The Last Public Spaces

June 16, 2023 7:45 AM

Have You Been to the Library Lately?
posted by stp123 (37 comments total)

Another article on homelessness leading with the vantage point of housed people.
posted by splitpeasoup at 7:51 AM on June 16, 2023 [10 favorites]

And another article on libraries that does its level best to increase awareness of library/librarian stereotypes while supposedly "refuting" them.

I wish I (as a librarian myself) didn't have to be so angry at so many journalists. Journalism and librarianship have a number of points of agreement. But journalists as a whole have done incredible damage to librarianship. I dearly wish they'd stop.
posted by humbug at 8:05 AM on June 16, 2023 [30 favorites]

Also a librarian: This article pulls in two different directions. One, acknowledging that libraries are often called to substitute for the failures of a social safety net. And two: the rosy emotional glow of love for libraries. Love for libraries doesn't pay the bills or operational costs... or help fund the fraying social safety net.

See also: vocational awe.

"Last public space?" this view just makes me angry and sad... Why isn't it a push to make more, better funded public spaces.
Sigh.
posted by SaharaRose at 8:16 AM on June 16, 2023 [31 favorites]

12 years ago Dr Lauren Smith compiled a list of tasks carried out by public librarians and library staff. At the end of the list there's a stack of comments containing examples of more things that librarians, and others who work in a library, do.

The list is still relevant now, and there's probably a lot of new/contemporary tasks which could be added. It gives a more rounded (and less ignorant or stereotypical) view of the wide array of functions provided by libraries.
posted by Wordshore at 8:35 AM on June 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

The rise of the internet meant that one of the reference librarian’s main functions could now be done with the click of a mouse.

I can't decide if this is an incredibly optimistic vision of how the internet works or an incredibly incomplete vision of how reference librarians work.
posted by box at 8:54 AM on June 16, 2023 [37 favorites]

They closed my local library many years ago.
posted by bifurcated at 8:57 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I can't decide if this is an incredibly optimistic vision of how the internet works or an incredibly incomplete vision of how reference librarians work.

Are you suggesting that the internet doesn't provide access to information, or that reference librarians didn't provide access to information?
posted by zamboni at 9:05 AM on June 16, 2023

I’m an old fart who has been going to public libraries nearly once a week since childhood. When Covid shut things down that stopped. But like a year ago, the libraries here in San Francisco finally reopened. Hooray! So I started going back. Prior to Covid, there would be lines of people waiting to get in when the library opens to grab a computer. Hey, everybody has a right to check their email. There were clearly social problems there. SF was, I think, the first public library with a staff social worker. But the library was alive, there were both new and old books to discover. But after Covid, and being open for about a year, the library seems dead. Almost all the computers are gone, infection vectors I suppose, and the new books are far less numerous or interesting. And there seems to be far more security people than customers. A friend of mine has been working in a library system in the South Bay for over thirty years. They have seen these changes up close. The books are disappearing. No more reference books. Culling the herd in the stacks increasing. And the management by librarians seems to be changing to management by business people. Libraries, as a social institution, are dying in this country. Lack of financial support, lack of effective social support, an endemic problem here for years, leaves us with a huge building with more security people than librarians. I’ve been self-sufficient in libraries for years, but who is going to be there to introduce the magic of the library to kids and adults new to the experience? Library staff are suffering as well as the customers. Civic powers don’t seem to care. I don’t have any solutions. But to all the library staff who helped bring that magic into my life, thank you.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:17 AM on June 16, 2023 [21 favorites]

Are you suggesting that the internet doesn't provide access to information, or that reference librarians didn't provide access to information?

Not speaking for box, but I think that the words "access" and "information" are doing an incredible amount of work to support this comparison.
posted by gauche at 9:22 AM on June 16, 2023 [15 favorites]

It is so, so saddening and enraging how much public discourse is -- frankly -- wasted on discussing these endpoint symptoms of a fundamentally broken social and economic system. What social services can offered at libraries? Should public restrooms at parks be expanded or closed? How can we manage Hep A outbreaks in our cities? How can we beg or borrow funding to open a tiny fraction of the needed shelter beds? Publicly funded rehabs or safe injection sites? Should people be forced to accept help? Around and around in circles discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin shifting around an inadequate and yet still dwindling pittance of public funding and hamstrung, strings-attached nonprofit grants.

