With the help of volunteers, the Lea School's library now has limited hours
for kindergarten through second grade students
by: Lauren Feiner
While Penn students might dread their weekend visits to Van Pelt
Library, it is clear from the crowded cubicles and GSRs that the University
would lose a valuable resource if its doors were closed. This is exactly the
situation in which Philadelphia elementary school students find themselves.
Because of extensive budget cuts, students are locked out of their school
libraries without access to books or trained librarians.
The School Reform Commission passed a “Doomsday Budget”
in late May last year,
in which $304 million was cut from Philadelphia schools for the 2013-14
fiscal year.
As a result, about
3,800 school employees were laid off, 24 schools were closed and money to extracurricular
programs was eliminated.
Libraries, however, have been seeing cuts for over a generation, WePAC Volunteer
Recruitment Coordinator Morgan Rogers Burns said. Under an increasingly tight
budget, chances of regeneration seem slim. “When it comes to cutting line items
for a budget, there are ways to rationalize away a librarian,” Rogers Burns
said. She stressed this was her own opinion, not the stance of her
organization.
A new Penn Libraries initiative is looking to expand students’ access to school
libraries. Ancil George , recently named the Community Outreach Librarian at Van Pelt, is
organizing efforts to get Penn students involved in expanding operations at the
library of the Lea School on the 4700 block of Locust Street. Currently, with
the help of a volunteer-based nonprofit called West Philadelphia Alliance for
Children, the library is open on Wednesdays and Thursdays to students in
kindergarten through second grade . George hopes to open the library for more days a week and to
more grades, since the school serves children through eighth grade.
Rogers Burns and other advocates for school libraries argue that
there are many things
that a school library provides that can’t be substituted. “The main thing that a
library allows students to do is self-direct their own learning,” she said. She
pointed out that although this might be possible in a public library, young
students rely on adults to take them to these facilities, and classroom
libraries simply don’t have as wide of a selection of books as large school
libraries do . “If it’s
not happening at the school, there’s no promise or guarantee that it’s going to
happen outside of school,” she added.
Studies also show that students who don’t have this access to
books and reading education are less likely to graduate high school.
A 2011 study by
Donald Hernandez found that, of 4,000 students tested, 23 percent of third-grade
students below National Assessment of Educational Progress reading standards
later dropped out of high school. Only nine percent of third-grade students who
had basic skills in reading, and only four percent of third-grade students with
skills rated “proficient” dropped out of high school. A 2013 research update
published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a private philanthropic organization
which advocates for disadvantaged children, concluded that studies continue to
support the hypothesis that third-grade reading proficiency may predict
graduation rates. As a result, WePAC and Penn Libraries is currently focusing on
granting lower elementary school grades access to the library at Lea, although
they hope to expand access to older students if given the proper resources.
WePAC and other community groups involved in school libraries and
reading programs are also working to get students enthusiastic about reading.
“In elementary school we would go to the library, and it was this great exciting thing
... it was the highlight of our week,” College junior Katelyn Behrman
, a co-director of the
Penn Reading Initiative, remembered. She has noticed throughout her involvement
with PRI, in which members tutor elementary school children once a week, that
without the drive for reading that a library can encourage in students, they
sometimes treat the subject like geometry, thinking, “‘When am I ever going to
use reading?’” she said.
“If a kid is struggling with reading in first grade, in four to
five years, that gets to be a kid who thinks that school is not for him because
it’s too hard,” Kate Mills said. Mills organizes the Book Choosing program at Lea
coordinated by Garden Court Community Association, during which each April, students get to
pick out their own books to keep, and start or add to their own home libraries.
Dylan Vizzachero , a College senior who volunteers at the Lea library once a week
through WePAC, recalled the connection he felt with a student at Lea when the
student confided in him that neither of his parents could read. Vizzachero
assured him, “Now you’re here ... maybe one day you can read to your parents.”
“Until the school district comes and takes this off our hands,
we’ll just keep opening libraries,” Rogers Burns said. So far, her organization
has reopened 12 school libraries for one to two days a week. If the Lea library
opens for more than two days a week with the help of Penn volunteers, it could
become a model for the rest of the schools that WePAC works in, Rogers Burns
said.
“All we can do as an institution is provide Band-Aids
,” said College senior
Kate Herzlin , the
outreach coordinator at the Kelly Writers House . “But we can’t stop the bleeding.
We can only cover it
up.”
Inside Three Lives
Photo: Shanna Ravindra
The doors closed Friday on the beautifully vaulted century-old space that
houses the Rizzoli Bookstore, only the latest in a long line of midtown book
emporia whose steady mass extinction seems to so handily showcase the Death of
Print. Just two weeks ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story
specimen blaring the headline “Literary City: Bookstore Desert.”
That story probably drove a small flood of sympathetic customers to
Manhattan’s endangered booksellers (St. Mark’s
Bookshop, Bank Street Bookstore, and maybe certain branches of Barnes & Noble). But alarmist rhetoric aside, it was a
familiar tale: Not about the end of reading, but about New York real estate —
inexorably rising rents and the few businesses that can afford them. It’s a
challenging landscape for anybody, but probably especially challenging for
bookstores after all. The same Department of Labor database the Times
cited, showing a nearly 30 percent decline in Manhattan bookstores between 2000
and 2012, also found Brooklyn actually gaining a bookstore (from 50 to 51) in
the same period. Look closely at a few of those — as well as Manhattan’s
hardiest survivors — and the city’s Darwinian, post-Bloomberg ecosystem begins
to look less like a literary desert than a harsh but productive driver of
bookstore evolution. Here’s how a few of the success stories have
managed.
The
shelves at GreenlightChase philanthropic support. Brooklyn’s most notable new arrival —
call it the 51st store — is Greenlight
Books. Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, a former events coordinator for McNally
Jackson, decided to open her own bookstore in the teeth of the 2008 crash, which
hit publishing particularly hard. But her plan won a Brooklyn business contest
worth $15,000, just as the Fort Greene Association revealed the results of a
local survey: The No. 1 service residents most sorely lacked was a bookstore.
