How libraries became “the last public space”

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Jordan Heath Rawlings For a long, long time, libraries were a place to go for knowledge, for books, for information and resources that you couldn’t find anywhere else. They were an incredibly necessary place, and the librarians who worked there were also.

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Jordan Heath Rawlings Sorry. The librarians who worked there spent their time sorting those books, helping you find those resources, curating content, and yes, keeping everybody quiet. And then the internet hit and going to the library for an encyclopedia was suddenly obsolete for most people. And libraries began a journey that would see them become something different entirely, but something that is arguably even more necessary. Now, machines can sort books, you can search for them yourself via computer, and librarians might still do some shushing. But what they have really become are the caretakers of the last truly public indoor space. To put it mildly, it is a completely different job than it used to be. Completely different than what most of them signed up for. It can be exhausting, rewarding, frustrating, scary, and even dangerous. But it’s really important. This is the story of how libraries became that last public space. About what they are now and what they might still become, the people who work in them and how they’re adapting everything to serve their communities. It is a messy story. It’s got a lot of problems, but it’s also kind of beautiful.

I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Nicholas Hune-Brown is an award-winning magazine writer. He’s the senior editor at The Local and he wrote about libraries for The Walrus. Hi Nick.

Nicholas Hune-Brown Hi Jordan.

Jordan Heath Rawlings This is a fascinating story and I think the changing nature of libraries is something most people have experienced, but maybe not really thought about in the big picture. And I wanna start where most of us probably start with libraries, with our memories of being a kid and walking into a library. Tell me about your earliest memories. What did you like about libraries? How did you fall in love with them?

Nicholas Hune-Brown Yeah, so I mean, I’m a, I’m a writer now, so unsurprisingly, I was in the library a bunch when I was a kid, and

Jordan Heath Rawlings I figure

Nicholas Hune-Brown What I especially remember is librarians as this kind of fountain of knowledge, right? I’d say, I like this book, what else might I like? And she’d say, oh, why don’t you read these Helen Creswell books? Or, you know maybe you’ll really like this, you know, this is a little bit of more advanced, but maybe you could go in this direction. So that’s my memory of going in, you know, week after week and having someone provide me with this like, knowledge and wisdom and, and share these books with me.

Jordan Heath Rawlings One of the things that I learned, from your piece is how so many of Canada’s libraries came to be, and so many libraries in the world. I guess, can you tell us about Andrew Carnegie? Who was he? What role did he play in this?

Nicholas Hune-Brown Libraries in some form have been around forever, right? Like collections of books. But the public library isn’t that old an invention. The way it really got started in, in Canada, there were a few kind of union led libraries and community places, but mostly it was through Andrew Carnegie, who’s the, the steel industrialist, the philanthropist. And he gave away a huge chunk of his money, I think 55 million US at the time, which is an insane amount of money. And he funded public libraries around the world and around the English speaking world. I think more than 2000 of them, including 125 in Canada. So these still exist today. Like I think the branch near me in Toronto is a Carnegie Library. I visited one in in Calgary. They’re everywhere. And, and he kind of, he believed that. He had become a rich person through his access to, to books, and that that was the most valuable thing that you could provide young people with. So yeah, you, he gave his money and he gave it to places to communities that were committed to funding the operations of the library into the future. So that, that kind of kickstarts the whole public library system, right, where, we’ll, we’ll build the building, you make sure that you’re actually gonna pay the librarians and, and fund this into the future. That’s where a lot of the, the major libraries in the country got their start.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And in your piece you refer to libraries in general, especially, Canada’s public system as the last public space. Can you kind of explain what you mean by that?

Nicholas Hune-Brown Yeah. It’s the phrase that I kept hearing as I was talking to people in the, in the library world, and usually it’s said with kind of a little bit of pride. You know, it’s an incredible thing and it’s service that they’re providing. It’s the last place that you can go. And just sit down without someone hustling you along or asking you to buy something. It’s like the last kind of open doors for people to be in a world that’s increasingly privatized. And that’s like an enormous, enormously important role. But it is, as a definition of what the library is, it’s, it represents like a pretty huge shift from what they started as. It’s a much bigger role than, a place where Carnegie thought you could go to borrow books.

Jordan Heath Rawlings When did that shift begin? I know we often like to talk about things that accelerated during the pandemic, but this was before that. Was it the age of the internet when libraries started to change? Like what happened?