8 vacant homes exist in the US for every unhoused person, and I'm sure the ratio is similar in Canada.
We throw away enough food every month to feed the world for a year.
The people who control the economy insist that we continue to do things in a way that concentrates resources and demands immense poverty and suffering.

I am sick to death of these head-scratchers about completely artificial problems. I am sick to death of supposedly-progressive people going along with the lies that because of some numbers and words a handful of rich white dudes wrote down once, the best we can do is try to raise some awareness and be more frugal with our tiny drop of public resources.

Our neighbors, friends, families, and selves are suffering and dying, year after year, generation after generation, so a few hundred soft, weak morons can add another digit to their fucking ledgers and we're actually arguing about how many social workers should be at a fucking branch library?

IT IS TIME. It is PAST time. It was time in 1916. It was time in the 1930s. It was time in the 1960s. It was time Summer of 2020. Stop "well, actually"ing. Stop bringing up why you, personally, can't participate. Stop demanding that every little tiny ideological nitpick be addressed first. Stop claiming that things are slightly less bad for your pet group while one wing of the monsters is in charge than the other. The world is chained to a machine that is fueled by blood and misery, barreling towards extinction and we have less than 12 years to stop it. The people at the controls are weak and stupid and vanishingly few. STOP IT.
posted by Krawczak at 9:28 AM on June 16, 2023 [61 favorites]

My local library here in Chicago doesn't really have a browsable book collection anymore. I used to occasionally check the new releases shelf just to see what random stuff was there but a remodel seems to have removed all book displays and now there is just books shelved along the outer wall of the second floor. Maybe about 1/8 of what was there pre-reno at most and the majority is now young children's book. The new building serves the new primary functions of the library: It has a massive wide open room resembling a gym studio that gets use for children's events and election voting. There are lots of tables, laptop sign-outs and free wifi. It has the only public toilets not in a park in the area. There is also a portable defibrillator, a gunshot wound treatment kit and a naloxone kit. It really is the front line for delivery of city services.

That said Chicago's library collection is pretty good and almost always has the books I want as physical books and as ebooks. However the experience of just browsing for some serendipitous finds appears to be gone which I worry about given the endless SEO garbage that searching for stuff returns these days and the general shallowness of most information on the internet.
posted by srboisvert at 9:29 AM on June 16, 2023 [14 favorites]

I refuse to stop fighting for my profession because you think it's unimportant, Krawczak. Sorry.

It doesn't mean I don't also fight for other things, of course.
posted by humbug at 9:52 AM on June 16, 2023 [13 favorites]

I refuse to stop fighting for my profession because you think it's unimportant

Attempting to characterize my comment as suggesting that librarians are "unimportant" is precisely the kind of smug, liberal bad-faith pseudo-nuance I'm so deeply sick of. Obviously, I think that librarians and other educators are amongst the most important social roles a person can have. Just as obviously, I am talking about the genre of social-problem beard-strokers that willfully ignore the blindingly obvious root causes of their subjects.

But you know what? Yeah. In the kind of major social upheaval that will be required to, y'know, SAVE FUCKING HUMANITY, you personally actually might lose your job. People might be inconvenienced in all sorts of ways, or even be hurt! I bet a lot of people might think that was even an acceptable cost to stop greasing the wheels of the apocalypse death-trolley with the fat of poor babies.

This is clearly a derail (of the aforementioned global trolley problem) so I'll step out of the thread now.
posted by Krawczak at 10:06 AM on June 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Fixing libraries means more funding to bring up staffing levels to give workers the support they need. But it also means doing things that are much more difficult: building more social housing, hiring more social workers, investing in mental health workers, schools, community centres, and everything else needed to address problems before they reach the library’s doors. Libraries have proven themselves to be incredibly adaptative, contorting themselves into various shapes to serve the needs of their communities.

As with everyone else who is on the ground trying to deal with our overlords' decision to kill the poor through neglect, they're in a terrible place. If they stop hiring social workers, the state won't hire any more social workers. If they stop connecting people with services, those people will not be connected with services. I mean, Toronto, as I understand from internet friends, is basically gutting its public health system right now. There is no help coming. You really can break a society if you try hard enough, that's what the rich have figured out.

