Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

by Amanda Oliver

In 2009, the San Francisco Public Library hired Leah Esguerra as the nation’s first full-time librarian social worker. Esguerra oversees a team of formerly unhoused people who provide peer counseling and outreach at branches around the city.

Only a fire can teach you what survives a fire. No, it teaches you what can survive that fire. —Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments

Any story that cannot accommodate nuances is not interested in truth, but in obscuring it instead. —Lacy M. Johnson, The Reckonings

I had accepted a position as a grader for an undergraduate children’s literature class a professor in my program was teaching. She had asked me to cover one of the lectures for her while she was out of town for an event, and the topic was one I knew well: how librarians select books to purchase for libraries. In preparation, I visited the main branch of the Riverside Public Library system to gather books that had a history of being banned. I wanted to begin the lecture by speaking to students about censorship, and I needed examples.

There were the same stained carpets soaking up years of lingering dust and body odor. There were the familiar black garbage bags of bedding and belongings tucked behind different structures of the building, partially hidden.

I eventually left the library with seven picture books, two of them featuring Black or Brown characters, and got into my car. As soon as I sat down, I started to cry. It was a defeated cry, not a productive one; it didn’t end with any action plan or e-mails to the library manager. I was too disappointed and defeated, not just by the collection, but by being back in the familiar space of a library asking old questions about who and what the space was for.

The next night I stood at the front of a university classroom and propped the books I had collected on a table in front of me. As the forty or so students filed in I encouraged them to flip through the pages. I began the class by asking them to guess which of the titles had been challenged, or banned entirely, from school or public libraries. I saw humor and then confusion and anger pass over students’ faces as I held up the books one by one and said, “This one too.” Every book on the table was one that had been challenged. One incredulous student called out, “Why would people care about whether a penguin is gay?” as I explained the premise of And Tango Makes Three. They were as incensed as I hoped they might be, and I began the lecture.

But school librarians were allowed to order only from specific vendors DCPS had contracts with, limiting the selections I could make even further. I could place book orders only once a year, and oftentimes I reached out to friends, family, and local businesses to donate or fund purchases of books on the student list.

An administrator for DCPL chose certain books each month that all libraries would receive as well. For the most popular releases, we were almost always automatically sent copies that the system purchased for all branches. (This is also how we ended up with multiple copies of popular books—James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy—that took up shelf space after interest and the lengthy hold lists had dwindled.)

This was the first work I engaged in around libraries, post–library work, that I felt positive about. I was learning how to exist in the world as a former librarian and not a working one. Nine years of my life—most of my adulthood—had been focused on becoming and being a librarian, and I had wanted to abandon that knowledge and experience when I arrived in California, to be a student and a writer only. I had wanted a clean separation between the two, and I thought, if anything, the width of the country could probably achieve that. But the library and what I had seen and learned there showed up in my life constantly.

Over the years, I’ve had lengthy conversations with friends, colleagues, and strangers about ways to engage with people, especially unhoused people, that will not take an unnecessary stab at their dignity. Make eye contact, respond when they address you. If you’re going to offer money, it is not your business how they spend it. If you’re going to offer food and they don’t want it, that does not make them ungrateful or a junkie or any other story you assign to them with whatever evidence you think you have. Sometimes an interaction may not end well, just like any interaction with any person. Be aware of your surroundings. Keep phone numbers for local shelters and shuttle services and emergency mental health care advocates in your phone. Ask if they’d like you to call someone for them. Stop and check if someone is breathing if you see them unmoving in a way that does not look like sleep.

When I pulled away from the drive-through that day, I felt something beyond the familiar senses of not helping, of being complicit within a country that has failed to adequately create solutions to provide livable housing for all its citizens. I felt what I had been avoiding: the ways I had failed at being a librarian. The many unhoused patrons at Northwest One whom I had never been able to help secure housing. The mistakes I had made. The times I did not intervene or intervened in ways that were harmful to others.

At my librarian baseline, I wanted to provide access to resources and accurate information to anyone who needed or wanted it. And I wanted anyone who entered any library where I worked to feel safe asking me. What was harder to face was that some of my actions, or inactions, twisted the fate of others. It didn’t matter whether that occurred because of a conscious or unconscious possession of power—it mattered that it happened.

I could not create space for looking at what I had done wrong—the times I had been impatient or unkind, the times I had not considered cultural difference, the times I had monitored areas of the library at length from a surveillance camera because someone was new and unfamiliar, the ways I had potentially harmed my coworkers, the unending list of minor and major interpersonal transgressions—because the reckoning and the subsequent guilt felt awful.

From childhood to now, the library has been my most difficult—most demanding and present—teacher.

I finally became curious about what public libraries could teach us about American society, once I had physical and emotional distance from the space where I had observed it. I started to see the library not necessarily as a failing solution or a shoddy fix-all, but rather as information about American society and culture. I started to think about how the American public library might move forward differently, and then how it might be one great teacher in how we move forward as a country.