The trade group contacted Bagnulo — already in talks with her current partner,
Rebecca Fitting, a sales rep at Random House, who was ready to kick in $50,000.
They held a gathering at BAM (Colson Whitehead and Jhumpa Lahiri showed up) to
solicit community loans, which eventually added another $75,000. Then they
landed $150,000 from the World Trade Center Small Business Recovery Fund. They
also got a rent break on prime Fulton Street — $5,250 for 2,000 square feet,
soon to hit the near-market rate of $7,500. The annual double-digit growth since
comes down to curation, engagement, and location. Greenlight became an official
merchandise vendor to nearby BAM, which led to a more aggressive strategy of
pursuing offsite sales. They’ve organized a new reading series at St. Joseph's
College, which hosted Gary Shteyngart in January and will soon feature best
sellers Elisabeth Gilbert and Khaled Hosseini. They’ve even hired someone
specifically to handle offsite events — 3 percent of the take as of last fall,
but a growing part of the business in a city without a lot of square footage to
spare. —B.K.
Powerhouse's
ample digsCourtesy of Powerhouse BooksForget books, sell the space. A recent ad for Verizon Fios features
two laptops competing for bandwidth in what looks like a Bushwick loft that
crashed into an Apple store. It’s actually PowerHouse
Arena: a 5,000-square-foot “laboratory for creative thought,” exhibition
hall, party space, shoot location, and, oh right, bookstore. “We don’t have a
lot of giant, traditional diversity,” says owner Daniel Power, referring to the
store’s rather limited stock. “We’re just very careful in what we select.” His
art-publishing house, PowerHouse Books, occupies another 5,000 square feet of
mezzanine, and at first the store sold mostly the books they themselves
published. But now 60 percent of their space (and 95 percent of book sales) is
given over to others, including better-known literary fare. There are no
shelves, just tables, the better to accommodate large-scale events (the top
corporate rate is $8,000 a night). Rent for the combined 10,000 square feet is
$22,000 a month, well below what you’d pay anywhere else in bougie Brooklyn, and
PowerHouse can make it back with just one major commercial shoot — like that
Fios ad, or a Japanese-language Sarah Jessica Parker spot for Coca-Cola Lite.
The store represents less than half of PowerHouse’s total business, which is a
good thing, because since the Arena opened in 2006, the best it’s done is break
even. But last year it broke even for the first time on book sales alone —
though those photo shoots and events certainly helped. —B.K.
Come
in and browseShanna RavindraHang on until the nearby Barnes & Noble closes. At Three
Lives, Toby Cox sells between 500 to 1000 books a week with the help of one
full-time employee, four part-time employees and two “booksellers emeriti,” that
is, former employees who still moonlight for fun. The West Village bookstore, on
the corner of West 10th in a former grocery story, runs on a modest profit —
enough to pay his bills, meet his payroll, and keep stock current but not much
more. The tattered awning is still tattered. The tin ceiling dilapidated. “But
that’s what the regulars like,” Cox says.
The early years of the great recession “were hard years,” he continues. “We
cut back the hours of staff, cut down on our stock and just waited for it go get
better.” But at the beginning of 2013, Barnes& Noble, the megalithic
bookstore that occupied a corner a few blocks east, abruptly closed. “Suddenly,”
said Cox, “people realized we were here.” The immediate uptick in business “was
noticeable. I never thought of Barnes & Noble as a competitor. I didn’t
think our customers overlapped. But after they closed, I realized they had been
taking our customers after all.”
At 600 square feet, Three Lives is about the size of the test prep section at
a big box bookstore, but the layout is streamlined for sales. The front half is
where new releases dwell, like charcuterie. (“I could pay a month’s rent on
The Goldfinch alone,” he says). Any time a book is bought, the entire
shelf must be reordered, since no books of the same color spine may be adjacent,
lest they appear erroneously as a set. “It’s a bit of an obsession, I guess,”
Cox says, replacing a stack of Teju Cole’s canary-yellow novel Open City
with Sebastian Barry’s burnt-ochre-hued A Long Long Way next to David
Peace’s shocking yellow-covered The Damned UTD. “The yellows were too
similar,” he says when pressed, “it just didn’t look right.” — Joshua David
Stein Get out from under your debt. Park Slope’s CommunityBookstore is Brooklyn’s oldest continually
operating bookseller, founded in 1971 by Susan Scioli. She still owns the
building and lives upstairs, but in 2001 she sold the store to her manager — who
by 2009 was barely managing. When Ezra Goldstein and Stephanie Valdez took over
the store the following year, they inherited a ratty rug, an unused fridge,
hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and a virtual menagerie.The
one thing Goldstein and Valdez didn’t inherit was a decent number of books. “The
stock was terrible,” Valdez says. “The kids section was pretty much empty.”
Publishers wouldn’t even sell them books directly that first year because the
store’s credit was too bad. The turnaround began around Christmas 2010, after
Goldstein took out $10,000 in savings, bought up stock from distributors, and
filled the store with books customers had long been requesting. Within a year,
they’d broken even, and their annual sales have since doubled, breaking $1
million last year. They gambled that, despite a massive Barnes & Noble
nearby, there was still demand for kids’ books; now it’s more than 30 percent of
the stock.
They held a grand 40th anniversary party in a church across the street,
starring locals like Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer. It was a coming-out
party for a store many neighbors had written off. “It takes a very long time to
restore a reputation,” says Goldstein. A lingering problem is the high rent on
Seventh Avenue. Theirs will rise to $9,500 in September — more than triple what
PowerHouse pays per square foot. In two years, the lease will be up. “It’s
essentially time to start panicking,” says Valdez, before correcting herself.
“Preparing.” And yet, they recently bought out a used bookstore in Windsor
Terrace from an owner in similarly dire straits. “We couldn’t help ourselves.”
