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Libraries and the Homeless

As a trustee of a rural library system, homeless people in libraries is a problem I think about frequently and I can’t say I have anywhere near a complete answer.

Please note that I write here as an individual, not for the board of which I am a member nor for the library itself.

My thoughts go to first principles. Why does a community have public libraries? What good do libraries do the community? How do homeless people fit into the bigger picture of libraries?

The public library as free entertainment

What is the role of the contemporary public library? Free public entertainment? Public libraries certainly do that; the library circulates a lot of fiction, entertaining non-fiction, music, and videos. However, a library also has more serious roles.

Source of useful information

When I wander the library system’s reading rooms, I see most seats taken by students young and old in serious study. Some use the library as a study hall for their high school, college, and other classes. Many use the library’s reference works, which range from books on theology and philosophy to tax manuals and instructions for overhauling farm equipment. I once noticed a person taking notes on pickling cabbage. Yet others are using library computers and network connections. Utilitarian non-fiction is a big part of the library’s circulation. Acquisitions librarians say they can’t order enough cookbooks or books on managing small farms to meet patron’s requests.

Public libraries and education

Well, then, is the purpose of the public library to provide access to useful information? Certainly, but it goes beyond that. Our system has agreements with school districts in our county to provide services directly in the schools. The library system can provide the schools with a wider range of books and other materials than each school district can offer individually. The system’s collection is a public resource that is shared by both schools and the general public. In addition, the system has highly trained and specialized youth and children’s librarians who help teachers with class room projects and offer programs used by home schoolers and private schools.

Community anchors

Often, I hear of public libraries as “community anchors.” Our county’s branches are certainly community gathering places where citizens meet and exchange ideas. Each branch hosts at least one monthly book club. Branches have genealogy, quilting, and writer’s groups. They support the county literacy council in offering individual and group literacy classes and English as a second language classes. They provide archives for artifacts of local history such as old newspapers, letters, and photographs and they help connect people with local history experts and other resources.

The problem of the homeless

Are homeless people a problem? Yes. Our rural system does not struggle as much as urban libraries, but every month yields a handful of incidents that are related to homeless issues. The homeless can be loud, smelly, harassing, and scary. They have been known to use library facilities to view pornography. Staff have found drug paraphernalia. Not just for the homeless, and not an issue yet, but if the opioid crisis continues, I foresee a day when the library starts stocking and training staff to administer Narcan nasal spray. However, to add perspective, I have noticed more gripes from library staff over parents who drop off unsupervised children and treat the library as a free daycare center than I hear about homeless problems.

How we deal with the homeless

The problem is real. A basic tenet of our library policies is that any activity or person interfering with other patrons’ legitimate use of library services will be stopped. That stricture binds in every direction. Homeless persons have as much right to library services as the most affluent contributor to the library foundation. When any person, homeless or not, raises a ruckus— if only by smelling bad, sleeping in a needed chair, or other disruptive conduct— the library staff is trained to take steps, all the way up to calling the police and having the miscreant forcibly ejected and banned from the premises. Their training is to focus on the disruption, not who is disrupting. I have not experienced it, but I believe (and hope) the staff would “trespass” even a library trustee who made trouble in a branch.

As an aside, in keeping with modern library best practices, conversation that does not bother other patrons is not banned. The staff tries to keep teenagers herded together in areas that do not bother the rest of the folks, but non-disruptive talking, warbling, singing, hijinks, and other furfural are all tolerated if not encouraged.

Are these policies enough? No. I repeat, I speak for myself, but the library’s role is to provide services; community anchorage is an important element in those services. Homeless members of the community are still community members and the library anchors them as well as everyone else. By providing promoting useful knowledge and information, the library is contributing to the general prosperity of our county and helping our residents to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. By contributing to the quality of our school system and giving our citizens materials and places for study, the library also contributes to the health of our community. This helps decrease the incidence of homelessness and aids those already homeless in their efforts to surmount their plight. At present, our library doesn’t have any specific programs for homeless, although homeless can and do avail themselves of literacy classes and other self-help programs.

Homelessness probably cannot ever be completely solved. The poor will always be with us, if only because the most prosperous community will always have a least prosperous member. The social service agencies are the vanguard against homelessness, but public libraries can contribute opportunities for every community member to advance in the struggle to thrive and prosper.

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Libraries, Automation, and Jobs

I observed at a meeting of our local library system recently that the 40,000 foot financial view of our library system is 70% of expenditures on personnel, 10% on collection (buying books), and the remaining 20% keeps the lights on, which includes computer systems, the cost of transporting books from branch to branch, office supplies, furniture maintenance, and all the other minor expenses that go with any business. I spent a few minutes researching and found that this distribution is fairly typical nationwide.

Dealing cards at Harper Reserve on the South Side

I worked in a library for the first time in about 1970, working part time on the desk at Harper Reserve in the University of Chicago library system checking out books and other documents that instructors had placed on reserve for students in their classes. In those days, record keeping was all manual. As I remember, each book had two cards in a little pocket pasted to the inside back cover. Patrons entered their name and borrower number on each card for each book they checked out. Part of the checkout process was to verify that a legible borrower number on the card matched the number on the patron’s library card. One card was filed by call number (the equivalent of author, title, and edition), the other was filed by due date. I may not remember all of this exactly, but I think we were able to determine who checked out each book, and the books due on a given date, but it was nearly impossible to provide a patron with a list of books they had checked out. If they didn’t know what they had, they would not find out until we nailed them with an overdue fine.