I stopped permitting myself so much time to think about me and started to think about we again. This only happened because I had the time, space, health insurance, and money that I needed to comfortably and safely reflect. My physical and mental health were not as directly on the line in California, away from libraries. I could dig into librarianship, and libraries, without so many of my own agonizing emotions attached.

As my father often said to us growing up, the fact remains that you have to do what you have to do to keep a roof over your head and food on the table.

IN OCTOBER OF 2013, author Neil Gaiman published an edited version of a lecture he gave in 2012 in the Guardian with the title “Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming.” It evoked familiar refrains of why libraries are so valuable as safe community spaces and repositories of information that give equal access to all citizens, noting that they provide “a haven from the world.”

Two days after the 2016 US presidential election, the Los Angeles Times ran a column titled “How to Weather the Trump Administration: Head to the Library.” Penned by David Kipen, the former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, it read, in part: “Even now, in this riven country, after this whole entropically hideous year, most Americans still agree on at least one institution. Mercifully, it’s the one that may just save us: the public library.”

In September of 2020, the New York Times published an opinion piece with the headline “How Libraries Can Save the 2020 Election.” It noted that libraries are among our last trusted institutions and that expanding early voting at local branches may be the best hope for future trusted election outcomes.

The president and chief executive of the New York Public Library, Anthony Marx, was cited in a September 2020 New York Times article as saying, “Given that the country is tearing itself apart, perhaps libraries can help to repair our civic fabric.”

In late March of 2020, the Atlantic published a story for part of their Our Towns series that began by stating that America’s public libraries have “led the ranks of ‘second responders.’”

“[Librarians] say that occasionally people are placed on ‘sabbatical’ from the libraries for infringements and are sometimes referred to public places where they can take showers. None have reported serious incidents to me, which suggests that respect is mutual.”

It is essentially second responders who pick up the pieces after the initial shattering. And though it’s probably not the first profession to come to mind, librarians often play the role of both first and second responder in their work, not just second responder.

Another common crisis that occurs in library spaces is a patron suffering a psychotic episode. A librarian may press a panic button, or otherwise call for help, but again, they are responsible for managing the situation while additional help is on the way. The librarian may attempt to calm the patron and keep space between them and others in case they behave violently, and a librarian may also utilize de-escalation skills they have formally or informally been trained in. This work of being both first and second responder is often missing in conversations about the daily challenges facing librarians in the field.

The 2020 Fallows Atlantic piece includes conjecture that libraries were positively acting and improvising in response to the coronavirus pandemic, noting that libraries would not understand the impact the pandemic had on them until later when “they’ll be figuring out what the experience means to their future operations and their role in American communities.”8 This implication that libraries were stepping up in ways they never had before is true. But this has less to do with libraries never responding to crises before and more to do with the global impact of this specific crisis, the first global pandemic in the lifetime of American public libraries.

In 2005, the year of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) representative in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, said plainly, “Libraries are not essential services.” And yet all evidence pointed to the contrary. One survey found that in the months following the hurricanes half of all respondents and 40 percent of people interviewed used libraries in New Orleans for reasons including Internet access, information and technology assistance, mental escape, and refuge.9 Participants also discussed how the destruction of libraries added to their sense of loss, and the eventual restoration of libraries gave them a sense of hope.10

As part of the Stafford Act of 2010, FEMA now recognizes libraries among essential services, adding them to a category that includes police, fire protection/emergency services, medical care, education, and utilities. But this designation was made without a clear understanding of how libraries should support their communities, which has sometimes led to confusion in subsequent emergencies, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Critics and culture writers certainly aren’t the only ones banking on libraries’ and librarians’ abilities to compensate for our lack of sustainable social safety nets and infrastructure. Libraries and librarians are used to working in these capacities, in the unpredicted and unpredictable. They have regularly responded to crises without any established protocol for how to best do so, relying instead on their skills and intimate knowledge of their communities to anticipate needs, and reevaluate them, as time passes. And whereas emergency teams, government agencies, and first responders will eventually withdraw, libraries and librarians remain there in the community, helping to pick up the pieces and assist with related needs for years to come. In many cases, crises have caused library systems, libraries, and librarians to undergo a paradigm shift, with a revision of services and development of innovative ways to work more efficiently and effectively. All of this comes with immense labor and potential conflicts among librarians and library systems as all try to determine new best practices.

During the height of the AIDS pandemic, the West Hollywood branch library in Los Angeles was specifically chosen as the site for a collection of resources about AIDS because it was felt that there would be less of a potential stigma for patrons entering a public library than going to an AIDS facility for information.12 Other libraries in the area worked with AIDS activist groups, created ongoing displays, and distributed pamphlets and other informational material.