—B.K.
...
and real estateJonathan BourlandBuy the building. BookCourt’s owners Henry Zook and Mary Gannettcan tell
you exactly why the Cobble Hill mainstay has been around since 1981 and managed
to expand just as the economy crashed: They bought their building, 163 Court
Street, in 1984, for $160,000. So while other stores struggle with leases that
seem to rise with every affluent (usually book-loving) new arrival to the
neighborhood, BookCourt actually benefits by collecting rent from upstairs. In
the mid-'90s, with their mortgage fully paid off, they also bought 161
Court* from their neighbor, a florist who
was relocating to Florida. They’d already converted 163’s dirt-floor basement
into another store level, but that cramped addition was nothing like today’s
space. The original 800-foot store is now a warm and well-stocked vestibule; the
front of the old flower shop is a welcoming kids’ area; and in back, where the
florist’s dilapidated greenhouse once sat, there’s now a large skylit atrium for
readings, lined with enough books alone to dwarf BookCourt’s original selection.
Bolstered by some new funding, Zook and Gannett finally began renovating the
greenhouse in 2006. Now there are dedicated sections for most of Brooklyn’s
favorite subgenres, from graphic novels to the paperback NYRB Classics. Asked
how business has been, Gannett evinces the cautious optimism with which the
couple has always handled growth. “Let me tell you, it’s very tough,” she says.
“I think we were probably more profitable early on, ironically.” But she’s never
regretted the expansions, which have raised their profile and their size in
every way. Besides, she says, it was never really about the money. “This is not
a profitable industry. There’s no money in this.” —B.K.
Of 3,200 children’s books published in
2013, just 93 were about black people, according to a study by the
Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.
Reading came early to me, but I didn’t think of
the words as anything special. I don’t think my stepmom thought of what she was
doing as more than spending time with me in our small Harlem apartment. From my
comfortable perch on her lap I watched as she moved her finger slowly across the
page. She probably read at about the third grade level, but that was good enough
for the True Romance magazines she read. I didn’t understand what the stories
were about, what “bosom” meant or how someone’s heart could be “broken.” To me
it was just the comfort of leaning against Mama and imagining the characters and
what they were doing.
What if those online music services that collect your tastes and
recommend new jams were headquartered right down the road? And what if they were
run by friendly folks actively working to wow you with care packages for your
ears that you could drop by and pick up? Okay, so the “care packages for your
ears” are compact discs. And the Internet isn’t serving them up—the library
is.
CD of the Month Club
Some would tell you that next to commercial streaming music
services like Spotify and Rdio, libraries’ aging compact disc collections are
fossils. So why do we even bother to keep our music collections? Why not just
cede the victory to our digital overlords and call it a day?
A lot of things justify maintaining and promoting physical
music collections. One of my favorites is a service we’ve developed at the
Cincinnati public library. The CD of the Month Club builds on the premise of
music discovery services such as Pandora and was, in no small part, inspired by
LJ 2012 Movers & Shakers Matthew Moyer and Andrew Coulon’s stellar
Personalized Playlists program at the Jacksonville Public Library (ow.ly/uk8Ad).
New club members fill out a form (either on paper or online at ow.ly/uk8qm) and
answer a few questions about the kinds of music they typically enjoy. Each
month, they’ll receive a mystery CD, chosen specifically for them by a team of
music-loving library staff and shipped to their favorite branch. Before sending
the selections we place a slip in the front of the jewel case, sometimes with a
personal note. When the discs are ready to be picked up, patrons are notified
just as with other holds.
We invite members to determine the adventurousness of their
selections on a scale between zero and five (zero being, “don’t bother sending
me something I’ve never heard before” and five being, “I dare you to blow my
mind”). In just over a year, our club has grown to nearly 700 members, and we
recently sailed past our 4,000th personal CD recommendation.
Behind the scenes
The process we follow in making our choices isn’t all that
complex. We create Word documents for members that include their preferences and
a history of our past selections for them, as well as any feedback they’ve
provided. The profiles are organized and linked to a spreadsheet on which we
also keep track of statistics and manage workflow. We’re transitioning to a
newly created database that will give members the ability to view and edit their
own profiles as well as rate and review each CD they receive.
The real fun is picking the CDs. Presumably most people join the
club because they want to be exposed to new things, so we work with their
preferences to begin. The human element is what sets our program apart from
algorithm-driven services. We make educated guesses, using intuition (and a few
resources I’ll discuss below) to help guide members to new (or old) musical
territory. Some members are less interested in being challenged than others, and
that’s more than okay.
Blowing their minds
More members than not dare us to blow their minds. But what does
that mean? Since we don’t want to scare anyone away, it’s crucial to consider
each member’s listening experience. We probably won’t send Wolf Eyes to a member
whose favorite bands are Maroon 5 and Adele, even if they’ve dared us to blow
their mind. Instead, we might start with something relatively safe, like Broken
Bells or Neko Case, then after a few months send something slightly outside
their comfort zone. We want to demonstrate that we understand their interests
before we throw John Coltrane’s Ascension at them. Every CD we
recommend is an opportunity to further our relationship with that person. And
then blow their mind.
Do it yourself
So you want to start a CD of the Month Club at your library, but
you aren’t feeling confident about choosing music for strangers. Don’t worry: if
you enjoy music, then you have what it takes. There’s a wealth of advice in back
issues of this column. Start with Moyer’s “Music Advisory” (ow.ly/ulz0K) and
Brian Morell’s “Discovery Without Algorithms” (ow.ly/ulz6L). I’ve also developed
a program-in-a-box (ow.ly/uk996) that any library is welcome to use.
Gnoosic’s Music Map (music-map.com) plots similar artists in
spatial proximity. Sometimes the comparisons are a bit off, but it’s usually a
great starting point. AllMusic (allmusic.com) is also excellent; in addition to
suggesting comparable artists it includes categories for “influenced by,”
“followed by,” “associated with,” and “collaborated with.” AllMusic also
features terrific guides to genres, highlighting key artists, albums, and songs
in each, plus tons of reviews and biographical information.