After a few months experience, library workers learned to handle three-by-five cards like Las Vegas black jack dealers and put a stack of cards in alphabetic or call number order without thinking about it. Does anyone besides me remember the sorting gizmos with A-Z plastic flaps?

It isn’t nostalgia

I haven’t gone into detail on these obsolete practices for nostalgia. I want to compare it to present practice. Almost all the work of the circulation desk of those days has been eliminated. Accurate alphabetization while thinking about what to say to the girl who sits across the table in Western Civ class is no longer a bankable skill. The activities that most of my cohort were hired to perform are now part of a computerized integrated library system. The checkout station scanner scoops up the bar code on the patron’s card and the bar codes on each item to be borrowed. The computer system takes it from there. In our library system today, a patron can check out a book at our “Express Library” with no human contact or touch. Only a few tasks I was paid to do at Harper Reserve in 1970 are still performed by human beings today: getting books for patrons from the shelves, re-shelving them from the return bin, and shelf-reading (checking for miss-shelved materials), all tasks that involve physically handling the books.

Integrated library systems

The system does a better job than we did in 1970. It’s faster and more accurate (the computer is never distracted by thoughts of the girl across the table in Western Civ), and the computer tells the patron which books they have checked out, when they are due, and offers them an opportunity to renew, all on a web site pleasantly decorated by a skilled graphic designer, instead of talking to a bored student who smells like wet wool.

The integrated system does it all, and does a much better job than we did in 1970. You would expect that personnel costs as a share in the budget would have shrunk significantly, since much of the work done by personnel in 1970 has been shifted to computer systems, which are funded as overhead, not personnel or content.

Library personnel today

This takes us back to the 70-10-20 split in library expenditures. I find it surprising that libraries still invest 70% of their revenues in staff. Investing in human beings is good, but I have to understand how it works for libraries. Today, we worry that digitization is eliminating jobs and making decent livelihoods a prerogative of a privileged few. I have no idea what the present equivalent of “Harper Reserve” is like at the University of Chicago today, but I do know a little about what happens today in our local public library branches.

I have not been able to find reports on the distribution of public library budgets in the 1970s, but I am willing to guess that they have stayed about the same because it simply feels the same to me. I notice that libraries today focus much more on hands on customer service as opposed to the rote work that took up time in the past. I argue that automation has freed up library workers for more productive purposes instead of eliminating jobs. Checking for legible checkout forms, shuffling cards, and poring over bins of paper slips to fish out circulation records is not good use of a human resource. Humans are better used in helping a patron find the book they need or want, by speaking to them and leading them to the resource, putting out informative displays, directing useful programs, and any number of tasks only humans can perform well.

Jobs and unemployment

Can this model be applied to other endeavors? Sometimes yes, but it’s hard for me to imagine finding a more human task in a factory for a punch press operator who has been replaced by a robot. Certainly, their are better uses for people outside of factories, but that is cold comfort for workers who have earned their living from their patience and diligence rather than special skills. Patience and diligence have always been, and still are, honorable human traits, but they are exactly what automation supplies cheaply and abundantly. Hence, they are devalued in many settings.

This, I think, is sad.

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Libraries and Service Management

While recovering from a serious turkey and mashed potato overdose, I started thinking about my experience in computer software and libraries.

I’ve spent a good part of the last thirty years building service management applications for large enterprises, so I can’t help but think of any organization as a service management challenge. In my book, Cloud Standards, I begin by providing my definition of a service. Many of my technical friends think it is too lawyerlike and bureaucratic to be of any use to them, but I disagree. Here it is

A service is a consumer-provider relationship in which the provider delivers value to the consumer and the consumer avoids designated costs and risks that they would have incurred if they had delivered the value themselves.

That’s a mouthful but it applies to an organization like a library as well as to computer architecture. Consumers and providers can be software and hardware modules as well as people. Here’s a human service: when I wore a suit and tie to work, I had the oil changed in my truck by an oil changing service to avoid the cost and risk of ruining my suit. I was willing to pay for the service because the costs and risks out-weighed the fee the service charged for changing oil. (Especially with a coupon!) I won’t bore you with a technical example, but there are many.

Library patrons check out books to avoid the cost of buying the book themselves and the risk of being stuck with a book they don’t care for.

That’s not the only service a library provides, but I will venture it is the one most people think of first. I used to consult for large IT organizations, helping them improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their services. My first question always was “What services do you provide?” The answers, to say the least, were varied. Some groups flat out had no idea—they resorted to telling me about all the maintenance they did and how many servers and switches they were responsible for. That was the equivalent of an oil-changing guy telling me what size wrenches were in his toolbox when I asked him what else he could do for my truck.

Other organizations I consulted for had a clear idea of what they provided, but most lengthened their list after we discussed it. Many were surprised at the value they provided. Sometimes they decided to drop services that had less value than they had assumed.

It is important to differentiate between owning a wrench and changing the air filter. Your wrenches are only remotely connected to consumers, but the value you deliver affects them directly. The point is that unless you understand the value of the work you do, you can’t understand how to increase the value of your services.

I suspect that librarians understand their services to the community better than IT departments understand their role. It’s a good exercise for IT departments; I am curious how it might work for libraries.