The meeting room was nice and bright, lined with chairs and mostly empty. There were almost more library staff members than the public. We were invited to sign-in and receive name badges. The meeting started with a audio/visual presentation of the future of the library. I won't bore you with details, but suffice it to say, books aren't going away any time soon. This was followed by a slide presentation by the director of the library on the current state of the library. With charts and graphs that would have pleased Ross Perot, he described the budget shortfall and what was being done to address it. At the conclusion of his presentation, he took questions from the audience. There was one last presentation for the evening, more of an announcement. It was a description of a fund raising campaign to be held shortly.
On the way home, my wife and I discussed the meeting. We were very disappointed to see so few of our fellow citizens attending. Of course, part of the problem could have been that the announcement has the incorrect day of the week. We figured it out, didn't we? One of the library staff mentioned that they had taken two surveys: one scientific and the other not. The former was performed by a research company and out of thousands of surveys sent out they got something like a 20% response rate. And that's considered good? Probably from some weird statistical analysis it is. When the results were tabulated they were similar to their non-scientific poll. Of course one cannot draw any conclusions from the similarity of the results.
So, as we headed home, we wondered do people care about libraries. What would life be without a public library? If I wander through the library on a typical day, who do I see there? Since my closest library branch is near a high school, I see many students on the computers, reading magazines and doing homework. In the stacks I see mostly older people (oh please say it ain't so). There are also many, many Mom's pulling their children around picking up books. People out of work are using the computers to write resumes, search, and apply for jobs. Homeless people use the library as a safe place to rest, read, or watch videos. Whenever I am there the library is always busy. Still, what does a community get from a library?
I remember my mother telling me that she read the entire library in the small hometown where she grew up. That might be a slight exaggeration, but I doubt it. I remember that books were a central part of my life when I was growing up. (I type this in my office surrounded by books.) For me (and my Mom), the library was a place where I could explore new ideas and authors.
I pursued it further and checked for some articles that you might find interesting:
Freakonomics: If Public Libraries Didn’t Exist, Could You Start One Today?
Circulating Libraries and Video Rental Stores (PDF)
I'm sure that there are more, but I tend to agree with the points brought up by the NY Times article, that Public Libraries
- Train young people to become readers, and
- Expose people to authors that they normally wouldn't read.
