National Library Week 2014: Lives Change at the Library

Lives Change at the Library
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This week is the 2014 National Library Week sponsored by the ALA  The theme this year is Lives Change at the Library.

The event began in the fifties (the spring after I was born) and is intended to raise awareness of all that the libraries and their workers do for individuals and communities and encourage the funding for those services.  

Now, during these economic hard times, this is more urgent than ever as libraries have been loosing funding and closing down.  In those that survive services, hours and materials have been cut.  Which translates to fewer librarians and their aides, fewer books and magazines, fewer multimedia items, fewer days open, fewer events held at local libraries.

It is the most astonishing shortsightedness on the part of library levy voters who can't see that the value they get from the libraries compounds the value of the money levied many times over even if they don't use the services themselves.  

And what can I say about the alarming arrogance on the part of community leaders, politicians and local business owners who are often spouting off about how they got where they are without setting foot in a library?

How can they all not see that even if they don't use the library themselves they are benefiting as much as anyone who keeps their card tapped out at all times?  Or that there are library services they could be using that could save them time and money if they didn't see it as a status step down or a violation of their libertarian doctrines?  Or that the services provided contributes to community health in ways that save hundreds of dollars for every dollar spent on the library?

Consider these few:

• Help with tax forms.  Besides those on fixed income like the elderly and disabled there are the employees of local businesses whose peace of mind translates into more efficiency at work.  But not if the library is never open when they are off the job site.
• A source of information on the people and issues on the next ballot.
• Fact check via phone or email.
• Activities for juveniles that keep them safe and the community safe from their boredom fed shenanigans while inspiring their imaginations toward their future contribution to the community and expanding their aspirations.
• Resources for study and homework help for the students who will be the next generation of employees and entrepreneurs.
• Resources for teen and adult hope-to-be entrepreneurs in learning all the requirements to setting up and running a business.
• Resources for homeschooling families who are also heavy consumers of specialty products provided by local business.
• Help for non-native speakers of English in becoming proficient at communicating in English enhancing their value to employers and the community at large.  Not to mention relieving one of the stressors contributing to dysfunctional behaviors that break down family and neighborhood cohesion and clog the justice system.  How do those costs compare to the few dollars per month asked of local property owners for a healthy vibrant library?

I blogged several times about the Southern Oregon Library System's closure in April of 2007 and how it reopened that fall with most of the 15 branches cut to less than twenty hours over two or three days.  It has yet to bring those days and hours back.  Several of the branches opted out of the system and closed altogether.  It still saddens and angers me.

But I'm currently living in Longview, WA and using the library of my childhood and it seems to be as vibrant and bustling as ever.

I've talked often here about how much I owe to the library systems I've patronized.  

• I've called them my universities.  
• This autodidact has depended on libraries to satisfy her every craving for story or knowledge.  
• I've checked out several thousand library books over my life-time and without libraries I'd never have had access to most of the several hundred novels I've read.  
• 95% of everything I've learned about the craft of writing and storytelling I owe to library books and media.
• The research for my stories depended entirely on libraries before the Internet and it is my belief that the Internet will never completely replace libraries for serious researchers*.  

*Research librarians with advanced degrees in media storage and information technologies still outshine and outsmart the search engines--especially now that most of the common free ones are now sponsor driven or the top tier in search results achieve their positions not because of their relevance or usefulness or even truthfulness but rather because someone with something to sell has paid for the slot.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Role of the Library

Jackson County Library Services

There seems to be a movement afoot in the Rogue Valley to bring back our library services to the pre 2007 levels--before the loss of funding and the six month closure followed my limited hours and staffing among other cutbacks.  This would mean extending the hours of all 15 branches again.  For example my Phoenix branch was once open six days a week for a minimum of six hours.  When they opened back up in October 2007 the 'little' branches were given less than 20 hours per week spread among no more than three days and Phoenix was given three six hour days to enjoy the brand new building that was still under construction at the time of the closure.  Even the two large branches in Ashland and Medford were given only five days and very truncated days at that.

And so it remains.

This situation contributes to my not having used our library services in nearly a year.  Because of my failing eyesight I no longer feel safe making the walk by myself and because we no longer have a car my husband has not been able to just drop by on his way home from work to pick up my requests on the one day a week Phoenix branch is open past 5pm.  We keep making tentative plans to make the nearly mile walk together on a Monday evening when Phoenix branch is open until 7pm but have never followed through and now it is the season he works ten hour days so he will not get off in time for that again until after Christmas.

Other factors include the fact that I've spent nearly half of this year up in Longview, WA helping my sister who is our mother's caregiver.  On most of those several week visits she has checked out for me at one or more of the library systems she has access to: the Longview Library which is our childhood library, the Lower Columbia College Library and the Vancouver Library system which has a branch in Woodland just a twenty minute drive from Mom's.

