CDs hit wrong note in Bangor

Public librarians in Maine are typically a budget-minded lot who don’t make a habit of looking any gift horse in the mouth if it could enhance their collections.

But Barbara McDade, who runs the Bangor Public Library, has decided to pass on reaping her share of the 25,000 free compact discs that will soon be shipped to Maine libraries and schools as the result of a national class-action lawsuit against some of the country’s top music companies.

“It’s definitely a wonderful gift, but it’s not for us,” said McDade, whose library has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the most dynamic circulators of books and periodicals in all of New England. “We’ve never had a recorded music collection, and we don’t have the money available to start one now and to maintain it.”

According to a recent news report, the nation’s top CD makers, including Sony and Time Warner, along with retailers such as Musicland and Tower Records, admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement of the suit with 40 states that charged the companies with price fixing. The $143 million settlement includes payments of $67 million to 3.5 million consumers who joined the lawsuit, as well as the sharing of 5.6 million music CDs among the states.

In an arrangement worked out by Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe, 55 percent of the state’s allotted 25,000 CDs will go to public libraries, 35 percent to the 138 public schools who asked to participate, and 10 percent to institutions of higher education.

As a result, many Maine libraries are now eagerly awaiting the arrival of their free CDs – about 160 to each library – as a way to add to their existing collections or to form the core of new collections they were never able to afford to start on their own before.

“All Maine libraries have faced budget problems,” said Anne Davis of Gardiner, president of the Maine Library Association “But I think this will be especially helpful to smaller libraries, some of them that have trouble even paying their phone bills. Only about half of our 274 libraries have any CDs at all right now.”

Yet for Bangor, McDade said, accepting the musical windfall would create a financial burden that the library’s traditional funding system is not equipped to handle.

“We’ve been offered musical recordings in the past from people who’ve gone from collecting LPs to tapes, and then moved from tapes to CDs,” McDade said. “And we’ve always considered those offers, especially since we do have printed music here. But the fact is that if you start a music collection you have to continue it. Once you’re in it, you have to stay in it. ”

The Bangor library’s endowment, which was established by two prominent families decades ago, clearly stipulates that the fund must be used for the purchase of printed materials only. And while the gifts have allowed the library to build and maintain an extensive book and periodical inventory over the generations, it makes no legal accommodations for the technological advances of an ever-evolving age of electronic information.

Consequently, McDade said, even the library’s modest collection of videotapes and books on tape has had to come from private donors.

“So if we started a music collection, we’d need someone to catalog it and the room to display it, which we don’t have now,” she said. “And you would always need to buy new recordings for the collection, as well as constantly replace the ones that get damaged, which they do, and that would mean we’d have to solicit even more money just to keep it going.”

Davis, who runs the Gardiner Public Library, said hers was one of the first libraries in the state to develop a collection of popular movie videos. The library also has a CD collection, and has been lending records for at least 20 years.

“We can include these things because our library is a department of the city and we can budget for them,” Davis said. “In Maine, no two libraries are run the same. Some are almost considered private because they get almost no public money whatsoever. Others, like Bangor’s, are endowed and have to live by those rules.”

McDade said it’s possible that CDs, videotapes, DDS and other forms of electronic media could one day have a greater presence in the library’s abundant collections. But for now, at least, she’s content to focus on books, the one medium she is confident will be around for a long time to come.

“Technology moves so fast that a CD collection could easily become outdated, too,” she said. “It’s just so hard to keep up. Hey, I still have a tape player in my car.”