The hard thing in making the case against closing eleven branch libraries is that the fiscal crisis of Philadelphia is not a mirage.
That’s why it is important to understand that the branch library closings have never fundamentally been about the budget crisis. The Mayor and Siobhan Reardon are misleading us when they keep insisting that we had to close libraries because of the city’s budget troubles.
I’m not sure I fully understand what the library closings are about. But this is what I’ve managed to piece together from talking with librarians here and elsewhere in the country as well as with people familiar with some of the inner workings of the library administration.
The proposal to close branches came from the library administration
The library administration has wanted to close branch libraries for years. They proposed doing so under Mayor Street, when then Councilman Nutter along with Councilman DiCicco lead the way in stopping them. As Siobhan Riordan admitted in an interview in Chestnut Hill Local, the plan to close library branches has been in the works for at least five years.
So when the Mayor came to the library, with a demand for budget cuts that would require more than a limited reduction in hours, the library administration proposed closing branches and never seriously considered alternatives such as reducing hours in all the libraries until the fiscal crisis was over or seeking private support for the branches.
Since when does a government bureaucracy offer to shrink itself?
Now that sounds counter-intuitive. Since when does a government bureaucracy offer to shrink itself?
There are two parts to the answer.
Branch libraries are hard to manage
The first is to recognize that, as the Free Library’s own statement on the closings points out, it is difficult to manage 54 branches with a shrinking staff. Those difficulties will be magnified with further staff reductions. Under these conditions, some librarians will have to work in more than one facility during the course of a week. It’s not hard to understand the incentive the library administration has to avoid this headache.
What a librarian wants 1: more depth in fewer collections
But, if providing services in branch libraries were central to the mission of the library, one would think they would still resist permanent branch closings. So the second, deeper answer requires us to understand how library administrators here and across the country look at the mission of libraries today. They no longer see providing books and periodicals and a quiet place to think, read and write in neighborhoods as central to their mission. Many people have access to books and periodicals and a quiet place to think and read and write at home. And many have, via the internet, access to far information than is contained in any of our branch libraries.
To the extent that loaning books and periodicals and, multimedia materials) to people is important to librarians today, it is in their ability to provide the kind of depth in these works that is not available in the homes of upper middle class people or at Barnes and Noble or Blockbuster or in the typical urban branch library. To attain that depth at reasonable cost, however, is impossible in highly decentralized system. That’s why the people who run large city libraries would prefer to strengthen a central library or regional libraries rather than have many branch libraries.
What a librarian wants 2: research collections
Beyond providing a broad range of books and periodicals and multimedia materials to people, what really excites the administrators of our major library systems is the large collections of information they catalogue and make available to scholars. And now, with the computer revolution, the capacity to digitize and organize this information and make it available around the world makes this more exciting than ever, as well as a source of grants and other revenues.
What a librarian wants 3: public revenue-generating spaces
And, when it comes to the real, not virtual world, the hot stuff in the world of libraries is creating new centers and public spaces in libraries that allow them to generate new revenues—auditoriums for readings and other public events; gallery spaces for traveling exhibits and events; hubs for the utilization of new technology; and centers for the incubation of businesses.
These are the exciting prospects embodied in the plans for the central library expansion on the Parkway. And similar ideas will undoubtedly show up in the plans for the two additional regional libraries the library administration hopes to build in the next ten years.
Closing branches was the best way for the library administration to attain its vision of the future
So it seems to me that the library administration proposed cutting 11 branches mainly because the alternatives to cutting branches threatened its vision of the future.
If, for example, we reduce the library staff and hours now without closing branches, then when the city’s fiscal health returns, demands will arise to restore the cuts. Doing so will conflict with the library’s need for staff for the expanded central library and new regional libraries.
That’s why the library has been so reluctant to consider sharing the burden of budget cuts by reducing hours in all libraries. That, plus the Nutter Administration’s pique at the temerity of people actually demanding that they follow the law before closing libraries, is why they are claiming that meeting the required budget reductions would require cutting every library down to 3 days a week.
And it’s also why the administration has come up with the idea of using private funding to support alternatives to the branch libraries instead of using private funding to keep the branches open. The library administration simply does not want to manage 54 branches and doesn’t want the long term responsibility of finding private support for them, especially when they are busy raising private money to complete the central library expansion.
So the fiscal crisis created an opportunity for the library administration to close branches they do not want and prepare for the future they really do want. Indeed, I suspect that they hoped to close even more branches in the future once the new regional libraries were opened.
Why the library closing plan was so bad
And that’s why, as critics of the library closings have shown, the library administration did not think through their criteria for closing branches and did not in fact even follow the criteria they proposed. It didn’t matter that some of the branches being closed have seen a doubling of usage in recent years. The library’s goal was never to figure out how best to provide branch library service. It was to figure out how to pursue their vision of the library of the twenty-first century.
Should we move to a 21st century library at the expense of the people who live in a 20th century city?
However, too many of us in Philadelphia still live in the twentieth century. Too many of us don’t have books and periodicals at home, don’t have internet access, and don’t have a quiet place to think, read, and write.
The vision of the future of libraries embodied in the plans for the new central library is beautiful. It should come to pass. But it will be a miscarriage of good government if it comes to pass at the expense of the neighborhoods of Philadelphia and the individuals—young, old and in-between—that are dependent on the eleven branches slated for closing.
In the next weeks and months, we are going whether the Mayor is willing to pursue that vision at the expense of the working people of Philadelphia.
Whether because he is putting too much faith in the library administration, or because the rules of Philadelphia politics don’t yet have a place for a Mayor admitting a mistake, right now it doesn’t look like the Mayor is prepared to back down.
I hope, however, that as the extent to which the library administration has mislead us (and maybe him) becomes clear, and the opposition grows to encompass not only those who are passionate about the libraries but also those who really do believe in open government, the Mayor is going to find that reversing course is the best alternative.