This past November visit was only four weeks and I was busy with NaNo and those time-crunched crochet projects so I didn't go to the library nor order any books from them while I was there which means the last time I had books checked out was last June.  The last time I had items out of our JCLS system was last January and they had all been checked out before Christmas last year.  My sister helped me return an apple box full of books to the library on our way out of town for my January to March stay at Mom's. They were over fifty percent related to my NaNo novel for last year--writing craft and books about role-playing electronic gaming which I've never done myself so needed to research it for my POV character whose passion it was. I had serious intentions of getting every one of them back again in the weeks and months after I got back home.  I would have been shocked and depressed if told that day that I still would not have done so eleven months later.

I must confess that one of the factors has been the embarrassment of having lost my library card during our move last December--for the second time in less than three months.  I had found the first lost one during the packing for the move so I told myself that I would not replace the new one until I'd finished unpacking and sorting all of the books and papers, bags, purses, boxes and pockets that it might have ended up in.  Eleven months later and that project, interrupted as it has been by the packing and unpacking for three extended stays at Mom's, is not completed tho I must say it is close to 90% done in terms of having unpacked and gone through everything if not completely sorted and organized all of the papers.

Then there has been my addiction to ebooks begun when I downloaded Kindle for PC last November in order to accept an ARC (Advanced Review Copy) and then discovered the plethora of free ebooks on amazon and then a few weeks later downloaded Adobe Digital Editions for another ARC and soon after downloaded Calibre which can read most of the other formats and keep my ebook library organized.  Because of my visual impairment ebooks are a Godsend but they are not a complete substitute for everything I need a library for.

Free is the only cost for books our budget can withstand and tho there are many thousands of free ebooks available and the flow of ARCs both ebook and tree book has stepped up dramatically for me over the last year, none of that is a complete substitute for all that I depend on the public library for.

What has all of this to do with the theme of my Friday Forays in Fiction posts?

A lot.

Beginning with the ability to keep up with the latest from my long list of favorite novelists and short story writers and to catch the debuts of new ones I would find on the new books shelf and to acquire those titles I discover on the book blogs and other reviewing resources online.

Then there is the role the library played in shaping my love for books, reading and story.  Then the role it played in helping me study and write term papers through high-school and college, developing my love of story and writing and research.  Then the role it played in my autodidact lifestyle in which I would choose subjects to immerse myself in for weeks or months which if not already chosen as research for a fiction WIP would often provide inspiration for one or more old or new ones.  And of course there is the role of the librarians trained in reference sources and fact finding who along the way have helped me fine tune my searches or chase down an allusive fact or resource or introduce me to a resource I hadn't known was available.

Most import, my fiction WIP including this year's NaNo novel have suffered due to lack of regular public library access this past year.  The Internet can lead me to titles of books and articles I need for research on topics and for fact checking needed for the WIP and research on craft and publishing but I'm rarely able to read them for free online.  And when, as has been my practice, one wants to access upwards of one or two hundred titles per year, few budgets can accommodate that.

There are those who believe the Internet is a viable replacement for everything a library represents to an individual and their community and thus libraries are becoming obsolete and not worth funding.  Aside from the fact that many of those who need free library services are only accessing the Internet at the library this is a woefully ignorant viewpoint, as besot by tunnel vision as are my own RP diseased eyes.

What role has your public library played in your life?  In developing or sustaining your love for reading and/or writing fiction?  In your own blogging habits?  In the raising of your children to love story?  How much of that can the Internet as you now know it replace?

This may be the first of a series of posts in which I explore these and other questions and topics related to the role of a free public library system in communities as our own community begins a new dialog on what ours means to us and the level of funding we are willing to sustain.

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Help! I Don't Know How To Be Without a Library.

From the Jackson County, Oregon web site, the final update for the night was posted just before midnight:

PRECINCTS COUNTED (OF 51) . . . . . . . . . . 51
REGISTERED VOTERS - TOTAL . . . . 110,952
BALLOTS CAST - TOTAL. . . . . . . . . . . . 58,588
VOTER TURNOUT - TOTAL . . . . . . . . . . 52.80%

15-75 Local Option Tax for Public Library Operations
JACKSON COUNTY

Yes . . . . . . . . . . . . 24,253 = 41.74%
No. . . . . . . . . . . . . 33,852 = 58.26%
Total. . . . . . . . . . . 58,105


We got the first half of the fifty-fifty requirement: The better than fifty percent turnout of registered voters. But for the second time in under a year, Jackson County, Oregon has said a resounding NO to a library funding levy.

