Building the Future – Brooklyn Public Library and Y.A. Services

Nearly 30 years in the making, the building of the Central branch of Brooklyn Library that dominates a corner of Grand Army Plaza, went from ground first being broken for the building in 1912, to completed construction in 1941. In 1997 the Landmarks Preservation Commission declared it a landmark building and in 2013 the interior of the library, much like the concept of the Public Library itself, remains a work in progress. Walking into the Central branch is literally like walking into an open book, one that offers glimpses of how the public library of the past and present is actively repositioning itself for a future role as something much more than simply a repository of knowledge and information, accessible to all. On a recent visit, I decided to take myself on a tour of the two floors open to the public before settling into the Youth Wing for an afternoon of observation and a conversation with one of the library’s two children and young adult specialist librarians on duty that day. After the near complete silence in the adult/reference sections and the popular library upstairs, and the low buzz of the info-commons and the library café in the main lobby, the noise level goes up a notch or five as I opened the doors to the Youth Wing which is a world away from traditional notions of the public library as quiet space. And while there is certainly public debate and a lot of enthusiasm for having both types of environments, the palpable energy of the Youth Wing space certainly made for a lively library visit.

The first thing I’m told by Yesha, the Y.A. librarian, who is standing under a “Cats Against Cat Calls” banner (a visual medley of pink lettering and photos of cats in their best haughty feline pose) is that she herself was asked to be quiet recently  by a young patron for talking too loudly – so much for the mythical figure of the shushing librarian! While the main focus of the Youth Wing is still reading and study, how that reading and studying is undertaken is changing rapidly. Books are still central to the space but laptops are also available for checking out and there are eight desktop computers for use in the Y.A. area. Color printing, either from a library computer or a patron’s own electronic device, is available for a small fee and Yesha handles queries and facilitates various printing requests during the course of our conversation.

In addition to the computers in the Youth Wing, teens also have exclusive access to all the computers every Tuesday afternoon between 4.30pm and 6pm in the Info-Commons as part of the Teen Tech Time program. However, by far the most popular teen tech offering is the Active Gaming Arcade program on Saturdays providing access to games such as Minecraft, which hones players creative gaming skills, encourages them to explore new environments, collect resources to use in these spaces and adapt and protect the space from attack.

A downside Yesha mentions in terms of having the availability of online games is that the teens rarely play against each other but tend to retreat into the games by themselves and so another aim of teen programming at the library is to try and balance things out and encourage more interaction between patrons. To this end there is an art club, writing clinic, poetry workshop, book club and a Game On! board game challenge, there’s even a monthly open mic. session as part of the teen program. Programs are planned to run with 2-15 teens taking part and having eight or more participants is considered a success.

Not all the programs are instant hits and Yesha explained that a recent self-portrait program required the librarian to order teens in the tech lab off the computers and point blank refuse them further access until they tried drawing “for at least 10 minutes”! While most did their 10 minutes and fled, eight teens stayed and returned to complete the program the following week, small steps perhaps along the path to what Durrani and Smallwood have called creating the people orientated library service:

As custodians of information, librarians everywhere have a role to play in eliminating the root causes of poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and inequality. It is no longer acceptable for libraries and librarians to refuse to acknowledge this social responsibility. The choice is simple: if the information profession does not acknowledge its social responsibility and act upon it, it will no longer have a social role. People will then develop alternative models of information and knowledge communication, which do meet their needs. There will then be no libraries as we know them today. The choice is our to make – today.

The location of the Central branch means that it services teen patrons across a broad demographic spectrum, from the relatively high-income area of Park Slope to the lower income areas of Crown Heights and Brownsville, as well as patrons who travel from further away to use the facilities unique to the Central branch. In turn this means there is a real opportunity to level the playing field of access, and in terms of teen patrons, by far one of the most effective and popular programs is T4 – today’s teens, tomorrow’s techies.

Previously, I’d spoken to a former participant of the program, now a librarian himself who explained that for him the program had given him an opportunity to take a different path to the one he’d been heading down as young man. While currently only offered at the Central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the program gives teens a chance to learn basic computer skills via an intensive summer workshop. This is then followed up with a minimum commitment of three hours per week for at least a 6-month period of volunteer work at the library, assisting librarians, and trouble shooting computer problems encountered by older patrons.

This intergenerational aspect and the social skills that are developed while carrying out a responsible volunteer role, as well as the varied practical skills that are learned, demonstrates the active way the library is fostering not just a community for its own future but make tangible what Dewey thought a “Great Community” might be.

