When I’m in a library, I think about family.
When my daughter Thandi was a toddler and we were living in London, story time at our branch was a highlight of the week. Once on a holiday to Stonehenge, we wandered into a library in the nearby town of Amesbury for a break after a morning of pretending to be knights fighting dragons. Story time was over by the time we arrived, but we were all charmed to find Amesbury’s library as welcoming as our branch back in London.
I have vivid memories of my father taking me to the library in Pueblo, the southern Colorado town where my family lived when I was in elementary school. Our branch must not have had limits on the number of books you could check out. My father would patiently make several trips to the car after I had chosen more than the two of us could carry.
My father’s mother studied library science at Boston College. When she returned to her small town in Jim Crow era Georgia, all that her degree earned her was permission to check out books from the library. She was the only black person in town allowed to do that. Instead of working at the library, my grandmother taught school in the Black part of town. And she checked out books for all her neighbors.
I wonder what my grandmother would have made of the role that libraries fill today.
In early July, for the first time since its coronavirus closure in March, Denver’s library system resumed its hold service, allowing patrons to go online to reserve materials. But now you don’t go into a branch to pick up your book up from the hold shelf. You make an appointment online to collect your item from a librarian standing at a desk set up outside, where there is plenty of room for the social distancing needed to slow the pandemic.
When the libraries shut down, I wrote an article that explored the impact on people experiencing homelessness, for whom libraries are de facto day shelters. The library is a place to read, charge a cell phone, access the internet to search for jobs and housing, use the bathroom. And it’s a place just to be, when so much of the city is off-limits to people who don’t have the price of a cup of coffee.
Denver’s library system has embraced its role as a service provider. And I’m not just talking about Denver librarians being trained to administer naloxone, the drug that can reverse an opioid overdose. In 2014, the Denver library was among the first libraries in the country to hire a social worker. In 2017 the social worker hired the first of what is now a large staff of people who have experienced homelessness as peer navigators. The navigators mentor and coach people who come to the library in need not just of books, but of housing, of job training, of help applying for food benefits, of mental health or drug counseling. A navigator might accompany a mentee to an appointment at Denver Day Works, a city agency that has placed people experiencing homelessness in maintenance and other jobs at the library.
Since the libraries closed, the social worker and her navigators have been able only to connect with their clients by phone. The calls have become scarcer over the months. Some things just have to be done in person.
A few weeks after the hold service resumed, staff set up a tent outside the main library in downtown with workstations where laptops could be used on a first-come, first-served basis, no library card necessary. Such pop-up internet cafés are now open at the main library and a dozen branches that keep their WiFi on so the internet can be accessed from outside.
On the day the laptop service was launched at the central library, a line of people was waiting when the tent opened. Pharris Washington told a reporter that he needed a computer to get his social security information, to apply for a COVID relief stimulus check and to set up a website to promote his music.
Library staff offered him a snack and a bottle of water when he arrived. “They care about the people, the community,” Washington said.
I think my grandmother would say that libraries are doing what they should always have done.