It comes up with every mutual aid project (or whatever; low barrier helping groups) - people need more than what you plan to provide, often in unpredictable and complex ways. And if not you, then who? Unfortunately, a lot of the time it's no one. Sometimes that means you scramble and succeed, sometimes you scramble and fail, sometimes you turn people away. There's a narrative that if people get told no in one place they'll figure out how to solve their problems elsewhere, but that is not at all the case.

~~
I don't go to libraries much anymore because they no longer focus on books and they are not quiet. They're community centers. This used to bother me, but I've decided that's just what is needed right now. Books and quiet are worthwhile; they are not replaced by the internet, noisy gathering spaces, social media, video games, etc. But books and quiet are luxury products for the few right now. Sashimi is a worthwhile and delicious thing, too, but if you have a lot of people out there starving then the food budget needs to go on bread and cheese.
posted by Frowner at 10:19 AM on June 16, 2023 [21 favorites]

But books and quiet are luxury products for the few right now. Sashimi is a worthwhile and delicious thing, too, but if you have a lot of people out there starving then the food budget needs to go on bread and cheese.

I see your point, but I think framing things like books and quiet as "luxuries" may lead people to infer that these are things that should not be provided for public use, or at least should not be pursued alongside more basic, important amenities. But small luxuries lend color and dignity to a life otherwise lived on a subsistence budget! "Give us bread but give us roses"—surely there is space to advocate for books and quiet alongside essential social services?
posted by the tartare yolk at 10:56 AM on June 16, 2023 [15 favorites]

… I think that the words "access" and "information" are doing an incredible amount of work to support this comparison.

Sure, let’s revisit the article text:

The rise of the internet meant that one of the reference librarian’s main functions could now be done with the click of a mouse.

(emphasis added.)

Reference librarians provide invaluable services, but you cannot convince me there is zero redundancy between the services provided by a 1970s ref librarian and a fully armed and operational modern internet.
posted by zamboni at 11:07 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

On the "books as luxuries" front - my feeling is that most people just don't want books, especially physical books that are mostly print, very much - this is doubly and trebly true for anything written before about 2000 or written in difficult language. I think that's a shame because I think that reading a physical copy of a book is the best, most intense and most memorable way to read, and I think there are things that long-form writing does that film, games, music, short-form writing, etc cannot. But I don't think most people find the unique things that books do very interesting or worthwhile, and my impression is that as literacy changes, people are finding it harder and harder to read books, especially older books with longer sentences and older prose styles. Physical copies of prose books for adults (as opposed to books of images and art books) are getting more like opera - something that is so irrelevant to the majority that it is difficult to justify sinking a lot of money into the service.
posted by Frowner at 11:12 AM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I mean, books as a mass commodity - that's a really new thing! In Europe and the US, ordinary people owning and reading more than a few religious or instructional texts is a matter of what, the past 175 years? Books rose, now they're falling.
posted by Frowner at 11:14 AM on June 16, 2023

people are finding it harder and harder to read books, especially older books with longer sentences

Citation needed.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:35 AM on June 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Citation needed? Do a search on “decline in reading skills” and it’s all over the place.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:13 PM on June 16, 2023

As to the reference librarian versus the internet… A reference librarian is trained to know the good sources of information. Somebody with a computer and a search engine is at the whim of whoever paid to have their links come up first. Internet searches are a minefield. Most of the time, here on the blue, people seem to spend more time either pointing out or complaining about all the garbage out on the internets, rather than sharing good things people might not know about. Cat pictures don’t count.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:23 PM on June 16, 2023 [11 favorites]

The article is not saying a modern ref librarian can be replaced by Google, it’s asserting that one of the functions provided by a pre-internet ref librarian is also available from the modem internet.
posted by zamboni at 12:56 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

We moved from Katy back to Houston earlier this year. The difference in library systems is like night and day. Finding parking at the Cinco Library was often challenging, and I enjoyed grazing their collection. Both the Houston libraries near us are quiet, and all their music's downtown for some reason. The library in the Heights is pretty, but seems incomplete? I remember wandering around, wondering where the rest of it is.
Sigh.
posted by Spike Glee at 12:56 PM on June 16, 2023

It may be past time for a number of things but say that to the security guard and see how far you get. Until you've figured that one out, hold your tongue.
posted by kingdead at 2:08 PM on June 16, 2023

it’s asserting that one of the functions provided by a pre-internet ref librarian is also available from the modem internet.