In New York City after the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers, branch and research libraries stayed open, an act that many considered a reassuring symbol to the community. Reading rooms were packed with people in search of not just information, but a sense of community, safety, and some slice of normalcy. In a January 2002 editorial in American Libraries, editor in chief Leonard Kniffel wrote that “knowing that an anti-Muslim backlash was inevitable, [the librarians] created programs to help the patrons of their libraries understand the teachings of Islam, the history of American policy related to the conflict we now find ourselves in, and what it means to be a Muslim in America.”13

One librarian noted that “the most important thing during the unrest was that all the library staff stayed neutral towards the whole situation. All patrons, whether they were protestors or against protesting, were welcome to visit the library, use its resources and facilities, and request help and assistance from the staff, who tried to avoid talking about politics.” Another staff member noted that “when some patrons felt disenfranchised with the community and the government, we were trying to be the one government entity that people could trust at that time.”14

At a minimum, library and librarian responses to civil unrest have helped ease some of the trauma, tension, and fear within communities simply by remaining open to the public and providing a familiar sense of normalcy. As another FMPL library employee put it, “If you need to make a photocopy, you can still go to your library even though it seems like the whole world is falling apart around you, you can still do the thing that you need to do to make it through your day.”15

And many libraries expanded general services like online renewal policies and reference services, increased online programming, and added curbside and contactless library hold pickups.

Librarians are clearly key contributors to community resiliency. It is easy to see how everyone from newspaper columnists to everyday citizens believes in the possibility of libraries saving us, even as what we need saving from constantly changes and grows.

There is a similarly long list of recent articles to the ones I opened this chapter with that question the future of public libraries and if they have one at all. Will libraries as public spaces remain relevant given our increasing reliance on digital data? If so, can librarians sustain the evolving changes of what it means to be a librarian? Will libraries withstand the move to privatize so many of our public institutions? Do people even still go to libraries?

Every few months, a friend sends me some version of a notion they’ve seen in a tweet or other social media post: if public libraries were invented today, our society and government would never let them happen. My response is this: I don’t think we would be here, period, without public libraries.

There is a reason that libraries have existed in some form as far back as the seventh century BC and that philosophers, historians, monarchs, peasants, and any other category of human beings we have created have turned to them for guidance, entertainment, and a sense of place in the world. They provide answers. They preserve history. They mark our humanness, our present, our past, our future.

One of the most prevalent oppositions to the necessity of libraries that people voice is the development and advancement of technology. In these instances, I would point people to link rot. Link rot is the tendency of Internet links over time to no longer direct to their originally intended content or to break altogether. We might consider the Internet as one giant library that is managed by no one person, or groups of persons, in particular. As Google itself puts it on its page titled “How Search Organizes Information”: “The web is like an ever-growing library with billions of books and no central filing system.”19 While this is cited and celebrated as one of its greatest qualities—the overall freedom of speech and expression, of democracy and grassroots perseverance, that the Internet allows for and fosters—it has also altered how we preserve our histories. Never have our recorded histories been more susceptible to erasure, compromise, and deletion in ways that physical libraries are not because they are run by living, breathing librarians who maintain them. As Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard, writes: “Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a ‘sharing economy’ for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It’s no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be—espec...

Zittrain has extensively examined and consciously critiqued the Internet for years now and has identified many faults to how we organize and protect the integrity of online information. At perhaps his most cautious he warns about the inevitable susceptibility of e-books and similar forms of publishing to become new areas for censorship, noting that suing writers for defamation has become far easier. He uses the example of rereading a favorite passage of a favorite book that has undergone a slight tweak on a Kindle, how the reader experiences “only a nagging feeling that it isn’t quite how one remembers it.” Such examples already exist, with authors requesting that ...

to the people who stop to sip the cool library water fountain like a sacred routine,

“I’ve found myself becoming more cynical and jaded as a librarian. I also find it disheartening that so few people outside the library realize just how much library workers put up with. It’s like a dirty secret people are fearful to talk about. We have to put on this happy, cheery facade of ‘everything is fine’ for fear of what? Losing public funding? I can’t even decompress and share the horrors of my experience with nonlibrary people because the attitude is ‘you read books all day, how bad can it be.’”

The set of survey responses that rattled me most came in response to the question “If you are no longer a librarian/library worker, why did you leave?” As I was reading through the gathered answers on an Excel spreadsheet, I spotted two of the same responses and assumed someone had submitted their answers twice. When I looked closer, I realized that two librarians from entirely different systems—one in western New York, the other in rural Illinois—had answered the question with the exact same words, in the exact same order: “I felt unsupported, I felt burned out, I felt unsafe.”

I sent the survey out during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and even though I was nearing two full years outside the profession, I was angry at the prospect of public libraries reopening during a pandemic before it was safe, without proper supplies and support. I was angry that librarians were being asked to put their bodies on the line in more and more ways. Angry that my writing about libraries had been called “dark” and “too pessimistic” by editors and publishers.

To better understand how and why libraries respond to crises, it is important to understand that there is something of a rift among librarians and that they can, for the most part, be broken into two groups. Group one believes library professionals sign up to be in deep service to their community and understand that they may be called on as second, and sometimes first, responders. Group two believes they signed up to be information professionals and protectors of freedom of speech, not emergency responders. There is plenty of crossover between these two philosophies, but every librarian I know or have interviewed leans one way more than the other. Emergencies of any kind are often the way to see where a person sits on this spectrum.