Recognizing the Binding Power of Libraries

The public library has a powerful role in shaping our democracy, particularly here in the Southland, a magnet for the greatest immigration to America since the Ellis Island days.

The new Americans have been featured in the news this Independence Day weekend as they waved flags and barbecued their holiday meals. It’s uplifting seeing them embracing our country’s birthday, a scene as old as the nation itself, but it’s just part of the story.

The easy part, actually. What’s hard is learning the language, the culture and peculiar customs of the new country. Here, as they were during the great immigration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the public libraries are on the job, morning through night, teaching the ways of this strange new land.

That’s just one aspect of the library’s task. Public libraries have a varied clientele, serving the native born and the immigrant, the well-off, the poor and those in between.

But today, life in the library is not as simple as when a librarian’s skill was measured by the ability to help patrons choose the right book. To fulfill its historic duty, the public library must operate in a fast-forward world, where the computer is as important a force as the book, and where too many young people are strangers to reading.

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These reflections were prompted by a letter I got recently from a Los Angeles city librarian, Rosalie Preston, who is unhappy about the budgetary and management practices of Mayor Richard Riordan and the chief city librarian, Susan Goldberg Kent. She said five other librarians supported her sentiments.

Riordan, in charge of a financially pressed city, wants to save money and improve service by promoting private donations for the library, and instituting management changes to make the place run more like a business. The council didn’t go along with him on some of his proposed budget cuts, sticking up for libraries, as well as parks. Still, the library didn’t get all that it needs.

Unhappy about the outcome, librarian Preston wrote me that the money shortages and the management changes have hurt library operations, particularly at the new downtown Central Library.

In her letter, and a subsequent conversation on the telephone, she wondered whether the Riordan administration and Kent are taking the library down a path that will hinder its ability to help the immigrants and other members of a bewilderingly diverse population.

For example, she objected to a new book purchasing system she said will weaken branch librarians’ ability to meet the needs of a city with so many distinct communities.

A private firm, Broadart, will study the city, and figure out which books will be hot here and order copies of them on the library’s behalf. It’s obviously one of those focus group, market-driven kind of deals, to prevent huge numbers of unused books gathering dust on the library shelves.

“Now, individual libraries put in a lot of time developing collections for their communities,” said Preston. “We’re going to the fast-food approach for the human mind.” A librarian in a neighborhood of Salvadoran immigrants might devise the right mixture of books for the clientele, only to be frustrated by a formula imposed by the bosses downtown.

Not so, said Bob Reagan, the library’s public information officer. The library isn’t turning into Crown Books. “We do not have cookie cutter selections around the city,” he said.

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There’s a lot to be admired in Riordan’s approach. Never before has the city been so successful in persuading donors to support needed services. The library has been particularly successful, with donations to its Library Foundation approaching the $10 million mark.

And for the first time, hidebound bureaucrats are being forced to examine old methods.

But the public library is not a business, any more than are the Police Department and the parks. The Riordan proposals, like other reforms, will have unintended consequences. So when people in the trenches--the librarians who work with the public--say the Riordan plan is threatening the library’s ability to perform its historic role, we should hear them out.