What we get from it
So many great, unexpected things have happened as a result of
this program. Members visit the library just to talk about music, or they’ll
email to tell me they just placed a hold on every other CD by the artist or
composer we recommended. Sometimes they’ll even counter with their own
recommendations for me! The CD of the Month Club allows us to shine a spotlight
on less-trafficked corners of our amazing music collection. I’m excited beyond
words about how far this project has come in such a short time. Suffice it to
say, my mind is blown.
Steve Kemple is a Music Reference Librarian at the Public
Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County
Many people still have the stereotypical image of a librarian stuck in their
head: an older kind of frumpy woman wearing glasses on a chain, her hair up in a
bun, shushing people with one hand while stamping books with the other. I was
even told by most of my classmates in Jr. High that I was going to be
a librarian because I liked to read, and I was very quiet during those years. I
still love to read, but since I’m much more comfortable with myself, I don’t
know if people would still say that I look like a librarian. Ironically, I did
become a librarian, but for completely different reasons.
As a librarian, we help to teach people how to become self-sufficient on the
computer, how to find the answer to patron’s questions (no offence Google, but
while you may come back with a million answers, we librarians come back with the
right answer), develop graphic designs for advertisement, act
as a social media managers, handle reader’s advisory, teach information literacy
classes, act as storytellers, teach children. We wear many many caps.
And here are five things that you may have been unaware that librarians do
(just a few of their caps), or that libraries offer.
1. Librarians are teachers. Many libraries have computer
classes: which can include teaching a room full of people how to use Microsoft
Office, how to use the internet safely, how to set up accounts and stay safe on
social media, or how to use photo manipulation programs. Some libraries even
teach computer programming classes.
2. Librarians are tech savvy. Whatever librarians are
teaching, or when we have to help a patron troubleshoot their own technology, we
have to be computer and technologically literate in order to help. We have to
know the basics of computer technology, at the very least. Most times, however,
we know more.
3. Librarians are advertisers. Libraries mostly manage their
own public relations and advertise their own services and events. They write the
press releases, network and make connections, as well as create their own logos
and graphic design.
4. Librarians are event planners. Libraries have dozens of
events every year, and the staff has to create a budgets and event plans, bring
in volunteers or paid presenters. They plan the activities, the topic, the
refreshments… everything. Sometimes, the librarian is also the presenter, if the
librarian’s outside hobbies happen to be of use.
5. Librarians are researchers. Librarians not only know how
to organize and find information. We know how to collate and analyze
information. We see the patterns and can extract information from it. For
example, have you ever gone to the library looking for the next book that
you would love, and asked one of the librarians what they would recommend? If
so, you were probably asked about what type of books you liked, if you have
favorite authors, of those favorite books or authors, what was it that drew you
in (location, characters, humor…), etc. These were all questions that help the
librarian gather information about analyze your taste in books to hopefully
provide you with your next favorite read.
With just those 5 things, librarians have to learn graphic design,
communications, how to interview, public relations, writing, computer literacy
and information literacy. And yet, there is so much more to librarianship that
even just the 5 items discussed above. This in no way means that the librarians
are ready to march into those other professions fully prepared, but we do have
to study and learn multiple professions so that we can act as librarians.
Librarianship is much more than reading books, and organizing them. Libraries
provide classed, events, public space, access to computers and technology.
Writing for the New York Times,
Julie Bosman recently looked at how surging rents are forcing bookstores from
Manhattan:
The closings have alarmed preservationists, publishers and authors, who said
the fading away of bookstores amounted to a crisis that called for intervention
from the newly minted mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, who has vowed to
offer greater support to small businesses.
[Author Robert] Caro said in an interview that he is heartbroken by the loss
of bookstores from Manhattan, calling it “a profoundly significant and
depressing indication of where our culture is.”
“How can Manhattan be a cultural or literary center of the world when the
number of bookstores has become so insignificant?” he asked. “You really say,
has nobody in city government ever considered this and what can be done about
it?”
There has, of course, been a similar trend in Toronto with the Cookbook
store, the Annex location of Book City, and the Bloor West Village Chapters all
closing (or about to) in recent months.
On a happier note though, Bosman notes that some stores are thriving by
locating to other, more affordable neighbourhoods in New York (and beyond):
just as many writers have fled to Brooklyn or Queens in search of more
affordable housing, some bookstore owners have followed. Greenlight Bookstore in
Fort Greene opened in 2009 to robust business and year-over-year increases in
sales.
In December, Christine Onorati, the co-owner of Word bookstore in Greenpoint,
Brooklyn, opened a second store in Jersey City. Ms. Onorati said she never
looked seriously at Manhattan because the rents were so unaffordable…
…After spending years scouring Manhattan for a second location, Ms. McNally
of McNally Jackson abandoned her search. At the urging of a former employee, she
began looking in Brooklyn and settled on Williamsburg, where she found a
“magnificent,” loftlike space with a 20-foot ceiling.
I hope this will be true of Toronto too even though it is much smaller than
New York (New York has more than twice the population of Toronto). But here,
despite some well-defined neighbourhoods, bookstores seem to have been slow to
follow their customers (and their families) to more affordable areas of the
city. My neighbourhood, where I’ve lived for 8 years, is filling up with young
families and yet many store fronts remain stubbornly empty. And while I consider
myself lucky to still have a bookstore, Book City’s Danforth location, only four
subway stops away, it feel like a very different neighbourhood. I would love to
be able to walk to a bookstore with my kids, or stop in to browse on my way
home.
Perhaps the bookstores further afield, in communities like Burlington
and Hamilton, are doing better? I hope so.
