by Susan Orlean
In Los Angeles, the librarians I met were not the dour and discouraged personnel of a dying industry, but cheerful and eager individuals uplifted by the conviction that they were doing something important. I started going to library conferences to see if my impression of their optimism bore out, beginning in 2013 with the American Library Association conference, the biggest library conference in the world. The conference that year was held in McCormick Place in Chicago, a structure so huge that it seemed to have its own atmosphere and weather pattern.
Alongside tens of thousands of librarians and library supporters, I roamed through an exposition hall that had seven hundred booths and almost seven thousand exhibitors. The event was so populated that it felt like a new nation-state. The librarians were from Fort Collins and Painesville and Irvine and Oshkosh, from Anchorage and Austin and small towns in Tennessee. I knew there were librarians from Los Angeles here, too, but the crowds were so big that I never ran into them. The librarians wore flowered blouses or glittering READING ROCKS T-shirts, or they had tattoos of books and Dewey decimal numbers. If they were wise, they were wearing comfortable shoes, or else they stopped at one of the Happy Feet inner soles booths, conveniently located at each of the hall’s four corners, to edit their footwear. “Librarians have pain,” the northwest corner’s Happy Feet salesperson told me as he fitted me with inner soles. “No one is on their feet all day like librarians are on their feet all day.” I enjoyed the book displays, but I was really fascinated by the mechanical stuff, the gizmos and widgets a civilian might never realize that libraries need. A company called MJ Industries displayed a staggering array of sorting systems. ColorMarq shelving management promised “The End of Misshelved Books!” There were signs from ASI Signage Innovations, and automated checkout kiosks, and something called Boopsie for Libraries that asked the question “What’s Your Mobile Strategy?” Interspersed among the manufacturers and mainstream publishers and niche publishers of, say, Christian cat books, were booths displaying single seemingly random books, such as The Long Journey of Mister Poop (illustrated, available in English and Spanish), and Young Revolutionary Publishing Company’s lead (and perhaps only) title, Memoirs of the Homosexual President: Told by the First Lady.
Some months after my trip to Chicago, I went to Aarhus, Denmark, for a biannual conference called Next Library, an international gathering to “look ahead and explore the continuously evolving nature of the public library in the 21st century.” That year’s theme was “Rethink.” It attracted several hundred librarians from thirty-eight countries who came, in part, to celebrate Aarhus’s new central library, a building so fresh-looking and engaging that I really didn’t want to leave it, and apparently, neither did anyone else. The building is a stack of concrete wedges on Aarhus Bay, and the space inside is soaring and open, with views of the water from the reading rooms. The bookshelves are in wide rows, adding to the feeling that the place contains more than the average amount of air and light. It is a loungey sort of library; there are big pillows everywhere, in case you want to lie on your stomach and read, and the main staircase, wide and gently sloped, has been adopted as a sort of indoor jungle gym for the infants of Aarhus. When those of us at Next Library weren’t swooning over the new building or guzzling the very good coffee for sale in the library café, we went to sessions about innovation and engagement and outreach and learning. Some were talks, and others were participatory. I attended one session that involved building things with LEGOs. I never understood what that had to do with libraries of the future, but the worldwide headquarters of the LEGO Corporation were just sixty miles away in Billund, Denmark, so maybe the session organizers just wanted to make use of local products.
In every session, the point made was that libraries could do more and more while still being places of books. The possible ways a library could grow seemed, honestly, quite endless. Conference-goers were impressed that the Aarhus library has a marriage license bureau among its services. A Nigerian librarian told me that her library offers art and entrepreneurship training classes, and a librarian from Nashville described how the city library there just started a seed exchange and housed a theater troupe.
