This is too small a basis which hardly leaves any margin for major investments or innovative services. As mentioned before, the implementation of the library act resulted in a densely populated library landscape because most local authorities stood up to the challenge, but all of them seperately and with few means. Since grants are tied up to the number of population served, the other side of the coin of this dense public library landscape is that most libraries do not have any financial strength for whatever IT related inintiatives they might be interested in. Moreover, on the local level, internal administrative rules are too rigid to allow for a flexible and autonomous policy. Since libraries are city depertments, they don t dispose of a dedicated budget the librarian can spend as he sees fit.
Every purchase has to be approved by the city council.
This way of deciding and financing severely hampers the integration of new services. First of all, the library act is actually being revised in order to impose co-operation within a networking structure on all individual libraries. At the same time, an intranet amongst all public libraries is being put in place. In July 1996, the Flemish government decided to connect all public ibraries to the internet. The infrastructure was put in place by the end of June 1997.