Still, I will leave the final word to Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in
Middlemarch, who has written a sharp response to the New York
Times article for The New Yorker:
Those of us who cherish our local bookstores do so not simply because they
are convenient—how great to be able to run out for milk and also pick up the new
Karl Ove Knausgaard!—but also because we feel a duty to support them, because we
believe in their mission. When books can be bought so cheaply online, or at one
of the dwindling number of discount retailers, paying more to shop at a local
bookstore feels virtuous, like buying locally sourced organic vegetables, or
checking to see if a T-shirt is made in the U.S.A. It can be gratifying to the
point of smugness to feel that one is being pluralistic, liberal, and humane;
shopping at an independent bookstore may be one of the diminishing opportunities
to experience that feeling in first-class New York City. Still, when I consider
the vanished bookstores of Manhattan, I mourn not just their passing but the
loss of a certain kind of book-buying innocence—a time when where one bought a
book did not constitute a political statement, and reading it did not feel like
participating in a requiem.
In a digital age,
publishers find innovative ways to bring readers books they'll 'fall in love
with'
by: Jennifer Rankin
Authors on rock star-style tours, animations of famous fictional characters,
merchandise based on children's stories – all these are now in the armoury of
Britain's biggest publisher as it fights back against the decline of the
high-street bookseller.
PenguinRandom House UK has
sold more than 10,000 tickets for a gig-style reading tour by the writer Caitlin Moran, and has
sold a cartoon version of Peter Rabbit to 15 countries, with
potentially lucrative tie-ins with toymakers and chocolatiers, as one of the
most venerable names in publishing moves into
territory which was once the preserve of film companies.
Tom Weldon,UK chief executive of Penguin Random House, said that, as
traditional ways of reaching book-buyers disappear, the company is looking to
build a closer relationship with readers, to tell them about "books they might
fall in love with".
"It is a sad fact of life that there are fewer physical bookshops than there
were. And traditional media is declining – including, sadly, newspaper books
pages," said Weldon.
As the books world moves from "a browse-and-display model to one of online
search and recommendation", publishers are having to adapt to catch readers'
attention, he said, especially when "there is so much entertainment choice out
there".
Speaking in his first national newspaper interview since Penguin and Random
House completed a merger last July that brought 15,000 authors under one roof,
Weldon said his industry had responded better to digital disruption than either
film or television, which had struggled to control intellectual property rights.
"The challenge isn't digital; it's how you tell people about the next great
book. Because anyone can get published now, but how do you capture the readers'
attention?"
The company would also be going into "merchandise and branding like never
before", using children's favourites such as Raymond Briggs's Snowman and Topsy
and Tim – and would carry out extensive market research to identify readers'
tastes.
Richard Mollet, chief executive of the Publishers Association, added that the
whole industry was looking at innovations, including new kinds of content, such
as "strange amalgams of books and games and films". Such changes did not "stem
from a position of weakness" but one of strength, he said. The industry had a
history of pioneering developments, such as the cheap paperback.
"Publishers have always been innovating and they are innovating well in the
digital world. It is a very exciting response to what is possible," said
Mollet.
However, a recent survey
from Booktrust, the UK
charity that encourages people to engage with books, showed that more than 60%
of 18- to 30-year-olds prefer DVDs to books. The scale of the challenge is
underscored by the fact that the games industry will for the first time have a
stand at the London Book
Fair, which starts on 8 April.
Jo Twist, of the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment, said the £3bn
games industry was complementary to traditional publishing and brought "an
innovative and creative edge to stories" to suit a growing population of people
who love playing.
However, Peter McCarthy, a New York-based publishing analyst, who has worked
at Penguin and Random House, said publishers should think carefully before
straying too far beyond printed books. "I am waiting to see how it really gains
traction," he said. "I am not a dinosaur, but I do harken back to the age of the
CD-Rom."
But even highly innovative CD-Roms and extended ebooks had "not broken the
land-speed record" and publishers can still "do better with any mass-market
paperback than an app", said McCarthy.
DENVER (AP) — Libraries are sedate and quiet — nothing
like a tussle over control of a library system that has erupted in northern
Colorado.
This week, elected leaders from five Weld
County towns and from the county commission agreed to move ahead with an effort
to oust the entire High Plains Library District Board, which some librarians in
rural parts of the county accuse of trying to take over their libraries. A sixth
member of the tax district, the city of Greeley, has not joined the
campaign.
The district and its independent libraries
partners have been sharing resources since 1985, when they banded together to
survive in the face of cuts in federal funding that had supported a range of
local services. Issues that have been rankling for decades may seem minor — such
as who should decide how many books can be checked out at a time, or how much to
charge a library patron who wants to use the copying machine. But Don Warden,
who helped draft the library district’s rules when he was Weld County director
of finance in the
1980s, said the local library is “part of the identity of their community” for
many in rural Colorado.
“It’s a sensitive issue that goes beyond
libraries,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday.
“They want to maintain control.”
The library tussle is part of a larger
reaction to a demographic shift from rural to urban. Last year, Weld County
elected officials were the first to raise a secession question. Weld was among
the six counties where voters rejected breaking away to form a rural 51st state
in November. Five counties passed secession measures, seen as messages from
prairie towns to urban centers that they see as arrogant and aloof.
Now, the six members of the High Plains
Library District Board, who deny any takeover intentions, are getting the
message.
Kelli Johnson, spokeswoman for the
embattled board, told AP she’s heard the charges the board was attempting a
takeover of local libraries when district officials approached their partners
across Weld County to talk about how to implement a centralized computer system
and other changes aimed at improving efficiency. It underlined a sense felt for
years that rules were unclear on how the district board and libraries with their
own boards are to work together, she said.
Johnson said the board sought input on
operational matters. The board includes members who have worked for libraries in
the region for years and are committed to cooperation and serving all patrons,
she said.
But Jerry Krois, library director in
Eaton, one of the communities pushing to oust the board, told AP he was left
feeling he was “not being listened to, not being respected at all by the
board.”
