The Rake Magazine

Tag: library

  • No One Is Reading, and Our Libraries Are Closing

    Creative Commons photo by Zachary Korb

    A couple weeks ago, a very quiet takeover of Downtown Minneapolis was staged. Thousands of librarians from around the nation — purse-lipped and padded-soled — convened for their annual convention. (Were it not for the laminated PLA badges that hung on yarn around their necks, they would have looked like any non-Target-employed resident of the city — that is, poorly but warmly dressed, and vaguely literary.)

    During their three-day conference, they would discuss new database software, innovative shelving systems, and learn how to market their respective branches. "It used to be that a library was a library and that was that. People would just show up," said Sylvia Schulman, a librarian from Connecticut. "Now you have to advertise."

    So it goes. The AP announced last August the results of a poll that showed 27% of their respondents hadn’t read a single book in the previous year. A 2004 poll conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 43% of Americans hadn’t read a book in the twelve months prior to the survey. You can read Ursula K Le Guin’s somewhat optimistic analysis of these data here.

    So wouldn’t one expect libraries to be ailing a bit, too? Apparently they’re not. Over dinner at The News Room, Helen Crosson, director of the Cold Spring Harbor Library in Long Island, boasted of one thousand new cardholders in her district over the last year. One of her dining partners, a librarian from Queens, spoke of how they were continually trying to build more libraries; currently they have sixty facilities to accommodate over two million people, which just isn’t enough. "We’re a minority-heavy area," she said, "and libraries act as a real hub for those communities. They’re a place where you can get on the internet for free, and you have unlimited access to pretty much any book you need if you’re trying to learn English." (She sipped from her drink, put it down and said, "Everyone in this restaurant is so white." Which was <sigh> true.)

    When quoted the statistics from the NEA and AP surveys, Ms. Schulman from Connecticut shook her head and said, "I don’t know. You’d be surprised" — and then conceded that she worked in an affluent zone with many residents predisposed to reading.

    I guess the question is, why are the Minneapolis libraries ailing so? Here we have testimonies from employees of both upper-middle-class/suburban and lower-middle-class/inner-city libraries that say their facilities are doing fine, if not thriving. Meanwhile, according to this article published on MPR’s website in 2007, the Minneapolis Public Library had "cut one third of its staff, sharply reduced library hours, and closed three neighborhood branches." (Since then, with the merger of the Minneapolis Public Library and Hennepin County Library, those three branches have re-opened…but still.) Are we just not advertising enough? Are we too white? (Minneapolis as a whole, I would argue, is not quite inner-city in the way of Queens, not quite white-collar in the way of New Haven. I’m reminded of Barack Obama feeling wrongly accused of being not white enough and not black enough. No wonder he got two-thirds of our caucus delegates. This is a long, unnecessary parenthetical.)

    Even with the opening of the new Minneapolis Central Library on Nicollet Mall last year, things are a bit lackluster — I’ve heard more about its architecture than its community benefits. Taking a quick glance at hours of operation is a little disheartening too. At first, it seems normal not to have the Walker or the MCL open on Sundays. But if you think about the foot traffic in Uptown and Downtown on the weekends, it seems Sundays should be one of the higher-traffic days of the week. On two of the five days it’s open, the Walker Library, on the corner of Hennepin and Lagoon, one of the busiest intersections in the city, doesn’t open until noon. To say nothing of Osseo’s library, which is open a grand total of eighteen hours a week.

    If there were a decrease in demand it would be one thing, but according to this Star Tribune report our check-out rates are more than 2.5 times the national average. So either those librarians I talked to were lying through their teeth (and pursed lips, yes, haha, it was funny the first time, too), or really there’s just not enough money to support what has been one of society’s strongest infrastructures since fires, and then campfires, were invented.

    Finally, here is one of the lamest photo tours of the skyway ever to have been compiled.

