Story in the Chicago Tribune.
Libraries short on cash, parking and staff are looking at self-service options to reach customers during off hours without adding work for employees. Tucked into vending machines or train station lockers, robolibraries allow patrons to pick up or drop off DVDs and books at their convenience during a time when many suburban libraries are cutting operating hours. Others might take the form of kiosks that serve nearly the same function as satellite branches and can allow patrons to access books, movies, videos, music, audio books, games or anything else the library lends. Eva Poole, president-elect of the Public Library Association, said she sees robolibraries as part of what people expect today from their libraries. "People don't want to be limited by time or location," Poole said. "It's instant gratification. They want to get it when they want it."
Showing posts with label Chicago. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chicago. Show all posts
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Downturn Puts New Stresses on Libraries
Rosalie Bork, an Illinois librarian, is seeing more stress.
The public library here had just closed its doors one evening in December when two homeless men who had been using the stacks as shelter from the cold got into a fight on the outside steps. What began as bickering took a violent turn when one of the men pulled out a knife and stabbed the other six times, leaving him bleeding beside the book drop.
Putting things in perspective, our problems are small.
Like libraries across the country, Arlington Heights Memorial had strived to keep pace with the changing times, ensuring its relevance in the digital age by becoming something of an indoor town square, and emphasizing that its money-saving services catered to the community’s needs.
These days, however, community need reaches far beyond reference help — and in many libraries, it is turning a normally tranquil place into an emotional and stressful hotbed.
Perhaps because of the nature, the demographics, of the communities HWPL serves, the tranquility here is broken only mildly. Of course, but a bus ride away are other demographics.
As the national economic crisis has deepened and social services have become casualties of budget cuts, libraries have come to fill a void for more people, particularly job-seekers and those who have fallen on hard times. Libraries across the country are seeing double-digit increases in patronage, often from 10 percent to 30 percent, over previous years.
We certainly have increased use.
The stresses have become so significant here that a therapist will soon be counseling library employees.
“I guess I’m not really used to people with tears in their eyes,” said Rosalie Bork, a reference librarian in Arlington Heights, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago. “It has been unexpectedly stressful. We feel so anxious to help these people, and it’s been so emotional for them.”
Well-to-do suburb fits Hewlett and Woodmere, indeed.
“Adults complain a lot about kids just playing games and you know, ‘I need to do a résumé, or ‘I need to write, I need some help,’ ” Ms. Jones said. “There’s a bit of frustration.”
That's familiar, at least the game playing.
Ms. Jones instructed her staff to tread carefully. “You don’t want to upset people,” she said. “You don’t know what might set somebody off.”
Very carefully.
Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, said résumé writing had become a major use of library computers, and every librarian in the system had received training in how to better assist patrons conduct job searches. The 40 million visits to New York libraries over the past year, he said, is the greatest ever in a 12-month period.
What a concept: specialized training.
In Sacramento this year, two branches of the public library temporarily stopped accepting cash as fines for overdue books, after thieves struck three times since June — in one instance, taking off with a safe filled with money.
Go where the money is, but that seems ridiculous.
In Lynchburg, Va., a gunman shot a man outside the public library on a Monday afternoon in late January. The victim, who survived, staggered into the library bleeding and looking for help. Since then, an off-duty police officer has been hired by the library for extra security.
We at times discuss the value of a security guard, but our problems don't quite measure up to that.
And in Quincy, Mass., where a man was recently arrested in the library and charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, among other offenses, a police officer on beat patrol now walks through the library during operating hours.
With an estimated 2,500 patrons visiting the library every day, employees must now park at a parking lot at a nearby church.
2,500? We can't get more than a couple of hundred, except on Wednesdays, movie day. The 2pm film showing can draw 160 people, and the parking lot gets full.
“When you walk by our new job-search desk, you see people in line and even waiting on the benches for assistance,” said Ms. Moore, the director of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library.
Soem people complain when they have to wait for an Internet machine here; they should consider the alternative.
The public library here had just closed its doors one evening in December when two homeless men who had been using the stacks as shelter from the cold got into a fight on the outside steps. What began as bickering took a violent turn when one of the men pulled out a knife and stabbed the other six times, leaving him bleeding beside the book drop.