In 1985, six municipalities, a Weld County
school district and Weld County formed what would become the High Plains Library
District Board. Local libraries get two-thirds of the funds generated in their
service areas by mill levies, and the rest goes to a district fund for shared
services, such as book mobiles and an inter-library loan system. The
district serves more than 200,000 residents in Weld and parts of some
neighboring counties. Over the years, the district has opened branch libraries
in growing communities that did not have their own libraries in 1985.
Over the next month — if they are not
slowed by a court injunction the district board has said it will pursue —
community leaders in the district will be voting to ratify the board members’
ouster and name elected officials such as mayors in their place.
Warden, who is semi-retired and now
working as an interim Weld County finance director, said he worries a protracted
legal battle is ahead. “That’s probably the heartbreak of the whole thing,” he
said.
Expert Derek Quenneville introduces patrons to 3D printing at the Toronto Reference Library. by: Megan Marrelli
Derek Quenneville shows guests how to use the Makerbot 3D scanner at the Toronto 3D Printers MeetUp in March (Photo by Toronto Public Library).
If you don’t know how 3D printing works, you’re not alone. Derek Quenneville, a Toronto-based expert, says it’s kind of like a glue gun. Controlled by a computer. Except the glue is plastic. And the plastic happens to build up one layer on top of another.
“The mechanics of it are quite simple,” he says.
Quenneville is well known in the world of 3D printing and fabrication art. He creates his own projects, runs Toronto’s 3D Printer MeetUps, and now he’s also a Toronto Public Library guinea pig: Quenneville is its first official Innovator in Residence thanks to a new six-week program launched with the TPL’s Digital Innovation Hub.
Quenneville’s duties as resident innovator involve running 17 3D-printing sessions—ranging from drop-in Q&As to formally led classes—over the course of six weeks.
Now in his fourth week, Quenneville says turnout has been amazing.
3D printing “kind of chose itself” as the first medium for the residency, says TPL’s Ab Velasco. “Out of all the technology we offer, 3D printing is the one that’s considered really cool, cutting edge.”
TPL offered 300 spots for a 3D-printing certification course, which sold out in three days.
Quenneville has been pleasantly surprised by the number of people coming to his classes. “A lot of people who are not computer savvy at all are totally happy to be playing with the software,” he says. “I guess it makes sense, because the library is a safe space to learn.”
The crowd is also older than he’d expected—many Torontonians in their fifties and sixties are looking to learn about 3D printing.
He says—get ready for this—there’s nothing he dislikes about his job. “Just seeing people’s faces light up when they look at something that was in their brain, and half an hour later they’re holding it in their hands—it’s an incredible thing to see,” he says.
The Digital Innovation Hub is aiming to host an innovator twice a year. Velasco says that they’re currently leaning toward someone working in film; however, future innovators could specialize in “anything from web design to graphic design to electronics and computer programming.”
Quenneville’s residency will wrap up on May 2 with a closing party, but you still have time to drop by and ask him all your questions about the creative and practical applications of 3D printing.
My head is still spinning from Panos
Mourdoukoutas’ post at Forbes last week suggesting that there should be a
Starbucks in every local library. Granted it appeared in Forbes and they slant
corporate but it might just be the most near-sighted, wackiest story I have read
in some time.
Of course he starts out proclaiming his love for his local library but before
it’s over he says “Simply put, Starbucks and local libraries supplement each
other nicely—they are both “third places” with different rules of conduct,
catering to different community segments. That’s a good reason to have a
Starbucks store in every library.”
Why not put a jail in every library for it also has “different rules of
conduct, catering to different community segments.” They would compliment each
other nicely by providing literacy services and job training to inmates while
scaring the pants off the kids so they won’t go astray of the law.
Thankfully, I recently ran across a
story at the Korea Joonang Daily that alerted me to some of the awesome
features that South Korea is adding to its public libraries.
Over half of all the public libraries in Gyeonggi, a city northwest of Seoul
“offer some sort of specialized features” with close to 100 “dedicated to some
other function than book lending or reading”
“The main purpose of specialized libraries is to encourage a “reading
culture,” which these days is losing the public’s interest. They encourage
people to read books and enjoy cultural institutions at the same time.”
“Adding cultural elements to public libraries meets the demand,” said Cho
Hyun-yang, professor of library and information science at Kyonggi University.
“The spread of specialized libraries plays a positive role by increasing
citizens’ satisfaction with life.”
Oh, and the government covered all the costs of constructing these
specialized libraries.
Legend has it that Miguel de Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quixote was conceived
and at least partially written in prison – “where every discomfort has its place
and every mournful sound makes its home,” according to its opening lines..
Stripped of freedom and with his vision acutely attuned to the ironies of his
circumstances, Cervantes broke through the literary conventions of his time. Can
prison be a muse? It hardly seems desirable, when freedom is the condition most
of us would choose. Yet history shows that lasting work can be inspired by the
horrors and deprivations of incarceration. Authors with the intellectual grit to
endure have been rewarded with exceptional insights into human behaviour and
psychology. The tension between freedom and captivity has led to unexpected
creative breakthroughs.
Don Quixote contains “practically every imaginative technique and device used
by subsequent fiction writers to engage their readers and construct their
works,” writes Edith Grossman in the preface to her 2003 translation. Cervantes
anticipates realism, modernism, post-modernism, the frame story, the mixing of
genres, and more, all while maintaining that ironic wit. His device of
characters commenting upon the text in which they appear is centuries ahead of
its time.
Cervantes’ masterpiece seems to have been inspired by the physical and
psychological pressures of confinement, linking the first modern novel with the
prison experience. And Don Quixote has endured, interpreted by critics from
myriad angles, shaping the work of scores of writers in succeeding
generations.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky credits Don Quixote as a precursor to his portrait of a
positively good man, the naive epileptic Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. “Of the
good figures in Christian literature, the most complete is that of Don Quixote,”
he noted in 1868 while working on the novel. “But he is good only because at the
same time he is ridiculous.” Prince Myshkin, whose goodness blinds him to the
subtleties of deceit and betrayal, is unable to function in society. Like
Cervantes, Dostoyevsky presents the state of goodness as verging on madness.