     

  • Paying for Crime

    The Minneapolis City Council proved itself to be more politically adept than the Minneapolis Library Board in early December when it warded off the pleas for permanent funding of the Minneapolis Library system. Instead of the hoped-for permanent budget increases that had been dangled before the Library Board, the Council instead gave them one year’s worth of funding to keep open three libraries that had been proposed for closing—that and the promise from Mayor Rybak to lobby the Legislature for more. 

    Given the previous record of Rybak at the Legislature, I wouldn’t hold my breath. If I were on the Library Board, (disclosure: I am on the Friends of the Library Board) I wouldn’t give the Council the political cover they seek, either. Keeping those libraries open for a year while Rybak begs for state money just lets the Council off the hook. They, not the Library Board, determine the library budget. If the Council wanted to find permanent funding for libraries, they could. Instead, we get funding for more liquor license inspectors (to speed approval of licenses for Council candidate donors,) and an aide for education policy for Mayor Rybak, although the Mayor’s office has nothing to do with the schools.

    The most maddening component of the debate was the Council’s concerted positioning of permanent library funding against funds for additional police officers. To paraphrase the Council’s argument: do you want three more libraries, or forty-three more police officers? Putting it more vividly, Council Member Don Samuels, representative of Minneapolis’s most-likely-to-be-murdered-in ward, said this: “When you are a person at the other end of a gun … the only use for a book is to throw it at them, or block a bullet with it.”

    Is the choice really books or cops? Perhaps the Minneapolis Council could call their counterparts in St. Paul, who, in their budget passed in early December, somehow found funding both to hire more police officers and to expand Library hours. Of course, St. Paul has a strong mayor system, and Minneapolis has a weak mayor system. Given that context, Chris Coleman and R.T. Rybak both seem to be ideally suited to their roles. Coleman gives St. Paul open libraries; Rybak gives Minneapolis Bonnie Bleskachek.

    In June 2005, Rybak made the following statement about how he was addressing increasing crime: “We need to remember that these recent murders have been driven by people living high-risk lifestyles: kids buying and selling drugs and guns. Minneapolis is a safe city for people who are not engaged in buying and selling drugs and guns.” Minneapolis didn’t become an “unsafe” city until a few other things happened. First, Rybak’s opponent in the 2005 mayoral race, Peter McLaughlin, started making points by calling for more cops. Then, Michael Zebuhr was murdered in Uptown while walking with his mother, and Alan Reitter was killed in Downtown while walking with his fiancée. So, as long as the “high-risk lifestyle” meant “African American high-risk lifestyle,” we didn’t need more cops—but when white people walking on the street get killed, we’re just going to have to close some libraries and address the crime problem head-on.

    Minneapolis needs both more cops and more library hours. It’s particularly unfair to the police and disingenuous in the extreme to make it an either/or question. The Minneapolis Police Department, just like the Library Board, has been handed an impossible task since the city began to lose Local Government Aid funding from the state in 2002. Police staff levels declined just as precipitously as library hours. After a decade-low number of forty-three homicides and 1732 aggravated assaults in 2001 (when there were over 900 Minneapolis cops), the numbers of both crimes have ticked up to the point where, as of this writing, we have had fifty-nine murders and over 2700 aggravated assaults in 2006. When the forty-three cops authorized this year are added to the force, on top of the seventy added as a result of last year’s campaign promises, Minneapolis will be back up to 893.

    According to Deputy Chief Rob Allen, the restoration of the force will allow more “proactive and preventative” police work. For example, he expects that the Juvenile Crime Unit, which had been disbanded for lack of manpower, will be restored. He also hopes that the investigative squad will restore the ten detectives who had been cut. “Case loads are overwhelming,” he said.

    Without being asked, Allen volunteered, “We’re conscious that the city has made the sacrifice to bring back the police department [staffing levels]. It’s critically important that we’re putting our officers where they’re needed, and that we’re efficiently using our people, otherwise that sacrifice is in vain. I don’t like being pitted against library hours, and it’s important for people to know that our officers are aware of that.”

    We do know that. And we also know that no sentient person thinks we need fewer cops in Minneapolis. What we do need is less cynical manipulation of budget priorities by the Mayor and City Council. Don’t hold your breath for that, either.