Most headlines surrounding President Trump’s unprecedented cuts to social support services are rightly focused on issues like food insecurity and healthcare coverage. Massachusetts researchers and students returning to classrooms in the fall will be facing another barrier, however: a lack of access to electronic resources which will disproportionately hurt small, rural communities and their schools.
The Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC) already canceled a number of programs and services to libraries and their users earlier this year due to Trump administration cuts, including a collaborative program to promote literacy in prisons and jails in Massachusetts, 12 programs with the Perkins School for the Blind to help individual libraries develop accessible websites and services, and 18 grants to individual libraries that had previously been awarded federal money to improve services. Locally, the public libraries in South Hadley, Springfield, and Northampton were among those that lost grants, along with the Swift River Library in the Belchertown Public Schools.
Now, faced with the proposed federal defunding of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in this year’s federal budget, the MBLC has been forced to make necessary adjustments to the services and resources they offer to all libraries and librarians statewide. Most noteworthy in these cutbacks is the loss of research databases that formerly had been provided to all library users in the Commonwealth.
MBLC Director Maureen Amyot testified in front of the House Committee on Federal Funding, Policy and Accountability on July 15 to discuss these changes in service and access. She said that in the last fiscal year, close to $2.2 million of the $3.6 million federal grant from IMLS was used to fund the suite of databases MBLC makes available throughout the Commonwealth, including Encyclopedia Britannica, the archives of The Boston Globe, and online platforms for language learning and early childhood literacy.
According to Amyot, MBLC is only able to retain four of the 34 databases they had made accessible to Massachusetts residents. While libraries in larger and more affluent communities may be able to backfill some of these resources out of their local budgets, smaller and more rural towns in the western part of the state will simply not be able to afford them. This will have great impact both in the short- and longer-terms, as local librarians shared in interviews with The Shoestring.
“Equitable access to information is at risk here,” Erving Public Library Director Abby Baines told me. “Democracy functions when people can be informed — understanding our civil rights, our differences, our similarities, and how we can best take care of ourselves and each other are at risk when information is made less accessible.”
Baines noted the loss of free electronic access to the newspaper of record in Massachusetts, The Boston Globe, as being of particular concern.
“The Erving Public library provides historical access to the Greenfield Recorder via NewsBank for $172.00 per year,” she explained. “We lost access to The Boston Globe when the MBLC had to cut it due to funding changes and that access would cost us $925.60 per year to purchase as an individual library.”
“We have yet to determine if we will make that additional purchase,” she said.
Local librarians are also raising concerns about what impacts this will have on the longevity of information databases overall in a declining market. Libraries are the primary subscribers to research databases, and with funding for these subscriptions drying up at all levels, Katya Schapiro, the director of Easthampton Public Library, foresees bigger problems than the immediate loss of access.
“My larger fear is that many smaller archives and larger database vendors, when seeing purchases go down, will simply eliminate or not support formerly crucial resources,” she said. “Without constant support, databases will be retired, erased, and generally rendered inaccessible by time or by their own publishers — at the least, costs will rise.”
Schapiro also has concerns about state-level advocacy efforts and the services MBLC provides to support them, like data gathering, strategic planning, and overall assessment of library services.
Schapiro stated, “Without data, libraries can’t make a compelling case for library advocacy at the state or local level, and very few small libraries have the resources to aggregate the needed information or do the larger coordinated marketing needed.”
Schapiro continued, “As with many of the recent federal cuts in many disciplines, the goal is to render the institutions themselves underfunded, undermined, and ultimately obsolete. This attack takes many forms but the removal of larger advocacy and data collecting bodies is the first step on the path.”
South Hadley High School Librarian Erin Pronovost sees a more immediate impact. “Reduced access to databases for research will definitely hurt student preparedness for both college and life in general,” Pronovost said
Pronovost offered the example of Gale in Context, a suite of databases accompanied by subject- and grade-level-specific learning tools, which she says her students use more than anything else for their research projects. It is one of the databases the state will no longer fund for local libraries.
“These databases make database use itself more accessible, and they’re perfect for middle- and high-school students,” Pronovost said. “The less students can access reliable sources of information, the more they’ll resort to unreliable sources of information. There’s going to be a lot more dependence on [AI], and that worries me. A lot.”
Data from the MBLC confirms that school-aged individuals account for 60% of the usage of these databases. Without access to them, it appears that Massachusetts students will be learning to conduct college-level research woefully underprepared.
While the outlook appears at this point to be grim, there still remains a glimmer of hope that funding to the IMLS can be saved. When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson adjourned the House of Representatives to avoid taking a vote on the release of the Epstein files, the approval of the FY2026 budget was pushed back. Final approval must happen by September 30, so there is still time for individuals to advocate on behalf of our libraries. Although no members of the Massachusetts legislative delegation currently sit on the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, it is still appropriate to contact members of this committee, due to the overarching nature of these federal cuts. The entirety of funding to the IMLS comprises only .003% of the federal budget, and each dollar invested in public libraries provides nearly $4.50 in return, according to a study by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Likewise, library patrons can contact Gov. Maura Healey and state legislators to ask for increased funding to the state Board of Library Commissioners (budget line 7000-9101) and the Massachusetts Library System (line 7000-9401).
There is great reason to fear that once these resources are no longer available, they will be gone permanently.
Eric Poulin
Eric Poulin is an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, and is Director of their West Campus, based in Greenfield. He has served as President of the Massachusetts Library Association, Western Massachusetts Library Advocates, the former Western Massachusetts Regional Library System, and was the first-ever Expertise Director of the Massachusetts Library System.
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