#83 - Why Libraries Will Continue to Thrive

"...the public library is what represents the best of America and the Democratic ideal to me."

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!

Hello, my friends,

Phew! Even though there’s been nothing especially notable about this week, I’m tired! I’ve been dropping dead to sleep early and feeling so-so upon waking. Maybe I’m fighting something that’s been going around, maybe it’s just my body acclimating to the dramatic change in temperatures here in Los Angeles: Going from up past the hundreds to perfect sunny 70s mere days apart.

In other news, homework has started for Michael (who entered kindergarten nearly a month ago). The handouts he's been assigned are simple and optional, but I feel like it’s not too early to build study habits. Thankfully, dutiful Michael has no negative connotations with homework and has seemed to enjoy ending his evening working practicing shapes, colors, and letters, followed by a little reading (by me, not him, for now). Personally, I’m happy to sit with him while he works. Not sure if there’s a 15 minutes better spent.

“Excited reading” (1889) by Carl Zewy

Why Libraries Will Continue to Thrive

There’s this meme going around, not the kind with an image and a clever caption, but the kind that Webster’s New World College Dictionary defined as “a concept, belief, or practice conceived as a unit of cultural information that may be passed on from person to person, subject to influences in a way analogous to natural selection.” (h/t to this NY Times article for the definition). This meme that libraries are always fighting for survival, just on this side of extinction. I hear sparks of this social “fact” when I talk to rideshare drivers, friends in tech, and even other library people. The latter often fall into an apologist rhetoric to convince others that libraries are relevant (“We’re important, please believe us !”). As a library worker who has written well over 100k words about libraries during the past decade or more, and someone who has seen the mission of libraries as an institution play out daily for over two decades, I can assure you that libraries will continue to thrive!

You might be asking, have they been thriving? How do you know? Well, public libraries in the United States see hundreds of millions of visits every year according to the annual Public Libraries Survey and numerous surveys and studies have shown that over half of Americans have library cards. Yet, many ignore the clear-as-day numbers that demonstrate library usage because why use libraries when the world wide web exists, and e-books. There’s no need to go to the library…Hold on there, hass, I say. Pull the reins back a sec. We’re over thirty years past the creation of the first web browser and as I wrote back in 2017, “Between 1990 and 2014, visits to public libraries grew by a whopping 181%. For context, the population of the United States increased by 28% during that period.” So during the first two and a half decades of the internet, library visits actually increased by a lot? Yes they did. And e-books? You’ll be interested to know that I checked out my first one from a library back in like 2004 when we had them available for your desktop computer and the Sony Reader. Years before Kindles became commonplace.

Yet despite cold, hard facts, the meme of library demise persists! Why? I suspect it has to do with the same reason national political elections are such cesspools — most people don’t truly care about facts; A guy can read the paragraph above about the robust library usage numbers and blithely maintain that libraries are on the way out. I’ve spoken to this person over and over, and to be honest, I like most of them. Everyone’s got opinions! But you know who I also listen to? The 403 people that came to my Zoom class on Google Docs last Tuesday morning and watched me futz around explaining a word processing app for over two hours! I listen to the thousands of people that came my programs when I worked at library locations — the chess club that drew 50 people every week, the writers’ group that still meets a decade later, the ukulele group that launched several local bands. Think about it, there are around 17,000 public library outlets in the U.S., each of them with folks to listen to!

A point that is easy to miss here, however, is that libraries often serve people who have no voice or are still finding theirs. While we have something for everyone, libraries will continue to thrive because there will always be people who need help. Going beyond the provision of materials and information access, the library has met the needs of communities nationwide by stepping, for better or worse, into the role of a social service provider. Libraries around the country are hubs for tax preparation services, vaccine clinics, resource fairs for the unhoused, workforce development hubs helping job seekers. Some large urban libraries have social workers on-staff. Public libraries were founded on meeting social needs and have evolved for the past two centuries as those needs have evolved. In my opinion, this ability to adapt is the key to our success. Whereas books and information access has remained at the core of libraries, nearly everything else has progressed. “The library is a growing organism” Ranganathan wrote. “God is change,” added Octavia Butler.

But look, I’m flying off into the clouds. The Octavia Butler quote is from her books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, books I checked out from the library. Above, I talked about listening to all of my library neighbors, people that I love, but when it comes to libraries I also listen to myself. When my family came to the United States from Ukraine (it was still the Soviet Union at the time), our local library was a miracle. My father took us every week and my brother and I got stacks of books and magazines, participated in programs, and soaked up what it was to be active, literate people. The library staff were kind to us even though they didn’t have to be. Just as Hannah Kramer, the senior librarian and my first library mentor, didn’t have to fight for a Russian language collection for the Soviet Jewish immigrants that peopled her neighborhood, but she did.

Growing up, the public library was the main government entity that we interacted with. It represented the United States even as we were sworn in as citizens years later. Even today, though I’m well aware of the interlocking government jurisdictions that surround us, with their plethora of departments and bureaucratic enterprises, the public library is what represents the best of America and the Democratic ideal to me. Show up exactly as you are and no one will ask you to leave. Learn a language or rest your legs, both are good. Say hello to me and we can talk about books. Stay awhile.

“Missão/Missões [Mission/Missions] (How to Build Cathedrals)” (1987) by Cildo Meireles

Time Machine

Here’s what I wrote in HMF a year ago (in issue #30):

• The Challenge of Microlearning: Highlighting the importance of challenge level in microlearning.

• 30 Minutes Later: The silver lining of a work schedule change.

• Getting Lost at Target: Revealing my inability to find stuff at giant stores, and a special talent to memorize the location of objects.

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