When you walk in, it’s all right there – new release CDs, blockbuster DVDs, and print and audiobook selections straight from The New York Times bestseller list. Down the hall a fire glows, and people lounging in overstuffed chairs around the hearth are thumbing through the latest editions of Newsweek and Real Simple. Across the way students and business professionals are hunched over their laptops, surfing the Internet while sipping macchiatos purchased from a coffee kiosk.
It’s a scene from a typical mega-bookstore. But if you live in San Jose, Calif., this is actually your neighborhood public library.
Libraries like this aren’t simply the wave of the future: They’re already a reality throughout the country, says Susan Hildreth, president of the National Public Library Association. So it’s only natural to assume that Dallas, a city that prides itself on trendsetting, would be in this premier category.
All it takes is one step into the Forest Green branch, however, to see that this isn’t the case. The library celebrated its 30th birthday this year, and in three decades, the building hasn’t changed much. That’s evident from the ’70s-era signage, which might look retro and hip in another setting, but against the backdrop of Forest Green, it just looks like everything else in the branch – old.
It doesn’t help that the undersized building, the smallest of Dallas’s 24 branches, lacks the space for an extensive collection. And the little space it does have has been squandered for some time – when branch manager Kitty Stone took over this spring, she found books on the shelves that had been there since her stint as Forest Green’s part-time library associate in 1978.
Yet Stone doesn’t act particularly perturbed by this reality. She instead feels that budgets are in a “good position” and believes the library is “valued as a city department.” She’s not alone in this assessment. From the top down, Dallas librarians are quick to extol the library’s virtues and, for the most part, seem oblivious to its shortcomings. (Either that, or they simply don’t want to acknowledge them.)
So the question is: If the people driving our libraries are perfectly satisfied with the status quo, will we ever get to San Jose?
Part of the problem – as with most things involving city government – is money.
Over the last five budget cycles, the library’s piece of the general fund pie has remained the same – roughly 2.8 pecent – despite the fact that four new branch libraries will have opened before the end of fiscal year 2007.
Despite this, Dallas Public Library director Laurie Evans doesn’t consider her department to be treading water. She believes the libraries are “well-positioned” and “sit very comfortably in terms of our budget.”
But just last year after she was hired, Evans told a Dallas Morning News reporter that the library was “at bare bones in terms of service and what we can provide.” Evans says the quote was taken out of context: She wasn’t referring to the article’s mention of preliminary city budget numbers showing that $880,000 would have to be cut from the library’s coffers. Instead, Evans says, she was arguing that you can’t throw money at materials without providing funds for extra staff members to process and shelve those materials.
Yet in the same breath, Evans says she doesn’t see a need for hiring additional librarians or expanding materials.
“I’m not asking for more. I’m pleased with where we’re headed,” she says.
Though many probably wouldn’t admit it, that can’t be music to the ears of library employees who often rely on “Friends” groups – neighborhood residents who raise money for their local branch – for basic needs such as trash cans, book carts and hand soap.
We haven’t always lagged behind the curve. In the ’70s Dallas was among the vanguard of the nation’s libraries, says Michael V. Hazel, who chronicled the library’s first 100 years in his book, The Dallas Public Library: Celebrating a Century of Service 1901-2001. Its branch circulations were among the highest in the country, and the system was among the first in the United States to launch a computerized catalog. But the economic downturn of the late ’80s and ’90s slashed millions of dollars from the library’s budget, crippling its ability to keep up with the latest trends, let alone set them.
“I think it takes a long time to recover from that,” says June Leftwich, who became a library employee in 1973 and now serves as the Dallas Public Library board’s vice-chair.
Even at the turn of the century, when Hazel was completing his book, librarians were anxious that the city might impose further cost-cutting measures, but Hazel’s sense is that dollars have remained fairly stable since then.
“That certainly doesn’t mean they have all the money they need to operate,” he notes.
That’s not what you might expect from one of the largest municipal library systems in the nation. And, in fact, Dallas even lags behind other Texas library systems.
Take, for instance, Houston’s Harris County Public Libraries, the system with the highest circulation rate in the state. Five years ago, director Catherine Park and her staff began referring to library patrons as “customers,” and stocking shelves at each branch with bestsellers, popular children’s books and new release DVDs. Harris County also turns over its collection at the highest rate in the state (Dallas has the lowest), and therefore has endured some criticism from the hey-that-book-wasn’t-worn-out-yet camp.
“We just don’t have the space to never throw them away,” Park explains. “That’s part of our high circulation. You don’t keep old and worn things on the shelf because they distract from the relevant collection.”
Today’s libraries find they have to cater to two major groups; the first being people who solely want quick and easy access to library materials. In Harris County, cardholders can simply request an item through the library’s website, walk in and grab it off a hold shelf, and scan it at one of the self-checkout counters. These amenities benefit librarians, too; they can spend their time focusing on branch development instead of scanning books.
But another segment of the population wants libraries to serve as social venues, and to that end, Harris County’s branches are inviting people to hang out by adopting the Barnes and Noble-esque trend of cushy chairs and, yes, even cafes.
Park, herself a 26-year veteran, says inviting food and drinks into the libraries was the change toughest for her staff to get over, but it’s part of what has contributed to their now “bustling” atmosphere.
Many of the ideas implemented over the last five years were borrowed from the San Jose Public Library, which is comparable in size to both Harris County and Dallas. Park says she was impressed with San Jose’s high usage numbers; the branch library described at the beginning had a circulation of 87,000 last July (compared to Forest Green’s monthly circulation, which averaged roughly 15,000 last year).
