By Shannon Curley

Hundreds of people are expected to turn out at noon tomorrow at Philadelphia’s Central Library in the first city-wide Save the Library rally. Organizers of the event say they expect anywhere from 500 to 1000 people to attend in an effort to prevent the 11 library closures that have been announced by Mayor Michael Nutter. The rally will be followed by a march to City Hall.

Despite the fact that the 11 branches the Nutter administration plans to close have been announced, Amy Dougherty, Executive Director of the Friends of the Free Library, says that advocates for the libraries do not believe that the writing is already on the wall.

In a letter to City Council last week, the Friends of the Free Library promoted an idea for what they call a “shared sacrifice”. The letter called on City Council to support “a moratorium on neighborhood branch library closures through the end of the school year and across the board service reductions to achieve the required cost savings”. The idea is that with this extra time, library advocates will be able to come up with alternative cost saving measures to closing the proposed 11 branches.

Yesterday, in an 11-4 vote, City Council passed a non-binding resolution that essentially asked the administration to keep all facilities open until the end of the fiscal year.

“We think that [the rally is] an opportunity to promote our shared sacrifice concept,” said Dougherty, going on to say that the passage of the resolution shows that there is support in City Council for the idea.

Regardless of any support in City Council, the letter acknowledged that shared sacrifice proposal had initially met resistance from the Nutter administration.

Representatives from the administration maintain that the best course of action to become remain solvent is closing the libraries.

Siobhan Reardon, President of the Free Library System, wrote in a statement on the Free Library’s website that the administration “considered cutting hours across the board, but quickly realized that would lead to branches being closed more often then they were open, which does not constitute quality service. Thus, there was no alternative to closing 11 branches, cutting the materials budget, and unfortunately, laying off staff.”

Shannon Curley is an intern for It’s Our City and is a Senior at La Salle University in Philadelphia.