The statement literally says that a main function of the reference librarian can be replaced with the click of a mouse, and that's just not true in an Internet that is chock full of misinformation. Unless we take that "main function" to be "spewing out a lot of garbage information in response to a question." I take the point of the article, but it is a point poorly made and poorly elaborated upon. A relatively sophisticated level of information literacy is necessary to assure that you are getting good information from Internet sources, and a reference librarian can provide that in a way that a "click of a mouse" can not.

Can you articulate exactly what that "main function" that can be replaced actually is?
posted by pahool at 2:14 PM on June 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Wow—if this is in Canada, I hope the writer doesn’t come to LA.
posted by Ideefixe at 2:57 PM on June 16, 2023

I don't go to libraries much anymore because they no longer focus on books and they are not quiet.

That's interesting. I still go to the library all the time, because my library has lots of books that I want to read. I definitely don't want to downplay some of the issues that the article raises, but it has not been my experience that libraries are neglecting their original mission. And while it's a complete tragedy that libraries have to be the social service provider of last resort, I don't think that's what's going on with a lot of non-book stuff that happens at libraries. I'm actually fine with the genealogy group/ teen gaming night/ maker space stuff. I *like* going to get books at a place that feels like lots of different people are using it for lots of different functions. To me, that's a separate issue from the fact that library workers are having to try desperately to compensate for the vanishing social safety net.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 3:57 PM on June 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

Can you articulate exactly what that "main function" that can be replaced actually is?

What I’m trying to get across is that helping assess information quality is a function that has become more important post internet, but is not the only service a ref librarian provides. Here’s the intro from a 2018 RUSA article that may help illustrate things.

Historically, reference, liaison, and subject librarians performed the role of connecting people to the information they needed in a visible way, sitting behind a reference desk or, since the 1970s, in front of a classroom full of students for information literacy instruction. Even the presence of print reference collections indicated the librarians who worked with those materials. As fewer reference librarians sit at public desks, as face-to-face instruction moves partially or entirely online, and as users simply click through a Google search to get to the information they need, how do academic reference librarians continue to be visible and connected to the students and faculty they are supposed to be helping?

posted by zamboni at 5:14 PM on June 16, 2023

I went to a panel at a recent conference about legal services in the library, and the ways that the legal community can reach out to underserved communities via libraries. In my state (US, apologies for the lack of Canadian experience!), that's partly accomplished by training frontline library staff in typical legal forms, resources to point people to, and how to assess if a problem is a legal problem. But it's also about pointing out to the legal community that libraries are eager to help connect people in need of legal services to people who can provide them. Lawyer in the library programs aren't typically library funded, but provided by a legal aid service and hosted by the library. They're still a bandaid on a wound that needs stitches, of course, but at least it's an effort by other organizations to lend resources to "the last public space."

It's absolutely true that we need larger systemic change to address issues that libraries and social services providers are scrambling to try to address. But that's a both/and proposition. We need to keep addressing the problems we can where we can, because there's never going to be a time when social problems are solved.

“Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.” We need to advocate for better funding for libraries, and support library worker unions, and demand better funding for social services and eviction prevention and mental health. All/and. Do what you can.
posted by the primroses were over at 5:26 PM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is a surprisingly noisy and fighty thread about Canadian librarians!

We throw away enough food every month to feed the world for a year.
The people who control the economy insist that we continue to do things in a way that concentrates resources and demands immense poverty and suffering.

I'm with you in spirit, but some of these "facts"...?

Is there food waste? Yes! But to claim the world throws away 12x as much food as it eats every month is a bit of a stretch.

I contacted a reference librarian (named "Google" ) and it sounds like nobody agrees, but perhaps 15%-50% of worldwide food is wasted. Not 1200%.