Dostoyevsky, too, was profoundly changed by his prison experience. He had
already published his first novel, Poor Folk, when he was arrested in 1849 for
involvement with a group of leftist St Petersburg intellectuals. After months in
prison, he was sentenced to death, carted with others in his group to
Semyonovsky Square and prepared for the firing squad. At the last minute the
Tsar stayed his execution but Dostoyevsky spent four years of hard labour in
the Siberian gulag, where his educated status inflamed other inmates. “They are
a coarse, irritated, and embittered lot,” he wrote to his brother. “Their hatred
for the gentry passes all limits.” Dreams of freedom
Dostoyevsky’s prison experience ushered in an awareness of the irrational and
of a sense of communal suffering. His best novels, including Crime and
Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, are gems of psychological insight. James
Joyce wrote that Dostoyevsky “created modern prose, and intensified it to its
present-day pitch.” Mikhail Bakhtin identified the ‘polyphonic’ qualities of
Dostoyevsky’s work, which expanded the novel to include many conflicting voices
rather than a single vision.
His 1861 novel From the House of the Dead, or Prison Life in Siberia, written
as fiction from the point of view of a man who has killed his wife, documents
his own prison experience. “Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times
dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom,” he writes. He explains the prison
trade in vodka and tobacco, the compulsion to steal. His fictional inmate
dreams of freedom relentlessly, as did its author.
This yearning for freedom while enduring the hardship of prison is a thread
through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary lifework, which began during his eight
years in Soviet labour camps. He was arrested in 1945 for making disparaging
remarks about Stalin in a letter. After finishing his sentence in 1955, he was
exiled to southern Kazakhstan. In solitude, beset by harrowing memories, he
composed his first novel, not expecting it to ever be published. One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich, set during one bitterly cold day in a Siberian labour
camp in 1951, was published in 1962, nine years after Stalin’s death, to global
acclaim. It was the first literary work to expose the degradations of the
Soviet regime’s gulags.
Solzhenitsyn wrote a series of novels, including The Cancer Ward, in which he
asked, “A man dies from a tumour, so how can a country survive with growths like
labour camps and exiles?” His masterwork The Gulag Archipelago, completed in
1968, is a massive three-volume indictment of the regime’s forced labour camps.
Subtitled An Experiment in Literary Investigation, it moves in excruciating
detail through the process of interrogation, transportation, imprisonment and
aftermath, including the massacre of inmates.
Solzhenitsyn drew on his own experience, hundreds of interviews and historic
documents. He distilled them into a shattering narrative that reveals the inner
workings of a murderous state within a state. His polyphonic form was noted in
the citation when Solzhenitsyn won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature: “each
person becomes the chief character whenever the action concerns him. This is not
just a technique, it is a creed. The narrative focuses on the only human element
in existence, the human individual, with equal status among equals, one destiny
among millions and a million destinies in one. This is the whole of humanism in
a nutshell, for the kernel is love of mankind.” Clear vision
Examining the relationship of the individual to the state and the question of
goodness was also a theme of the 19th-Century American political thinker Henry
David Thoreau. Thoreau was deeply affected by the night he spent in prison for
refusing to pay a poll tax. “I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I
lived,” he wrote.
This episode inspired his 1848 speech Resistance to Civil Government, later
published as Civil Disobedience. “A minority is powerless while it conforms to
the majority,” he wrote, “… but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole
weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and
slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.” The insights Thoreau
developed from witnessing first-hand the power of the state to jail citizens,
had far-ranging consequences.
His thinking about the obligation of the individual to question the actions
of the State influenced generations of future thinkers from Leo Tolstoy to
Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. King’s 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, in
which he noted, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here,” is a classic
document in the civil-rights movement. King credited Thoreau with convincing him
that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as co-operation
with good. "No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting
this idea across than Henry David Thoreau,” King wrote. “As a result of his
writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative
protest."
It could be argued that Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn and Thoreau
might not have written so brilliantly without being inspired by prison.
Confinement is onerous, but there can be redeeming aspects. As these writers,
and countless others have shown, prison, in tandem with the spacious human
imagination and the dream of freedom, can inspire literary masterpieces.
In Brief: Beginning the summer of 2012, a group Canadian
librarians in Winnipeg came together to discuss the lack of library services in
the prison system in the province of Manitoba. The newly formed Prison Library
Committee started a weekly drop-in library service at the Winnipeg Remand Centre
(WRC) located in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This article will explore the importance of
prison library services in the current context of prisons in Canada through our
grassroots voluntary prison library service.
Introduction
As I sit down to write this article my mind floats back to a
conference I recently attended on the topic of literacy and incarcerated youth.
The focus was on increasing awareness of low literacy levels among “at-risk
youth” in Canada and what changes would support these youth in developing
literacy skills. A panel of people in executive positions in justice and
non-profit organizations lamented the lack of communication between
organizations, the lack of funding, the startling numbers of Aboriginal and new
immigrant youth being incarcerated in Canada, and the enormous costs. While I
left that panel without any solutions, it did provide me with insight into the
types of discussions that are happening at high levels.
What is being talked about by many people is the need for change in
the Canadian justice system. The prison library project explained in this
article is not an answer to these big questions. It is simply a response to the
fact that there was no library service in a prison located in downtown Winnipeg.
This article will explore our grassroots prison library project and touch on
some of the complex issues surrounding working with people who are serving
time.