It is going to take me a few hours, if not days to assimilate the understanding that I'll be without library resources for at least several more months. The earliest another measure can get on the ballot is September.

I don't know how to be without a library in my life!

My first memories of visiting the library are from the time my baby brother was still in a stroller. He was 22 months younger. So those memories go back to age three. I have very vivid memories of receiving my first library card at age five and then upgrading to a 13 year old's card with 'upstairs' privileges in the adult stacks. That was in Longview, Washington where I lived until I married just after my 21st birthday and since then I have lived and held cards in Oceanside, California,, Longview again, Jackson County, Oregon, Longview again, Sunnyvale, California and Jackson County again. During the late eighties I had a card with the Southern Oregon State College (now Southern Oregon University) in Ashland as well as the county card. In Longview in the late nineties I had a card with the Lower Columbia Community College as well as the city card.

Remind me again how I am supposed to do this. I know I worked out a plan and nothing has changed to alter its parameters, though there was a close call this past two weeks with the malware attack putting my laptop and relatively unhindered access to the Internet in jeopardy. Maybe I'll feel a bit better by tomorrow night, after I've had a chance to adjust to the let down of the slim hope I was holding onto; after I've had a chance to review my plan for how to live and continue my work for a time without library resources. It isn't a long-term plan though. If this is still going on a year from now I'll have to be reminded why I want to continue living in a community where vested interests are holding access to knowledge hostage and the majority of those who care enough to vote about it are A Ok with the idea.

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Turned my library levy ballot in here this morning. Phoenix City Hall now occupies the building which was the Phoenix Library a year ago. Our new library is being built on the lot where City Hall used to be. But will it ever open its doors?

Today is D-day for the library levy. Ballots must be turned in by 8PM which is less than three hours out now. To pass there needs to be better than a fifty percent turnout of registered voters plus better than fifty percent in favor. Word on the local news at five is that turnout is running at 48%. Close enough for hope but not close enough to relax. No word yet on how the votes are falling. Opinion on both sides has been strong and outspoken.


Nobody needs to guess where I stand.


I walked my ballot over to City Hall in Phoenix this morning, dropping it in the box just before nine. To do this, I had to stay up way past my usual bed time of late. I had hoped not to be leaving it to the last minute like that. The ballot arrived in the mail the same week the malware attack hit my laptop. Possibly the same day thought at the moment I can't quite remember whether the ballot arrived on Saturday the 28th or Monday the 30th. I will never forget the moment my laptop started blitzing the screen with browser windows and pop ups faster than I could close them. Just before 3AM that Saturday morning.


For over a week, I feared that I was about to loose access to the Internet and my files at the same time I was loosing access to the library. Panic is not a strong enough word to describe my state of mind. Over the next twelve days my laptop got at least as much attention as a newborn in intensive care. After a week of playing Whack-A-Mole with the malware, my husband was at his wits end and told me to start preparing for a probable reformatting of the hard drive. By which he meant for me to collect my personal files for back up. Since some of my files needing back up were still on the PC, I started working with them during the times the laptop was busy with scans or restarts.


One of the biggest backup projects on the PC was my email corrospondence trapped in the AOL software. I had discovered only after I had been using my laptop for three months that transferring AOL mail files from one computer to another would overwrite the files on the destination computer. I would have had to choose between the two years preceding my Dad's death while I was in Phoenix communicating with my parents and siblings three to five-hundred miles north of here, or the three months following his death while I was in Longview, Washington communicating with my husband here in Phoenix. Then there was the email related to web site admin on both. No way to choose. Thus the only way to salvage the PC email files was to copy and paste them into text files or save them as HTML pages.


I knew that project was going to be huge which was why I procrastinated on it so long and because it was hooked in my mind with the whole issue of backing up my files it tended make me avoid thinking about it. But this latest scare has really got my attention. I hope I never need another lesson in the importance of backing up your important files regularly. A lot of the stress of the last two weeks would have been avoided if a few keystrokes could have backed up my files.


I had been estimating that the PC email retrieval was going to take two or three night work sessions. Access to the PC for me is limited to between 9PM and 5AM. Or I can get back on it after my husband leaves for work on the days his mother also works--Tuesday through Friday. Which is what I did this morning because I had to stay up until I could walk the ballot over anyway. I had come very close to completing the project before five but had a couple dozen more emails to sift through and some double checking with my photo folders that I had already copied the pictures over to them. That took me a bit less than an hour after my husband left for work this morning. I estimate that I put in close to thirty hours on that project alone over the last ten days.