I used to enjoy browsing for books in my local library, and stopped due to COVID. I was looking forward to resuming this activity but it sounds like it's no fun? I hope my local library isn't like this...
posted by soylent00FF00 at 5:55 PM on June 16, 2023

Zamboni, that article was about University libraries a very distinct type of library serving students and faculty doing research. We are discussing public libraries. In the public libraries I go to, as well as my friend the reference librarian, they still sit at desks available to the public. The biggest change in their function is that the stacks of reference books of all kinds are disappearing as libraries are removing books in order to make more space for non-book stuff. The librarians are left to using internet search to look things up. But at least their internet searches are probably better than ours.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:56 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, I've been to the library lately. Not as much lately as when my kids were littler but I was there last week and I'm probably in there about once a month. There are still lots of books there and there is still a central desk where the librarians sit. They also have paper copies of the New York Times, the Wisconsin State Journal, and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel out and a big shelf of DVDs for borrowing.
posted by escabeche at 7:11 PM on June 16, 2023

Let me try approaching this another way, giving up on brevity. Again, I am not arguing that reference librarians are obsolete, just that their role has changed in the last half century. I hope it is uncontroversial that librarianship has changed in the last fifty years.

A important function of a 1970s ref librarian was to help patrons access collections that were on site, including using the catalog. They were the search engine. Curating the collection was a separate function. Assuming that was happening, assessing information quality was a secondary concern.

As folks have mentioned up thread, people now have access to a vast (but poorly curated) collection of material without venturing anywhere near a library (thanks to other 1970s librarians who helped make computer search a thing), and a modern ref librarian finds themselves engaging in live curation, helping patrons assess the quality of novel sources and to deselect the duds.
posted by zamboni at 8:09 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

my feeling is that most people just don't want books, especially physical books that are mostly print, very much

Take heart. Not only do my kids sneak off to the library, I have spent serious $$ this year on books/manga/art books, at their request. They also read e-books and of course watch too many videos. But books are not dead.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:13 PM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Citation needed? Do a search on “decline in reading skills” and it’s all over the place.

Maybe so, but there’s a lot of bad info in searches, so evaluating a source is important. I was curious about this, so I started with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading and went through the “Reading achievement: national and international reports” section. The best overview of trends I found doesn’t really support a general downward trend; perhaps the opposite.

The idea that the kids today don’t know how to read (or speak, or write) is a common one throughout history. In its latest iteration, the evidence seems to be that text speak is to blame, but I think that’s incorrect. Because Internet does a great job of explaining how sophisticated and complex these modes of communication are despite appearing less literate from the view of elder generations.
posted by Cogito at 4:21 AM on June 17, 2023

a modern ref librarian finds themselves engaging in live curation, helping patrons assess the quality of novel sources and to deselect the duds.

I'm going to paraphrase something from information theory class here (it's been a while) but another piece of it is navigating from the initial search query to what the searcher is really looking for. Filling the information gap.

Commercially operated search engines don't always have the incentive to do this. Rather they are incentivized heavily to keeping you in their ecosystem looking at ads, and providing data for future ads. Whatever will do this most effectively. Providing recommendations related to your search history but off topic from the actual information need. Providing unasked-for rage baity headlines. Whatever they can hook you with.

Having a public alternative that doesn't rely on dark patterns isn't a horrible thing for society. The far right is coming after libraries for a reason.
posted by StarkRoads at 9:48 AM on June 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I work in a library in a low-income urban area and it sounds like most of y'all don't, except a couple of commenters up top, so. Obviously every system is different, but still, a couple of things I feel compelled to clear up.

Yes, people still read. Including kids and teens. The library absolutely exists in that mode, and fairly robustly too.

People also use the library for social services or just as a place to be.

These are often, though certainly not always, two different groups of people. Most readers take their books to go. Most people who stay are on the computers or their phones. This is completely fine, it's just two different usage patterns.

It's an insanely hard job, and I say that as someone who likes our regulars and my coworkers. We're perpetually understaffed and dealing with problems way outside our pay grade and training, though we are trained on interacting compassionately with unhoused people. We absolutely need a full-time social worker or counselor or something.

Something I would personally appreciate, as a library worker who has literally been through several shooting lockdowns this year and been threatened several times, is for grown-ass adult patrons to stop pouting directly to us about your municipal libraries not being a nice peaceful place to curl up and read for hours and hours. My job is hard enough without the added emotional labor, which is constant, of managing 40-something-and-up feelings about this. Like, I might have to make a child abuse report and I have to help someone else look up homeless shelters, but let me apologize right quick because we're not the Gryffindor common room. I'm not allowed to tell them to grow up, but I'm telling you. Do not say this to library employees. We're sad about it too and we have to engage with it a lot more directly than you do. You wanna make life better for library workers, start by dealing with that one on your own time.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 9:39 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]