of requiring public support, he never envisioned such a population drain and an inept local government). Make the sale to Pitt legally contingent that the Oakland branch and all of its existing holdings would remain open and free the public in perpetuity (e.g. the reorganized Carnegie Library at the University of Pittsburgh would coexist as a Carnegie Library branch and the main library for Pitt's ULS). Include stipulations that a majority percentage of all revenue (e.g. library fines) generated from non-university affiliate patrons would go to the Carnegie Library System and that some space must be reserved for the Carnegie's public programing. Consolidate the duplicative library services (like microfilm) and sell off duplicative holdings that exist at Hillman Library in order to free up space (probably could free up the entire ground floor of Hillman, maybe more). This would make the Carnegie the site for items that are of the greatest public interest (e.g. things like new releases, fiction, local history) as well as the major site of student and public study. In the subsequent space freed up at Hillman, the crowded specialty library centers (e.g. Latin American, Asian, etc) driving the need for expansion there can grow into the new spaces reducing/eliminating the need for a physical addition to Hillman. Hillman would become mostly dedicated to specific research specialty collections, specifically for UCIS, and its rarer collections still protected from non-university affiliate loss and damage. This benefits Pitt by giving it a historic, classic library space to call its own and reduce/eliminating the need to physically expand Hillman. It hurts Pitt by splitting its major holdings between two facilities across Schenley Plaza (perhaps they could build a tunnel in the future) and costing $$$ it really doesn't have (purchase cost and rennovation/consolidation costs, adding additional librarians/staff). It benefits the Carnegie by setting up a endowment that would generate about $1.35 million a year (at 4.5% rate of return) which would provide the same amount of money they are planning to save by closing the branches, plus eliminates the upkeep costs of maintaining (and staffing entirely themselves) their largest central branch in Oakland. Downside for the Carnegie is that the Oakland Library is would be much more crowded by students and it is embarrassing to divest itself of its flagship.