Up Library

I was planning to start a series of color Holga shots of Old Orchard Beach, and I will soon, but first I need to vent…

This is a shot of the boys at the downtown Minneapolis library, a fabulous new facility that opened to much fanfare this spring. It’s got a great kids’ area, packed-to-the-gills fiction, and an impressive local history collection, not to mention some special collections that I hope to visit someday, like the childrens’ book art collection.

Alas, its hours aren’t exactly suited to the working family: 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM most days, closed Sunday; getting downtown is a bit of a journey, so it’s hard to get there as often as we’d like. Our local branch is under renovation, and the nearest Minneapolis branch, while in a lovely old building, is in a rougher neighborhood than I like to go with the boys (and is closed on the weekend…). So we tend to go over the river to the nearest St. Paul library.

Anyway. I was checking the availability of a couple of books and the hours at a few branches, and saw that there was an online survey about the community’s needs for the library system. I started taking it, and was confronted with a grim reality: given the aid to local government cuts under the Pawlenty administration and general lack of funds, the library is looking at either (a) closing more branches, (b) reducing hours at more branches, or (c) cutting back on acquiring new materials (while closing branches and/or reducing hours…).

Which would be horrible enough if it weren’t for the Twins stadium that the taxpayers of Hennepin County will be buying over the next several years through a sales tax hike. Which was passed by the county board without a referendum. In their magnanimous graciousness, the county board has earmarked $2 million to the library system to increase hours; the library board notes that the funding gap is $6.5 million, likely to grow to $12 million in a few years.

So the public can pony up $350 million dollars of the $522 million needed for a new stadium (the old one was built 25 years ago, also with much taxpayer “support”), but we can’t adequately fund our library system? Because the stadium will have such a positive “economic impact”, but making books available to the community won’t?

Though one doesn’t like to be terribly political, one notes that a big part of the library’s woes is due to the Pawlenty administration slashing the state Local Government Aid (LGA) which made up 43% of the library’s budget. It costs a bit more to run a mixed-income city than it does to run a middle-class suburb, and the governor knows where his votes are coming from. I hope that the people who care about libraries make sure their votes head somewhere else on November 7.

Perhaps we’re drifting into the post-literate society, and I should just accept that the book is an outdated technology that is being replaced by iPods, widescreens, and camera phones. I mean, the technology of printed words on paper hasn’t really changed much since scribes were working with vellum and quills; it’s time to move on! Surely there’s not much use for the things anymore.

But all the same, Jack and Peter look forward to their trips to the library–any library–and sit rapt for their nightly stories. The library contains more worlds than a million television stations, all there for everyone to share for free. A place where any citizen, of any means, can go for knowledge and recreation, for improvement or escape, without buying a ticket or paying “convenience fees”. And it doesn’t even need a retractable roof.