Nicholas Hune-Brown There were two big shifts that kind of happened at the same time, and one of them is definitely the internet. Right before the internet, if you wanted information, if I want to know the how many people lived in Edmonton in 1972? I would go to a library and there’d be someone behind a big desk and they would’ve had lots of training and they would know where to find this thing, and they would get a big book from the shelf and they would, you know, figure it out for me. That all obviously shifts, like completely, so there’s that side of it. There’s also just other technology like RFID tags where you don’t, you know, you go to Calgary’s library right now and they have this giant insane robot that, you know, the books get pushed up a giant escalator and then they’re sorted. And that all used to be done by humans, right? So you have this moment where you have these highly trained librarians who they don’t need to do that kind of work quite as much. Like the work of information sciences and telling you where to find stuff is still very important. And it’s still a huge chunk of what librarians do, but not to the same extent. So, The first thing is you have librarians who are now, instead of being behind these big desks in charge of reference books, they push them out on the floor. They begin a bunch of programming. You know, you have all the kids stuff, you have right ESL classes, you have librarians doing things that are more useful than, you know, scanning a million books. At that same time, and I think I’m talking about kind of the nineties till now, you have another shift that’s happening kinda outside the library, which is more complicated and harder to talk about, but it’s basically kind of the social safety net. The hole is getting larger. Right? Homelessness becomes a bigger problem. Mental health care, getting treatment has always been an issue, but it’s, it’s a bigger issue today. These kind of services that used to be provided by other places, suddenly they’re not provided by those places quite as well. And the library is there as like as the one open door as the last public place. So more and more of those tasks through no one’s decision making, they just slowly shift to being the work of what a public librarian does.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And how are librarians prepared for that? That’s what fascinates me is, you know, how are they traditionally educated? Most of the librarians in the system that you know, would’ve gone to school cuz it took a degree. What skills would they have trained for compared to what they’re doing now?

Nicholas Hune-Brown I think what librarians are are learning in library school has shifted a little bit to be more focused on this kind of community-based stuff that they’re dealing with. But, but still traditionally the stuff they learn is about information about how to sort it. So I think speaking to a number of library workers, and those include librarians who have like the master’s degree and also a whole bunch of people who work in libraries who don’t have that degree, but who are doing the same kind of community work who are on, on the front lines there. Yeah. A lot of them say that they they’re not prepared for the kind of work they’re being asked to do. They’re, they’re doing things that are, that are pretty far outside maybe what they envisioned when they decide to do a degree in library science. Cause they like books and they, they enjoy literature.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well, you visited a huge library conference and listened to some of the discussions there. Can you tell me about them and what are they focused on now in terms of providing the services that come with being the last public space?

Nicholas Hune-Brown Yeah, I went to the super conference in Ontario, which is the biggest conference of library workers in the country, and it brings people from everywhere and they, you know, chat and catch up. And then within these seminars there are people getting into the biggest issues. And the one that I attended, it was really about kind of the role of social workers in the library. Over the last few years, more and more libraries in North America have hired social workers to deal with what you’re seeing, which is a lot of the, the homeless population spend time in libraries. A lot of the work that you might have, seen done by other social service agencies are being done in libraries. So the discussion there was about how do we, how do we do that? How do we meet the needs of that clientele without having the kind of necessary funding or, or even skills sometimes what the best way to do that is how do we, what are the limits of what we can do? You know, I think that’s very much a life question right now. That that’s, that’s kind of what was the focus of the article is. At this moment, I think people across libraries in Canada are asking like, what should we be doing? What should our role be? Cause libraries are open to everyone. That’s the beautiful thing about them. And they’ve been like very good at adapting to fit the needs of their communities. But at this point, you’re hearing some desperation from workers saying that like, we actually can’t adapt to fill these needs. Th is is, this is a bit too much for us.

Jordan Heath Rawlings How much of this, and I wanna ask this sensitively, because the space I think everyone agrees should stay public. It’s a public resource. How much of this is about librarians and people who work in libraries, feeling unsafe or ill-equipped to deal with the level of crisis they’re seeing?

