In good times, people are happy to have adorable pets and spend money on their care when they get sick. In bad times, when money needs to go to essentials, Rover gets put down when his infected foot costs as much as a car payment. Libraries have similar problems. In good times, libraries have the budget and staffing to expand their collections, offer lots of services to the public, and be really useful to patrons coming in to find information or entertainment, or socialize with other readers and hobbyists.
In bad times, libraries are more essential because the people coming in are more often there out of financial hardship, seeking information to solve a problem or start a new career path that can hopefully drag them out of the trap they've found themselves in. In bad times staff is needed to help these people, but this is precisely when budget cuts means there's fewer staff to do the work, and while they have the skills, they don't have the time. This is more tragic than ironic.
The trouble is, good times don't last and we're in a series of economic bubbles. Knowing we're in bubbles that eventually burst, what can head librarians do to plan for this, and how should they budget for the eventual cuts? And how should individual librarians deal with an industry that ruthlessly cuts their hours, benefits and jobs every time they are needed most?
In nearby Placer County, just down the mountain from me, to my South, the library there spent like there was no crash in the economy and now they're cutting hours to branches and closing at least one branch completely. They'd been operating by keeping only retired part time librarians on short hours to avoid paying them benefits, thus cutting their costs by half but would be starving these workers if they weren't retired already. It is currently common for California librarians to work 2-3 part time library jobs and pay for their own benefits out of pocket rather than be properly sustained by the communities they serve. This cost cutting insult shows that the Community does NOT value them or their contributions, which is exactly the time to pack up and leave for places which DO value librarians. More reason to support mobility.
When I worked in GIS, which is a type of digital map archive mostly used by govt but eventually gets sold to car GPS companies so you can find an address and get directions there, I was told my job was going to end if I didn't learn how to program in Visual Basic. It takes around 2-3 years to learn this skill and normally pays $80K per year. I was getting $19K/year as a GIS technician, and would be looking a 50% raise if I learned this skill, which is roughly 1/3 if I completely avoided map data and just programmed computers instead. $30K for an $80K skill. Govt considered that just fine. I didn't. Neither did my coworkers. Within a year of my leaving, all of them were gone too. A completely new staff does that job and hides their data from prying eyes but I STILL see my data, from 15 years ago, in use in maps today. What has the new staff been doing? CYA, apparently. The flaws we suffered from still exist too. I could have manually programmed those parcels years ago. Idiots. Archival jobs may be steady and stable, but when it becomes CYA, run away. If you stay you've ruined your reputation and you become obsessed with hiding your own incompetence.
General public libraries and the librarians who work in them, for the public good, should not get bothered by many things libraries have become. The local pot growers generally wash before coming in these days, which is good. They didn't used to. The ones sleeping outside don't light the place on fire. Inexpensive rental of the community room for club events means its a useful community center, though the insistence by lawyers that clubs can't sell their own materials in the room to other club members is something that should be changed. If an astronomer wants to sell his telescope to another astronomer, what's the harm? Its not like they're flea markets.
Childrens librarians do end up baby sitters of little kids while the mom's hunt for educational materials for her own career or books on child psychology or a romance novel. Romance novels are the single biggest loan material. Small wonder. Marriage is often the end of romance. That's just life. Managing a YA collection seems to end up a teen support group, and trying to include materials relevant to teens is tricky in a down economy. Rural teens have to deal with drug addiction and pregnancy, and military service vs barely legal pot growing are choices teens make if they don't have the patience for college. Impatient people, by definition, don't have the patience to learn patience. The lucky and smart ones start businesses in more legal venues, but around here those drift into illegal as well. Its just something that happens with desperate times.
For those with a yen for learning, librarians can help them most, finding useful resources and keeping them aware of what is going and what is coming, so they can prepare for each. As a shelver I can observe all of that, and its really interesting with my slight disinterested smile crafted to be as inoffensive as possible as I manuever politely around browsers to return books to the shelf. This is what patrons need. Get the books back where they can be found. Help them find what they're looking for. Type in the search if they feel embarrassed that they hunt and peck. Write it down for them. Don't let them see you judge them. At least the came in the doors to stop being ignorant. They've already made the first and most important step.
This willingness to stop being ignorant is why I like public libraries.
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