I often thought of how City Librarian Tessa Kelso would have felt at home at the Aarhus conference: Her suggestion in the 1880s that the Los Angeles Public Library should loan tennis racquets and board games would have fit right in. So many things at both Next Library and the ALA conference made me think of the Los Angeles librarians of the past whom I had come to know through my research. Charles Lummis would have reconsidered his opinion that librarians were dull if he’d joined me at the Librarians with Tattoos cocktail hour in Chicago. And Dr. C. J. K. Jones, the Human Encyclopedia, would have felt vindicated by the British Library and the Royal Library of Denmark’s new “Wikipedians in Residence.”
In Aarhus, I tagged along with Deborah Jacobs, the former Seattle city librarian, who is now running the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries Initiative. The foundation helps underwrite the conference, and Jacobs had been the person who urged me to come. She also happens to love Aarhus and mentioned that she was thinking of renting an apartment there when she retires. Jacobs is small and sturdy, with bouncy chestnut hair and a twinkly smile and a good laugh. She is also possessed of an iron constitution. In the weeks before we rendezvoused in Aarhus, she traveled to Nambia, Ghana, the Netherlands, South Africa, and San Francisco, and she didn’t seem worse for the wear. Bill and Melinda Gates got interested in libraries long ago: Supporting public libraries was one of their first charitable projects, before they even formed their philanthropic foundation. The effort began in 1997, with the goal of helping every American library get connected to the Internet. In 2002, after they completed their part in helping wire all the libraries in the United States, the Gateses decided to continue their engagement with libraries and to expand it internationally. The Global Libraries Initiative was founded in 2004. (The global and domestic programs merged in 2011.) One of its first projects was to help people around the world connect to the Internet at their local library. At that time, sixty-five percent of the world’s population didn’t have access to the Internet, which left them unable to get information online or develop knowledge of the digital world. In a sense, the Global Libraries Initiative designated libraries as the worldwide portal to the future, by making them the default location for free public Internet.
In the last twenty years, the initiative’s goals have broadened beyond just wiring the world’s libraries. It has awarded grants to international literacy organizations like Worldreader in developing nations, and has supported thirteen thousand libraries around the world, in such places as Botswana, Lithuania, Vietnam, Moldova, Jamaica, and Colombia, with funding for equipment and training for staff. More recently, Jacobs has steered the program’s efforts toward educating librarians and connecting them to one another, especially in Africa, where librarians were isolated from one country to the next. She also wants to cultivate the next generation of what she calls “spark-plug librarians,” whom she pictures guiding the profession in the future. She considers Los Angeles city librarian John Szabo one of the current spark plugs, but she’s also thinking about the generation who will come after him. “We need to make sure there are strong people to step in when we’re gone,” she said to me recently, then added, “Wow, I almost choked up when I said ‘when we’re gone.’ ” At the time of our call, Jacobs was in South Africa, sitting in an office with Gertrude Kayaga Mulindwa, the former head of the National Library of Uganda, who is now a director at the African Library and Information Association and Institution. Because I wrote a book about orchid thieves a few years ago, Jacobs thought I would like to know that Kayaga Mulindwa is a passionate orchid collector, and when she travels to international library conferences, she has been known to tuck a few orchids in her suitcase and bring them home. “Is that illegal?” I could hear Kayaga Mulindwa saying in the background. “Deborah, I don’t think that’s illegal.”
; In 2014, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation redoubled its commitment to health and science issues and decided to prune programs that didn’t fall into those areas. Rather than stopping it abruptly, the foundation gave the Global Libraries Initiative four and a half years to wind down so that the libraries and librarians it was helping would have time to adjust to the change. By the time the program ends in December 2018, the Global Library Initiative will have devoted twenty years and $1 billion to libraries and librarians and literacy programs around the world. The Next Library conference I attended with Jacobs took place in 2015, shortly after Jacobs had sent the email announcing the impending end of the program. The initiative and Jacobs are big forces in the library world. It seemed like every single person at the conference knew Jacobs, and many benefited from the initiative. Jacobs seemed pleased by the fact that most people reacted to the announcement not with panic or despair but with a bootstrapping determination to keep doing what they were doing, even without the Gates’s largesse. “We didn’t build physical libraries the way Andrew Carnegie did,” Jacobs said. “We encouraged and trained and connected librarians, and we helped communities develop. I’d say that’s pretty good.”
