Libraries encourage early childhood literacy, provide those without computers access to the Internet, offer databases that can help with everything from job searching to searching for ancestors, and help people stretch their entertainment dollars by lending DVDs and CDs.

They also lend out books. They do all this and more without charge.

For senior citizens on fixed incomes, for children from poor families who don't have the same access to the resources that their better-off fellow students do, and for those struggling to regain a place in the workforce, these services can be vital. For many others, libraries greatly enhance quality of life.

So going after funding for libraries is an odd place to start when balancing a state budget. It doesn't make good fiscal sense. Yet that is what Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has proposed, slashing state aid to libraries by about 30 percent, saving the state $2 million.

That number represents about .01 percent of the proposed $19.7 billion state budget.

The governor's budget would eliminate the Connecticard program. This program allows state residents to use the library card issued by their local library at libraries in other communities. As an incentive for libraries to participate, a library that loans out material to someone from another community receives a 22-cent transaction fee.

Without that state subsidy, many libraries may end their participation. Beholden to the taxpayers or, in the case of private nonprofit libraries, donors, library boards may no longer be able to justify lending out material to people who contribute nothing to operational costs.

Eliminating support for Connecticard will save the state $950,000. Those small savings, in relative terms, do not justify damaging and potentially ending a program that citizens utilized to take out 4.5 million items last year, according to the Connecticut Library Association.

Also slated for elimination is the $332,000 the state spends to provide administrative support for the Connecticut Library Consortium. Formed in 2003, the quasi-public CLC coordinates bulk purchasing of library books and other products, such as research databases and equipment. The Connecticut Library Association estimates the program is saving libraries about $7 million annually, not a bad return on the $332,000 investment.

Gone, too, would be a grant program that encourages local libraries to provide matching contributions for programs, purchases and improvements that help meet their patrons' needs.

According to testimony presented to the Appropriations Committee by State Librarian Kendall F. Wiggin, these cuts would drop Connecticut's ranking in per capita contributions for libraries from 35th to 42nd, with direct aid of just 8 cents per capita. That's embarrassing.

Wiggin also testified that elimination of these programs will result in the loss of $500,000 in federal aid that flows to libraries in the state, causing additional service cuts. And it is not as if libraries have had a free ride up to now as the state sought to balance its books. Current funding is 21 percent below what was appropriated in fiscal-year 2009.

In the interest of full disclosure, my wife, Katherine Choiniere, is a librarian, working at the Slater Library in Jewett City that serves the towns of Lisbon and Griswold. Slater is operated by a nonprofit trust and receives modest subsidies from the towns of Griswold and Lisbon.

No one works at a library to get rich, that is for sure, and I am not writing this to protect my wife's job, which I think is safe.

I'm writing this because people should be aware that in an effort to save a little state money they could experience big reductions in the services they receive with their library cards. It will hit small libraries and patrons on low or fixed incomes hardest. The legislature should save these programs and restore the funds, or at least a substantial portion of them.

Paul Choiniere is the editorial page editor.

Twitter: @Paul_Choiniere