Source: By Chloe Gotsis, Tewksbury Advocate (MA), Wed May 28, 2008
........ Three months after the town's Financial Planning Task Force entrusted the Tewksbury Public Library's Board of Trustees to investigate the benefits of privatizing the town's public library, the trustees concluded they cannot support a decision to privatize the library.
...... The board reported if the town privatized its library, it would be burdened by large unemployment costs, since most libraries around the country that are privatized by the country's primary outsourcer, Library Systems and Service (LSSI), initially layoff all their employees.
Currently, the Germantown, Md.-based LSSI manages 65 privatized libraries in Oregon, Texas, Tennessee and California. The large size of LSSI and its rank as one of the sole outsourcing companies raised some eyebrows among the library trustees, who said they feared this large monopoly put both the town and the trustees in a poor bargaining position.