Still, everyone at Next Library talked about money and how there was never enough of it. The topic is such a constant in the world of libraries that it almost goes without saying that it comes up anytime more than one librarian is in a room. But just like the participants at the American Library Association conference, everyone I met at Next Library seemed excited about the future—even the people who ran tiny libraries in the basements of city halls in Polish villages or were barely breathing life into woefully underfunded ones in Kenya. It was like everyone shared the same great realization: that libraries have persisted, and they have grown, and they will certainly endure.
I stepped into another portal to the future when I visited Cleveland recently and toured the headquarters of OverDrive, which is the largest digital content catalog for libraries and schools in the world. If you have ever borrowed an e-book from a library, it is likely that you were borrowing it from the library’s cache in the OverDrive mega-collection, which numbers in the multimillions. When Steve Potash founded it in 1986, OverDrive sold diskettes and CD-ROMs to publishers and booksellers. “That started to peter out,” Potash told me, “and we saw where the technology was going.” A few years later, the company executed what businesspeople like to call a “pivot” and reinvented itself as a gigantic collection of e-media. Essentially, the company created the concept of an e-book loan. At the time, libraries were sniffing around the business of loaning nonphysical books, but that would require more computing power and management than many had available. With OverDrive, they could just set up a membership and offer material for loan without having to do the daunting behind-the-scenes work. For instance, the Los Angeles Public Library’s digital collection resides on a cloud run by OverDrive in Cleveland.
The first public library to give OverDrive a try was the Cleveland Public Library, which set up its e-book lending service in 2003. At the last count, more than forty thousand public and school libraries (and some academic and corporate ones) in seventy countries use OverDrive to handle the loans of their electronic media, which now includes audiobooks, music, and video, along with electronic books. The number is growing so fast that when I visited its headquarters, OverDrive had thirty-seven thousand member libraries and just a month later, when I called to confirm the number, it had risen by over eight percent. It might have seemed like a wild idea when it started, but within three years of its founding, OverDrive had loaned one million books, and in 2012, it had reached a hundred million checkouts. By the end of 2017, it had reached the milestone of having loaned one billion books. On an average day, seven hundred thousand books are checked out through OverDrive. The company has been so successful that, a few years ago, the Japanese conglomerate Rakuten paid $410 million to acquire it.
I met Potash in the lobby of OverDrive’s new headquarters, which is a stark, striking glass-and-concrete monolith perched on a grassy ridge west of downtown Cleveland, on the far side of a deep valley carved eons ago by what must have been a very impressive piece of ice. Unlike many people who have founded pioneering technology companies, Potash is a grown-up, and his three adult children—two daughters and one son—work at OverDrive with him. Potash is warm and rumpled, with a head of thick brown hair and a way of talking about the company that sounds parental and proud. OverDrive is essentially a technology company, but Potash has the manner of a library person rather than that of a technology person. He knew every Los Angeles librarian I mentioned, including details of their lives and histories. Before he gave me a tour of the building, for instance, we spent at least five minutes talking about Peggy Murphy, the head of the Catalog Department at Central, and Potash knew all about how Murphy had sneaked into the cage of dirty books at her first library job and read her way through them.
The lobby of the OverDrive headquarters is huge and high. A ten-foot-square screen that displays a world map dominates the center of the lobby. Every few seconds, a bubble pops up from somewhere on the map, showing the name of the library and the title of the book that had just been borrowed. The screen is mesmerizing. If you stand there for a few minutes, you will see that someone at a small library in Arles, France, has just checked out L’Instant présent by Guillaume Musso; that someone in Boulder, Colorado, has borrowed Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J. K. Rowling; and that in Mexico City, someone has claimed a copy of El cuerpo en que nací by Guadalupe Nettel. It feels like you’re watching a real-time thought map of the world.
