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.

Folks Are Flocking to the Library, a Cozy Place to Look for a Job

HWPL certainly has been busier lately, the last few weeks, or so, compared to months ago. I can not know why.









Shamika Miller works on a computer at the Stockton-San Joaquin County Library in Tracy, Calif., a town that has been ravaged by mortgage foreclosures.

The financial crisis has caused a lot of withdrawals at the public library.

A few years ago, public libraries were being written off as goners. The Internet had made them irrelevant, the argument went. But libraries across the country are reporting jumps in attendance of as much as 65% over the past year, as newly unemployed people flock to branches to fill out résumés and scan ads for job listings.

Of course, the Internet itself is no replacement for actual research, not entirely. But I myself criticized the old model, and doing so got me in a lot of trouble In Library school.

Other recession-weary patrons are turning to libraries for cheap entertainment -- killing time with the free computers, video rentals and, of course, books.

Books, too, of course.












An average of 230 people a day line up to use the 27 computers at Randolph County Public Library in Asheboro, N.C.











A patron browses the science fiction and fantasy section of the Tracy library, which has seen an increase in the number of people using their materials.

Insights Both Fresh and Tested

The typical books-of-the-year list is confined, with good reason, to books that were published during that year. But the crush of recent economic news means that several older books suddenly have a new relevance. So while 2008 books still dominate my choices, you will also find a prophetic book from 2003 and a classic from the late 1950s. The idea is to create a reading list for anyone trying to make sense of the world right now.

The obvious place to start is the financial crisis, and the clearest guide to it that I’ve read is “Financial Shock” by Mark Zandi, a founder of the research firm Moody’s Economy.com.

I recently read the early parts of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s trilogy, “The Age of Roosevelt,” written more than a half-century ago. It is a bit triumphalist, but its age offers an advantage I hadn’t anticipated: you can draw the historical analogies for yourself. The debt-fueled business excesses of the 1920s sound especially, and chillingly, familiar.

I also asked Barry Gewen, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, if he would put together a canon of Depression books, and we have posted the list on our economics blog, nytimes.com/economix. At the top is “Freedom From Fear,” David Kennedy’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner (which, at almost 1,000 pages, is still 1,000 pages shorter than the Schlesinger trilogy).

To try to keep the current crisis from turning into a depression, the Obama administration is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars next year, much of it on a vast infrastructure program. And it so happens that one of the better-reviewed nonfiction books of 2008 was, in large part, about infrastructure. The book is “Traffic” by Tom Vanderbilt. The reviews focused on Mr. Vanderbilt’s entertaining tour through the anthropology of driving. But “Traffic” also has a larger message.

The next book was written more than five years ago, but it’s still the closest thing to an obituary for the Big Three car companies, as they once were. It was written by Micheline Maynard, a longtime automobile journalist who now works for The Times, and it’s called “The End of Detroit.”

“Detroit’s long reign as the dominant force in the American car industry is over,” she wrote, in the first sentence of the first chapter. She predicted that one of the Big Three could collapse within a decade. “The ultimate irony,” Ms. Maynard continues, is that Detroit “has been defeated by companies that did the job Detroit once did with unquestioned expertise: turn out vehicles that consumers wanted to buy and vehicles that captured their imaginations.” The Big Three’s ability to solve this problem, quickly, will largely determine their postbailout fate.

That's in a book published in 2003. It is, obviously, prophetic. I think that within two years there will be only 2 Detroit companies, and neither will be that strong. Chrysler and GM might well merge, but the sum of two sick companies will be one bigger sick company.

And, then, politics.

From the left, Larry M. Bartels, a Princeton political economist, explained in “Unequal Democracy” that the economy has consistently performed better under Democratic presidents than Republican ones over the last 60 years. For middle-class families, incomes have risen more than twice as fast under Democrats as under Republicans. Mr. Bartels makes a strong case that the pattern is more than coincidence. I’m not sure that cause and effect are as tightly linked as he suggests. But his critics have yet to come up with an argument as strong as his.

From the right, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam pleaded with their fellow Republicans to come up with an economic strategy beyond tax cuts. In “Grand New Party,” Mr. Douthat and Mr. Salam lay out an alternate agenda, for overhauling taxes, lowering health care costs, improving schools and reducing the number of single-parent families.

Lower health costs, better schools, social engineering; they're rightists?

Finally, I will mention a book that I already recommended once this year — “The Race Between Education and Technology,” a history of American education by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz.

The Road to Meltdown

THE ASCENT OF MONEY
By Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 442 pages, $29.95)MR. MARKET MISCALCULATES
By James Grant (Axios Press, 430 pages, $22)

A library question, and an answer

A young man came in today asking for material on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (passed in 1890). He's an 11th grade student at Ramaz. A search on the OPAC returned very little material: the only book was a biography of Benjamin Harrison, during whose presidency the Act passed.

I looked at Economics books; the indexes (actually indices, but why quibble?) revealed little, but it was a start. Following, I went to books written by economists: Galbraith, Friedman, Thurow; not much. But I did get a lead: look at the trusts themselves: Carnegie (steel), Morgan (money), Rockefeller (oil). I suggested to the student that he look at the index of each book, and determine if the pages on the Act were relevant.

A satisfactory start: he left with books and ideas, and a lesson on using the index of a book as a research tool.

A satisfactory end: I did my job well, and provided information and a lesson to a patron. This is a time when being a librarian is satisfying and rewarding.