Nicholas Hune-Brown I mean, that’s something I’ve definitely heard over and over again, and I think it’s, it’s something that even the library workers themselves have a hard time. Even squaring in their mind, they go into those services because they genuinely wanna provide these services and to work with these communities. So some of them told me that, you know, they don’t want to be the one that says, I actually feel a little uncomfortable providing Naloxone as part of my job. That is something that they’re trained in. And because they’re more opioid poisonings and in a lot of public places, including libraries, that’s something that library workers do do. You know they don’t wanna be dealing with someone who’s in. Intense mental distress or they don’t feel equipped or, you know, they don’t feel like they have the, the skills to do that. So that’s something that comes up a lot and I think it’s something that a lot of people are struggling with who, who work in these places.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What about for, the library patrons themselves who, you know, might be having the same experience with their kids as, you know, we might have with our parents. How do libraries deal with the push and pull here? In terms of being a space that is open to everyone, but also like a safe space to bring your kids for story time on Saturday morning.

Nicholas Hune-Brown You know, I heard, I heard less about that and I think just speaking from my own experience in libraries, I, I mean there are moments when you know, you’re dealing with people in distress in a lot of public places and maybe you’re less comfortable with that. Maybe there’s someone noisy next to you and you don’t work there or you don’t there reading with your kids. But I think overall libraries actually do an incredible job of holding this messy mixture of people in the city within their walls. And making everyone feel pretty comfortable. I think it’s more the library workers that I’ve heard who, because that is their job and they’re the focus of it, experience that as, as a daily thing. And I do, I don’t think that there is a huge contingent of people who refuse to bring their kids to the library because they don’t feel safe. I think libraries are still very well used. But of course you can see a, a danger down the road and if libraries shift what they’re doing completely.

Jordan Heath Rawlings How have libraries begun to shift? You mentioned some of them employ social workers. What else are they doing to be more prepared to meet the current needs of the community?

Nicholas Hune-Brown Well, as I said, they’re being trained in kind of and how to deal with these different kinda clientele and, and there’s constant trainings on, on how to deescalate. The more controversial practices that have come in is around, around things like security. And I spoke to people in Winnipeg in particular, which is a kind of difficult case where at the Millennium Library, they brought in kind of airport style security a few years ago, and that was in response, they said to increased violence in that library. There was a huge outcry and you know, by putting people out the doors, you, it turned out were pushing people away from the library. If you’re homeless and you’re carrying all your stuff, would you submit to having all of your stuff searched through by security? If you’ve had bad experience with the police before, would you want to kind of submit yourself to that inspection? So violence went down, but library use went down as well. Right? And that’s the whole point of the library is for people to use it. So I don’t know if you could call that a success. More recently, and sadly there was a, someone was killed in Millennium Library. And after that incident, they reintroduced security at the doors. So I think, I mean, I, I talk about that particular example as like, just an example of how difficult these issues are, right? I don’t think there are many clear, clean answers to some of these difficulties, and that’s again, I don’t think that’s necessarily, a, a problem of the libraries. That’s like a problem that libraries are being forced to deal with. It’s a problem that starts like way outside the doors of the library and that the solutions to which probably exist outside the, the doors of the library as well.

Jordan Heath Rawlings When we talk about libraries as the last public space, how much of that shift has been exacerbated by the past three years in the pandemic?

Nicholas Hune-Brown Yeah, that’s interesting. I, I think. It was a moment of clarity, right? When everything shut down and you kind of realized how much people needed libraries, first of all, like for a washroom, like for the internet. And it was also a fascinating moment where you saw libraries try to jump into new spaces or try to meet the needs of their communities in new ways and mean in Toronto here, because the library has this amazing distribution system, they became food banks. They opened up their wifi. They kept it going 24 hours a day because you had kids who were literally doing their schoolwork, like from cars, in the parking lots. In Calgary, I think they were doing print on demand jobs because people needed stuff printed like the roles at the libraries fill right now they have like, stepped into huge places of need in, in society that are doing conferencing and rooms that are kind of, part of being the less public space means adopting all sorts of things that are necessary in the community. So the pandemic was an amazing moment for that. After the pandemic, as we’ve kind of come back into these public spaces, I think, I think the library, like a lot of public spaces, you’re seeing the results of a few years of difficult times of lockdowns of huge illness, of people dying. And you’ve seen that in every public space in Toronto. I know there’s, you know, a number of violent incidences on the TTC. You kind of hear anecdotally and, and statistically about kind of mental health difficulties for children. And the library is a place where all of these difficulties. They come in that door and you and you see them. So I spoke to librarian in Calgary who, again, someone interested in books, but who is doing work since the pandemic that she sees is just so different from what she was seeing before, kids who are in mental distress. So she’s actually taking a, an extra master’s degree in like child psychology to help them. A lot of immigrants who they don’t have the same settlement services as they have before. So she is kind of going far beyond her role as like as a librarian there to try to help them. So that kind of work is really inspiring. It was amazing to talk to library workers doing that, but it’s also. It’s also untenable. You know, you can’t rely on like underpaid library workers doing an extra degree in order to solve your like children’s mental health crisis. So I think that post pandemic reality that we’re in and we’re kind of figuring out at different levels of, of government society, libraries are really seeing that in in person.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And so naturally, with all these extra challenges, the libraries are receiving a lot more in government funding because politicians definitely understand how important libraries are, right?