“We’re not afraid to do pilot projects and see how customers respond,” Park says. “We have to do that to continue to make the library a vital place in the community.”
So what needs to change about Dallas’s libraries in order to keep them relevant? It’s a subject Evans is reluctant to discuss. She prefers to refer to them as one of the city’s “best-kept secrets,” believing that if she and her staff can get people in the door once, they’ll return.
But she admits the libraries need some updates. Her current pet project is turning downtown’s Central library into an “urban center” with a downstairs cafe, a gallery space for local artists, and wireless headsets that allow librarians to move freely among aisles of books instead of being chained to a desk – all of which should become reality within a year, Evans says.
Nothing similar is proposed for the branches (except for perhaps the wireless headsets), but all of them did recently become wireless Internet hot spots. At Audelia Road, with its groupings of modernistic yet cozy easy chairs, the free WiFi should be popular.
The branch received a complete overhaul in 2004, and it’s now a portrait of what you might expect from a modern library. Its updated design with warm tones and wooden bookshelves give it a mellow feel, and the new amenities include a self-checkout counter and a children’s area with pint-sized cushions and a window seat.
“I was impressed. This library is nicer than I expected it to be,” says Nicole Dreisbach after her first visit to Audelia Road.
Dreisbach isn’t the only neighbor pleased with the changes, if circulation numbers are any indication. They shot up by more than 250,000 within a year of the renovation, making Audelia Road not only the largest Dallas branch in size but also in circulation. (In contrast, Forest Green’s circulation numbers have dropped in recent years, and is now the lowest circulating branch in Dallas.)
Still, its new-and-improved status doesn’t mean Audelia Road is sitting pretty. The money for the cute Dr. Seuss posters in the children’s area came out of librarians’ own pockets. And the clocks on the wall, the benches outside and even the garbage cans were purchased by the Friends of the Audelia Road library. One of the friends, Mary Jane King, emphasizes that her branch has plenty to offer, but she also believes that Dallas leaders see the library system as “the stepchild of an overall kazillion budget.”
“I mean, we have to buy our own hand soap,” says assistant branch manager Denise Lyons, describing the limitations of her library’s funding. “We’re making those dollars stretch as far as we can, but it really does pull on us in every direction to provide the best service to the community.”
Despite budget restrictions, neighborhood librarians are doing what they can to keep pace with changing times. Stone began tackling her outdated collection by restocking shelves with new materials. And Lyons, with the help of the Friends, created a Grandparents Raising Grandchildren support group with an entire bookshelf dedicated to related resources. Texas is second only to California in its number of grandparents raising their grandchildren, and the program is so popular that it caught on at other Dallas branches. Unfortunately, the collection’s grant funding will soon run out.
Though Evans makes clear that she’s not asking for a padded budget, she also says she wouldn’t turn down another few million. “In a perfect world,” she says, the library would modernize buildings at least every 20 years, stock the branches with bestsellers that are flying off the shelves like hotcakes, install the latest technology sooner rather than later, and hire more staff to implement all of this.
“We’d phase in things faster at some of our older locations. We wouldn’t be as tied to or dependent on passage of the bond to do things we want to do long-term,” Evans says.
That said, the most recent bond election gave her hope that Dallas residents are rallying behind the libraries. In 2003, voters approved $55 million to build four new branches and replace four others, the largest proposition in the history of Dallas libraries and the highest vote-getter on the ballot. Rodney Schlosser, chair of the Dallas Public Library board, cites this as proof the city may be on the verge of moving its branch libraries into the 21st century.
“If we continue to invest at the pace we’ve been investing since the beginning of this decade, then Dallas opportunity is really unlimited,” Schlosser says. “We are on the right trajectory now, and we have momentum.”
Evans points to the recently opened Hampton-Illinois branch in Oak Cliff, a library attached to an elementary school, as an example of the innovation these bond dollars can accomplish. Dallas isn’t alone in the joint library-school concept, she says, but “we’re few and far between.” The same goes for the small performing arts theaters added to this location and three other new and renovated branches. Though Dallas isn’t one of the premier systems in the country now, “I like to think that we’re turning the corner to get there,” Evans says.
It may take a sprint to get up to speed with other systems. Hazel cites Denver in his book as a city that underwent a similar economic downturn, yet never reduced its library budgets, and even passed a $91.6 million bond proposition in 1990. Today, Denver’s cutting edge practices include audiobooks, movies and library podcasts that can be downloaded from its website.
Passage of the $46 million library proposition on Dallas’s Nov. 7 bond election would be a step in the right direction. Schlosser admits that even with this funding, there would still be gaps (the library’s original recommendation was closer to $74 million), but it would help reverse the recession of the previous two decades.
That may be a small miracle in a state that ranks 40th in the precentage of income it provides to libraries, or, as Hazel says, in a city that has always prided itself on keeping taxes low.
“As a result, there never was quite enough money to go around. The library was one of the departments that suffered as a result,” he says.
Another department that took a substantial hit after the economic downturn was the parks, but concerned citizens across the city have banded together over the last few years to get budget dollars up and hundreds of millions in bond dollars passed, not to mention a $343 million proposition on this month’s ballot. Park activists are calling it a renaissance.
Will libraries be next?
It’s a question that persuades Evans to break from toeing the eternal optimist line, even if just for a moment.
“Oh goodness, I hope so,” she exhales.