OverDrive may be the future of book lending, but that’s not the same thing as the future of libraries. Libraries are physical spaces belonging to a community where we gather to share information. There isn’t anywhere else that fits that description. Perhaps in the future, OverDrive will be where our books will come from, and libraries will become something more like our town squares, a place that is home when you aren’t at home.
31.
Civil Procedure in a Nutshell (2003)
By Kane, Mary Kay
Series: Nutshell Series
347.9 K16 2003
Great Careers with a High School Diploma: Health Care, Medicine, and Science [electronic resource] (2008)
By Porterfield, Deborah
E-book
AIDS, the Mystery and the Solution (1984)
By Cantwell, Alan
616.97 C234
Ask the Dust (1939)
By Fante, John
On shelf
In 1991, five years after the fire, it was finally possible to imagine a time in the not distant future when Central Library would move back to the Goodhue Building; the new wing would be open; things would return to normal. The Goodhue Building was still closed, but construction crews had power-washed the walls, shoveled out the soot, and put things right. On the adjoining lot, a huge hole had been dug to make room for the new wing. The rumble of construction equipment and the sharp chime of steel against steel rang through the blocks bounded by Grand Avenue and Fifth Street and Hope and Flower. A few miles away, the document restorers pressurized and vacuumed and groomed and babied each damaged book, then declared it either salvaged or hopeless. The number of books ready to go back on the shelves was growing. New books, paid for by the Save the Books campaign—which had reached its goal of $10 million—were starting to arrive. In March, the new wing was topped out. The interior work began, and in spite of the construction fencing and the saggy orange grid of Tenax barriers, the place was beginning to acquire the shape and dimensions of a library. Librarians began the process of cataloging the contents from scratch, merging the three collections—the books that made it through the fire unscathed, the salvaged ones, and the new books bought to replace the four hundred thousand that were gone for good.
The city’s civil suit against Harry Peak, and his countersuit against the city, inched along—a deposition here, a motion there; a statement from
the French Quarter waiter, a filing about damages from the city attorney—but nothing felt decisive. Rather than speeding toward a resolution, the case dawdled. It grew more bewildering. In his most recent depositions, Harry had altered his story yet again. He now insisted that he’d had breakfast with Fathers Wilkie and Clark before his wart treatment rather than after; he said they’d been in the restaurant at ten A.M., not noon. Father Wilkie altered his testimony, too, saying that he had another patient scheduled at eleven A.M., and that the patient had been a little late, and that he, Harry, and Father Clark left the restaurant and went up to his office a few minutes after eleven.
This new set of facts and times was hard to reconcile. The first alarm at the library sounded at 10:52 A.M., but it wasn’t known to indicate a real fire and not just a false alarm until 11:11 A.M., when firefighters discovered smoke in the Fiction Department. Therefore, the earliest anyone knew that there was a fire at the library was 11:11 A.M. According to Harry’s new time line, the waiter’s mention of the fire would have occurred just moments after the alarm went off. This would have been impossible unless the waiter was listening to a police scanner; otherwise he couldn’t have heard such an early report of the fire. In terms of Harry’s guilt or innocence, the shift in time didn’t matter. It was still the same alibi—Harry’s claim that he was with Wilkie and Clark when the fire began. What mattered was that Harry’s constant revisions made the truth about the day seem as unfixed as a drop of oil on water. Every time a coherent pattern formed, it almost immediately deformed and became unrecognizable, and what you thought you saw—a circle, a cloud, a face—dissolved into a murky swirl with no shape. I’m not sure why Harry thought changing this timing helped his alibi. Instead, it furthered my sense that his lying was an involuntary impulse, so automatic that he didn’t weigh the lie’s value before it flew out of his mouth.