Nicholas Hune-Brown Yeah, yeah, exactly. They’re now, they’re flush with cash and a lot of those problems are, are, are done with. No. Yeah. They, they, they’ve taken on a whole bunch of new rules, haven’t received more funding. And that’s the challenge, right? I talked to one head librarian that says they wanna hire another social worker, but actually what they have to do is they have to wait till a, a librarian retires in order for that to happen. So the path forward for libraries, I think, I mean the obvious one is, is a little bit more funding so that staffing can get up both for the safety of library workers and just kind of to provide all these services. For the bigger issues again, it doesn’t feel like they’re issues that can be solved in the library. I think that right, if homelessness numbers continue to go up cause of lack of social housing. If mental health continues to be a crisis, if you provide, you know, continue not to provide enough settlement services to immigrants or housing is so scarce that people use, need a public space to use as their office or their living room, like, you’re gonna see all those difficulties in the library.

Jordan Heath Rawlings When you talk to people who have spent their careers, working in libraries and love them, what do they think they could do or see as the future of libraries if it was prioritized? Like, I guess, let’s leave the underfunding aside. What do they see as the ideal role for a library in 2023 and beyond?

Nicholas Hune-Brown Yeah, well Calgary is a great example cause Calgary is this just a gorgeous central library, a beautiful place, and it was built fairly recently. So it’s kind of an image of what people think the future of libraries could be. And I mean, one part of that, to be frank, is less books like they’re still tons of books in the Calgary library system, but they are removing a bunch of them. And that’s because libraries are being used more as public spaces. So there they have a whole bunch of meeting rooms that are constantly being used, right? Like if people don’t have enough space in their homes. If you are a small business that needs a boardroom, if you are like a university student who needs to do a video interview for an internship, but you live in a overcrowded house, like right. These are things that the libraries can do. So beyond the programming there, the future seems to be as the sort of. Public space in every way you can imagine. You know, they have recording studios in them. They’ve got people who can teach you how to make video. They’ve, they’ve gone well beyond their start as places to get books. That’s a fascinating shift, and I think people who work in libraries are, are excited about that. Then the shift towards kind of being a services hub is happening alongside that. And I think that’s, that’s something that they’re, they’re figuring out, right? If, if you can be the first place to still providing information, you, what you’re doing is you’re, you’re welcoming door and you tell someone. Hey, look, this is the place where you can get shelter. This is the place where you can get immigration services. You can hand someone off to someone who can help, you know, help do that work. That’s, that’s something that definitely makes sense for a library to be doing. The problem right, right now is that there’s no one to hand a lot of these people off to.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Nick, thank you so much for this. Thank you for the piece. That’s really fascinating. And yeah, here’s to libraries getting some money and resources.

Nicholas Hune-Brown They’re great places. I’m gonna go, go with my kid later on, get some books about cheetahs.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Oh, my kid loves cheetahs too. Did you know that Cheetahs very fast. Yeah.

Nicholas Hune-Brown Yeah

Jordan Heath Rawlings Thank you again for this.

Nicholas Hune-Brown Thanks very much.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Nicholas Hune-Brown writing in The Walrus. That was The Big Story. For more from us as always, check us out at TheBigStorypodcast.ca. Or of course, every single place you get podcasts, you can always write to us with an episode suggestion or some feedback at hello@TheBigStoryPodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter @TheBigStoryfpn, or call us. Leave us a voicemail, 416-935-5935. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.