Block quote: The Professional is Political: Redefining the Social Role of Public Libraries, Shiraz Durrani and Elizabeth Smallwood  – first appeared in Progressive Librarians, No. 27, Summer 2006. Republished in Questioning Library Neutrality, Alison Lewis Ed. Library Juice Press 2008.

A Dystopian, Vampire Romance – tales of eBooks, publishers and public libraries

The Coldest Girl in Cold Town is the latest Y.A. novel by Holly Black, published last month by Little Brown (part of the Hachette Book Group). It falls easily into that most ubiquitous of Y.A. fiction categories: dystopian, vampire romance. A week after publication, I purchased the Kindle edition for $4.99 (I had my reasons). While the New York Public Library purchased two eBook editions, for which there are currently multiple holds on the library website, and 72 hardcover copies (of which 22 are currently available to borrowers). Why so many hardcopies and only two of the eBooks edition? It couldn’t possibly be due to the sky-high price extracted from NYPL by the publisher to acquire an all too temporary license to the eBook edition?

In his recent opinion piece posted on Wired magazine’s website (October 2, 2013) Art Brodsky writes about The Abomination of EBooks: They Price People Out of Reading. While he isn’t too concerned with the fact that eBooks don’t offer the same sensorial experience as printed books, for him:

“The real problem with ebooks is that they’re more “e” than book, so an entirely different set of rules govern what someone — from an individual to a library — can and can’t do with them compared to physical books, especially when it comes to pricing”, (the way eBooks) “are priced differently to consumers and to libraries. That’s how eBooks contribute to the ever-growing divide between the literary haves and have-nots.”

Noting that the mark-up to libraries in some instance can be as much as 300%, Brodsky post examines the variety of other restrictions that come with eBooks, not just in terms of what device an eBook may be read on – which he claims is discriminatory enough in itself – he also tells of how libraries are only allowed to circulate an eBook a certain number of times before a decision must be made to renew the library’s eBook license. Not exactly a vision of a library utopia with equal access to all!

But then should we be surprised?

“That corporations dominate our profession as publishers, hardware manufacturers, software providers, database creators, and network gatekeepers, and that an attendant corporate ethic increasingly infuses how library management defines its modus operandi”

as Peter MacDonald has previously asserted (Corporate Inroads and Librarianship: The Fight for the Soul of the Profession in the New Millennium, essay from Questioning Library Neutrality, ed Alison Lewis 2008. Original essay published in Progressive Librarian, Nos. 12/14. Spring/Summer 1997).

As of this week it may even seem like the already difficult relationship libraries have with eBooks has hit a new crisis as not one but two eBook subscription services were rolled out in quick succession. In September Oyster arrived and was portrayed in the media as “a plucky young NYC-based start up”, and then just this week the social publishing service, Scribd, announced it’s own subscription service had landed HarperCollins as it’s first major publisher to come on board and lend it some traction in the race to be the “Netflix for the eBook”. The Forbes commentary said it all:

“And even though libraries have done this for books, for free, for more than a century, so far there hasn’t been a digital, all you can eat subscription platform for books.”

And clearly we need that eBook buffet.

So where does this leave the public library? Perhaps, like the heroine of many a romance novel, in need of a complete make-over.

“As heretical as it may seem in these times, marketing probably deserves financial preference over the more basic library activities”

(Maria J Nauratil in The Alienated Librarian pg 77, quoting Daniel Carroll’s Library Marketing: Old and New Truths Wilson Library Bulletin 57, November 1982 pg 216). But it must be incredibly demoralizing to be trying to get the message out that public libraries are there to cater to patrons, who are often the most under served in the community, while at the same time coping with underfunding, as well as pressure to maintain their collections in the face of strident commercial competition.

So what about a happy/happier ending? While it might not make everyone happy all of the time, there is much worth considering in Eric Hellman’s August, 2013 blog post about an alternative business model for Libraries and eBooks: A Rational Framework for Library eBook Licensing. Hellman offers up a range of practical suggestions for Libraries and publishers to cooperate over eBook licensing, including the currently contentious notion that if the library buys an eBook, it should get to keep the eBook. However, he is also advocating compromise when he suggests libraries could pay up to a 500% mark-up for the most popular eBooks but a much reduced price for eBooks where the library will most likely have some hand in making them a success. While Hellman acknowledges his proposals would require a radical rethinking of how things are done, never an easy ask, the benefits to both publishers and libraries would be immense.