Putting things in perspective, our problems are small.
Like libraries across the country, Arlington Heights Memorial had strived to keep pace with the changing times, ensuring its relevance in the digital age by becoming something of an indoor town square, and emphasizing that its money-saving services catered to the community’s needs.
These days, however, community need reaches far beyond reference help — and in many libraries, it is turning a normally tranquil place into an emotional and stressful hotbed.
Perhaps because of the nature, the demographics, of the communities HWPL serves, the tranquility here is broken only mildly. Of course, but a bus ride away are other demographics.
As the national economic crisis has deepened and social services have become casualties of budget cuts, libraries have come to fill a void for more people, particularly job-seekers and those who have fallen on hard times. Libraries across the country are seeing double-digit increases in patronage, often from 10 percent to 30 percent, over previous years.
We certainly have increased use.
The stresses have become so significant here that a therapist will soon be counseling library employees.
“I guess I’m not really used to people with tears in their eyes,” said Rosalie Bork, a reference librarian in Arlington Heights, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago. “It has been unexpectedly stressful. We feel so anxious to help these people, and it’s been so emotional for them.”
Well-to-do suburb fits Hewlett and Woodmere, indeed.
“Adults complain a lot about kids just playing games and you know, ‘I need to do a résumé, or ‘I need to write, I need some help,’ ” Ms. Jones said. “There’s a bit of frustration.”
That's familiar, at least the game playing.
Ms. Jones instructed her staff to tread carefully. “You don’t want to upset people,” she said. “You don’t know what might set somebody off.”
Very carefully.
Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, said résumé writing had become a major use of library computers, and every librarian in the system had received training in how to better assist patrons conduct job searches. The 40 million visits to New York libraries over the past year, he said, is the greatest ever in a 12-month period.
What a concept: specialized training.
In Sacramento this year, two branches of the public library temporarily stopped accepting cash as fines for overdue books, after thieves struck three times since June — in one instance, taking off with a safe filled with money.
Go where the money is, but that seems ridiculous.
In Lynchburg, Va., a gunman shot a man outside the public library on a Monday afternoon in late January. The victim, who survived, staggered into the library bleeding and looking for help. Since then, an off-duty police officer has been hired by the library for extra security.
We at times discuss the value of a security guard, but our problems don't quite measure up to that.
And in Quincy, Mass., where a man was recently arrested in the library and charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, among other offenses, a police officer on beat patrol now walks through the library during operating hours.
With an estimated 2,500 patrons visiting the library every day, employees must now park at a parking lot at a nearby church.
2,500? We can't get more than a couple of hundred, except on Wednesdays, movie day. The 2pm film showing can draw 160 people, and the parking lot gets full.
“When you walk by our new job-search desk, you see people in line and even waiting on the benches for assistance,” said Ms. Moore, the director of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library.
Soem people complain when they have to wait for an Internet machine here; they should consider the alternative.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Film: The Earl of Chicago
It worked, barely; and beside learning that Robert Montgomery was not only a Republican but a friendly witness before witch-hunting anti-Communist committees, it's okay. Barely. Saw it on TCM.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
In Chicago, a Sarajevo Exile Finds a New Home and Voice
Last year, a teenager in a trench coat shot to death five people in a crowded Salt Lake City shopping mall, before being gunned down himself by police. The story caught the writer Aleksandar Hemon's eye not for its horrible post-Columbine banality, but because of a detail about the shooter -- he was a Bosnian Muslim refugee from Srebrenica, Europe's bloodiest killing field since World War II. Without presuming to know the boy's demons, Mr. Hemon, who fled Bosnia himself, notes that traumas of war and exile lurk deep inside.Nelson Algren said loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose, and loving Sarajevo is like loving a woman with a broken spine."
Mr. Hemon is often put in good company with W.G. Sebald, Joseph Roth and Bruno Schultz as well as his generational "immigrant-lit" cohorts -- Gary Shteyngart and this year's Pulitzer winner, Junot Diaz.
He acknowledges literary debts to the late Montenegrin-Jewish writer Danilo Kis and his favorite of favorites, Anton Chekhov.
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