The article is scathing to say the least. Patrick Range McDonald attacks the mayor and the city council naming exactly who voted to pass the budget cuts. I thought this was a little mean. It had to be a hard decision to make. If he had written the same article about a similar action at the federal level he would have been called unpatriotic.
McDonald could have written the same article saying that the citizens of Los Angeles were wrong in passing the bond that they voted for in overwhelming numbers in 1998 that made our library system one of the largest in the nation. Unfortunately, the bond provided lots of money to build libraries but no new money to run them. Mr. McDonald could also have blamed all of the people who lost their jobs and are not spending as much money and therefore are not paying as much in sales tax. Or better yet, all the people who are not paying their property tax because their houses are foreclosed on. It was the citizens who voted for the libraries, the citizens who use them, why not blame them for the closures? Obviously I'm not serious here, but we do need to look at the bigger picture.
Why blame anyone? Why not present this as what it is....a time for change in libraries. McDonald starts his article by telling the story of Noel Alumit, a writer who grew up in Low Angeles. He would go to his library daily and one book in particular helped him through his crisis of being a gay teenager. If Alumit were growing up today there's a good chance that he would have had this experience on the internet at home. Or on his phone. Libraries do not have as much to offer people as they once did.
The cities that we have today do not need a huge building filled with books. We don't use books the same way that we once did. Learning and research can be done much more effectively through the internet. Libraries have internet stations, but most of them do not have enough, and the systems that they run are generally old and slow, and because of the high demand there are time limits and a long waiting list.
Of course libraries also provide fictional books, movies, and a place for young people to go after school. There's no doubt that all of the services that they provide are important to the community. But here is their fatal flaw: Libraries mainly serve the lower class members of the community, and they do nothing to bring the community together.
The library of today needs to be one that makes its self invaluable. The city has a number of newly built libraries that are fine examples of architecture, but not one is named after a donor. If I were running a library I would take it upon myself to find my own funding from the private sector. Rich people LOVE to put their names on libraries. And fundraising would not only bring in a library budget the can't be cut, it would be an excellent way to bring together the people who are not using libraries now and the people who are.
Another way that libraries can make themselves profitable and useful to a larger population is to offer classes for small fees. They could help students study for SATs, they could help unemployed people write resumes, or they could teach people to use computers. They could also offer meeting places for book clubs or other events. In our city now, we have meeting houses, we have unemployment centers, and we have after school programs, but they are all separated and funded separately. They need to be under one roof.
The real reason that our libraries lost a great deal of funding this year is not that no one cared, but that in a time of crises its easier to cut the programs that won't be missed. The city of West Hollywood - in this down economy - is in the process of building a new library. Their new library is tied into their park and other community services, and it's in a well designed building with donor names everywhere that allowed. And most importantly the stack rooms and reading rooms are only about half of the actual space. The rest of the building is internet rooms and meeting rooms.The West Hollywood library is designed as a place for the community to come together. It's not a holy house of research; it's a vessel through which people can interact with one another. This is a service that if it really works will not be easily cut. My advise to the city of Los Angeles is to put the responsibility on the librarians to make their work more meaningful. And my advise to the librarians is to make their libraries a place that everyone values.
