Libraries, Archives, and all things Bookish...

[apl68]

Our state held a small face-to-face children's services workshop for the first time since COVID just last week.  One of our staff attended that.  They're supposed to have another one this fall.

We have a major annual event that we hold in conjunction with the local schools scheduled for this afternoon.  We'll be hosting student and local artist art exhibits, music, games, and food trucks.  We've got a team of teachers in the building right now working on the setup.  I took a couple of minutes to glance at the art on display.  Some of it is pretty impressive.

Unfortunately the weather seems likely to depress turnout.  It looks very rainy, and likely will rain by this afternoon.  We'd already postponed the event once due to fears of rain, and it didn't rain then.  Looks like the planning team zigged when they should have zagged.  Here's hoping for the best in a few hours.

[apl68]

Our event has now begun, and the rain situation looks good at the moment.  We've even been seeing a bit of actual sun.  The food trucks have arrived, the school buses are shuttling people from the school parking lot, and parents and children are touring the art exhibits.  So far, so good.

[hmaria1609]

We had a local public charter school come to the library for a community outreach event today. We were the hosting venue.

[apl68]

We had a local public charter school come to the library for a community outreach event today. We were the hosting venue.

That sounds great!  We're still trying to persuade our schools to resume visits to the library that went out with COVID.  The almost total lack of cooperation between the library and the schools over the past four years has hurt us both.

The only cooperative ventures we've had have been those annual outdoor events, such as the one we had yesterday.  It's planned by teachers and features student art and music, and other local art and music, and is hosted at the library.  This time things went without a hitch.  We had attendance in the upper hundreds at least.  Everybody seemed to be having a good time.  The vendors I spoke with were satisfied with their experience.  As I type, I hear a team of teachers out in the main area taking down the student art.

[hmaria1609]

To add, the local public charter school is moving out from their current location to a new one so they're on a community tour to promote the school. We happened to be the hosting venue for their community meeting.

Apl68, I'm sorry that your children's staff hasn't been able to reconnect and collaborate with their peers in the school system.

[apl68]

To add, the local public charter school is moving out from their current location to a new one so they're on a community tour to promote the school. We happened to be the hosting venue for their community meeting.

Apl68, I'm sorry that your children's staff hasn't been able to reconnect and collaborate with their peers in the school system.

Public libraries can be a great way to promote a school, and vice versa. 

We held a long post-mortem meeting with the teacher team while they were here yesterday.  We came up with several ways to make next year's event even better.  We also tried to start a conversation about re-integrating the public library into the schools' efforts to promote literacy.  Since parents have almost totally abandoned the public library post-COVID, reading has become something that children are hardly exposed to outside of school.  Which means they're coming to regard it the way they do math--as something they do only when forced to in school. 

Hence our district's truly disastrous recent literacy benchmark scores.  A few months ago the assistant superintendent of the district announced at Rotary Club that they were planning a new literacy push.  It was literally the first that I and our outreach staff member who attend Rotary regularly had heard of it.  It never even entered their heads that the public library would make a useful community partner in promoting literacy.  We're now trying to work our teacher allies to get us into the planning process for next year's literacy push.  Since the district is under the gun on raising their literacy scores, they have no choice about making a renewed literacy push.  If they don't start involving us and other community partners, they're going to continue to fail.

[Langue_doc]

The main libraries in all the boroughs used to be open all seven days. Now it's down to six days, and very soon the hours are going to be cut further to five days a week. Our elected representatives need to get their heads from out of their behinds so that the city doesn't sink down to the level of countries that people are fleeing, for good reasons.

[apl68]

While visiting my parents last Monday, I tried going to the library in the county seat to speak with the librarian.  She's an acquaintance of mine who happens to live not far from my grandmother's old house.  Anyway, I saw that they are now only open five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday.  It did not surprise me, given that that county library has had major budget problems for several years now. 

A previous librarian seems to have retired on the job and let the old building rack up many years' worth of deferred maintenance, apparently on the theory that she could make it last long enough for her to retire and let it be somebody else's problem.  Her immediate successor spent some year-end money to cover the most urgent repairs, only to learn too late that the "year-end money" was actually the entire operating reserve her predecessor had left her.  What's sad is that the town's voters supported some quite substantial civic improvements not too many years earlier, but the old librarian seems to have made no effort to get the library included in that.  An institution's leaders just can't afford to miss a rare opportunity like that.  The current librarian has little prospect of getting the community investment she needs to keep running in today's climate.

I've been trying to think about what day we could close--we're currently open six days a week--to make the best use of a reduced staff if and when we have to reduce staff hours.  This will probably become necessary before many more years, simply because the local economy and property tax revenues are declining long-term.

[kaysixteen]

Have you gotten any sense that, in your ruralish red state community, public support for the very *idea* of a public library and its offerings, has itself dimimished, irrespective of available funding?

[apl68]

No, I get more the sense that people have come to think of the library the way they often think of the local churches.  They're all for them, they just don't see much reason to go there themselves, unless there's some particular help they want, or some spectacular event that looks interesting.  The real enemy in both cases is apathy, not hostility.  In both cases it's a mindset that's honestly hard for me to understand, since I'm passionate about both types of institution.  But that's bucking the trend.

I've done a lot of soul searching over the years, wondering what I could have done differently to produce a different outcome.  Is it because I've failed to be as enterprising and talented as some of my more successful colleagues elsewhere?  Or have I just never been able to take advantage of the same perfect storm of opportunities that they've had? The most successful libraries have been in regions that have other things going for them as well.

The more I compare our library to those of other small towns in economically depressed areas, the more I've come to conclude that it's mostly the latter.  Our libraries are declining mainly because our communities are declining--declining in more ways than one.  As much as I wish it were otherwise, the library can't really do much to stem the general decline.