The email was the last of the files on the PC needing to be accounted for and organized for backing up. Now I can focus on the files on the laptop. And the good news is that the laptop is cooperating at the moment. The aberrant behavior has been nearly zip since Friday evening. There is hope we will not have to reformat the disk after all. But I refuse to loose the momentum or the motivation on the file back up project. I am still hoping to hit the target my husband set a week ago which was this coming Saturday. The day he was going to take the hard drive back to its out-of-the-box state.


But for the next several hours my focus is going to be on following the election returns on the local news. The fate of ballot measure 15-75 holds my fate in its hands. Life will go on without library access but wouldn't be a life I would recognize or feel at home in.

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Attention Jackson County Oregon

Attention Jackson County Oregon

Save Our Libraries

Yes on 15-75

The caption under the picture is a link to the local PAC set up to promote the levy measure on the May ballot for funding Jackson County Oregon's 15 branch library system for another three years.

Ballots will be mailed on April 28 and must be turned in by 8PM May 15. (Note: if mailing your ballot, be sure to mail in plenty of time. For those who have been used to dropping your ballots into the locked ballot boxes at your local library branch in past elections, here is the list of official drop sites established for this election.)

Final day new voter registration will be accepted for this election is April 24.

Here is a PDF of the voter pamplet.

Please Jackson County, Save our library system!

You can bet I'm going to have more to say about this over the next month.

So this evening marks one full week since the library doors were locked. I can still barely believe it. Meanwhile I am tending to the promise I made to myself the day I posted this Thursday Thirteen regarding the things in my life I have neglected in the four months between learning of the impending closure and the day the doors were locked. I am groping my way toward balance. Sleep and writing are the two things that have gotten the most attention this past week. With this post I congratulate myself for having posted every day for a week.

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Save Our Libraries

This is the picture now displayed on the home page of our library system's web site.

There is is a mixture of sadness and anger in our community this week. There is a strong consensus that loss of library access is not good for the community but there is not much consensus on what should be done about it.

The sadness needs little explanation. The anger is a complex cauldron.

Some of the anger is directed at the county officials because of a perception that funds have been mismanaged, or that they dithered too long in creating a replacement for the Federal safety net monies due to expire last year.

Some are angry with the Federal environmental laws and the 'loony tree-huggers' who filed suit after suit over the years to stop the logging on the Federal lands which was providing the income for the rural counties that then needed to be replaced with the 'safety net' money known as the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act which expired in December when Congress failed to renew it.

Some are angry because they perceive the library closures as a blatant attempt by certain county officials to manipulate public sympathies against the logging restrictions and in favor of solutions that propose selling millions of acres of public land to create trust funds for the counties.

Besides sadness and anger there is anxiety on the part of supporters of county ballot measure 15-75 which would fund the libraries at current levels of service for another three years with a tax of 66 cents per $1000 of assessed property value. This is estimated to average about $9 per month for the average home owner in the county. Anxiety stems from several concerns, not the least of which is that tax measures are notoriously difficult to pass in Southern Oregon. Then there is the requirement of a better than 50% voter turnout with a better than 50% yes vote in order for the measure to pass and Southern Oregon is also known for low voter turnout. The fact that a similar levy garnered less than a 50% approval last November when hotly contested Federal Congressional and State Gubernatorial races provided a bigger draw than the election this May is expected to contributes to the anxiety.

Those who suspect that interest in last November's version of the levy was impacted by the hope then current that Congress would vote to renew the county safety net after the fall recess. A hope that was to be disabused. If that was the case then, a similar reluctance to pass the levy could be induced by the fact that a three year extension of the county monies has been inserted into the emergency appropriations bill for the Iraq war--the one Bush is threatening to veto because of the time lines it contains. But that D.C. imbroglio could drag out for several more weeks and it hasn't been decided yet whether, if it passes, the county monies would be forthcoming at the beginning of the fiscal year this summer or at the end of this year.


Nor does it help that county officials are murmuring to the effect that even if the levy passes it could be months, if not the beginning of next year before the libraries could be reopened because of the complexity of collecting and disbursing the money..

Thus it is that the campaign to save our libraries is going to be an uphill battle.

More information about the issues involved can be found on the website of the Association of Oregon Counties.

The Southern Oregon Library website is still hosting its infoblog which continues to post breaking news relevant to the library closure and personal testimonials. One post from January 27 is regularly updated with links to the most recent news from newspaper articles to TV broadcasts and even blogs. The newer links are added above the older links which makes this particular post a good resource for following the complexities of this story over time.

Meridith May's San Francisco Chronicle article is still one of the better overviews of the situation as it stood a month ago.

And Open Democracy, an anonymous local blog, gives some good background info as well as a taste of some of the passions and personalities involved in this local drama which is fast becoming a national spectacle.

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