Prison Libraries in Canada
I would like to provide some context around the prison system in
Canada and who is being incarcerated in our society. Statistics from the Office of the Correctional
Investigator state that a third of inmates have a need for mental health
treatment and three out of four have substance abuse issues. According to the
report by Sapers, Aboriginal people make up 22% of the federal prison population
but make up only about 4% of the general population. Aboriginal women make up
33.6% of federally sentenced women (Office of the Correctional Investigator,
2013). In addition, the number of Aboriginal people in Canadian federal prisons
has gone up by more than 40% over the last 10 years, are over-represented in
solitary confinement, and are kept behind bars for longer periods than
non-Aboriginal inmates (2013). An
inquiry into this unjust situation was conducted in 1999 (led by Justice
Murray Sinclair) but 15 years later the number of Aboriginal people in prison
has continued to increase, suggesting that the structural racism of the system
has not changed.
In 2001, a national survey of libraries in federal prisons was
undertaken by Ann Curry of University of British Columbia and colleagues Kris
Wolf, Sandra Boutilier, and Helen Chan. The survey found that overall, prison
libraries were meeting the needs of people in prison, however there was a great
deal of variation among the sample and all of the libraries could use more
resources and funding (2003). Since this survey, funding for libraries and for
the staff to run them has been slashed. Despite the common perception that
prisons have fully functioning libraries, many in Canada do not.
Many prisons do have a room with books in it or a small collection of
books but do not have an information professional working there. This is often
due to budget cuts or assigning the library work to a teacher who is already
working in the institution. There is a directive by Correctional Services of
Canada for the institution to provide library services which reflect the
services provided in the community including computer resources (2007). In the
news we hear of prison libraries closing and anecdotes from other librarians
that demonstrate that this directive is not being adhered to.
When our committee first approached the Remand Centre in Winnipeg,
there was no library in the building and just a few copies of books floating
around brought in by prison staff members and from outside prisoner support
organizations such as John Howard
Society and Elizabeth Fry
Society.
Winnipeg Remand Centre Open Library Project
Every day on my way to work in a downtown public library I walk by
the Winnipeg Remand Centre. Every day thousands of downtown workers pass by the
Remand. It is a tall building with dark windows which reflect the sky. Many of
us don’t think about the hundreds of people inside.
The Remand Centre is a maximum security prison built in 1992 to hold
approximately 290 people. The Remand has been consistently over-capacity for
year and the average number of people serving time there has risen from 329 in
2005 to 406 in 2012 (CBC, 2012). This increase in numbers is disturbing.
Overcrowding is a real issue for those who are incarcerated. Effective library
services within this institution would provide some distractions from the very
difficult situation people are being forced to live in. A small but eager group
of librarians and library technicians (public, academic and special) decided not
to ignore those people in the Remand.
For two hours every Saturday evening we turn the room usually
reserved for people to meet with their lawyers into an ‘open library.’ We open
up two cupboards full of books organized by genre and bring in a large cupboard
on wheels which is also stocked with books. We pull out a sign that says
“Welcome to the WRC Library,” tape it up on the wall, and rearrange tables and
chairs. We use the tables to create book displays depending on what books are in
stock.
Once we are all set up, we let the guard know they can bring groups
down. The Remand divides people into men’s and women’s units and then into units
based on gang affiliation to keep tensions lower. The unit the guards refer to
as ‘trustees’ are those who get the privileges of doing work such as helping
prepare meals, do laundry, and clean. We never see those who are in solitary but
sometimes are asked to send a book or two up to them. The different groups cycle
down based on a schedule. Sometimes the guards will come back and tell us no one
feels like coming or there are family visits happening at the same time.
Sometimes we will get up to 4 groups of 10 people in a row-half an hour per
group.
When the patrons come into our open library they browse the displays,
sit around and chat with us or each other, and choose three or four books each.
We don’t track anything being taken—people can simply take the books with them.
Even if they end up leaving or moving to a different institution, we tell them
they can take the book if they aren’t finished with it. Otherwise, they can send
it back to the library. It is a very basic service and has the primary goal of
connecting readers with books they will enjoy. Within the grind of prison life
this has the possibility to be a powerful connection.
Collections
Our collection is made up of items that were weeded from the public
library’s collection, brand new or used books bought with donations from
individuals and a small grant from the Manitoba Library Association, and books
donated by supportive community members. Led by a dedicated collection
development volunteer who is an experienced public librarian, we come together
to sort by genre and label the books with a series of coloured dots to represent
popular fiction categories such as mystery, science fiction, and romance. We
base our collection development on the requests of our patrons tempered with the
restrictions placed on us by the Remand. We scour used book sales to find copies
of In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier, our most
requested book. Biographies, mysteries, and thrillers are very popular with
patrons, as are works relating to self-help and addiction. As librarians, we
work to get these books into our patron’s hands and constantly bring in new
books in good condition.
One of the barriers prison librarians face is censorship. Longtime
prison librarian and author Brenda Vogel terms collection development in prison
libraries as a “collision with the absurd” (p. 42). There are many items which
are not allowed into prisons and these restrictions are often based on
antiquated ideas of what books those serving time “should” be reading. We have
never been shown a guide to which books aren’t allowed past the Remand doors,
but staff go through the books as they arrive in their weekly delivery. We base
the collection on what we have been told during our orientation: there are no
magazines allowed at Remand and no hardcovers. As a rule, books that fall into
the true crime genre are not allowed, despite the fact that these books are
often told from the perspective of victims of crime and may actually be
insightful. Generally, our collection development volunteers follow a
user-driven collection model. We take suggestions from our patrons at every open
library and build off of these to create a collection that is appealing to them
within this structured environment.
Many of our patrons have a love for reading, some are looking to
learn new skills, and some are just bored. Many of the members of the committee
have a love for reading and have had that magical experience of the right book
at the right time—that book that you can identify with and takes you away or
allows you to more fully investigate your own life. This is what we seek to
provide for inmates through our collection.
Creating Space
The purpose of this article is to describe the library service I and
other volunteers have worked on. This project, however, cannot be taken out of
the context of historical
and contemporary colonial trauma collectively experienced by Aboriginal
people in Canada and systemic racism and the myriad forms of resistance. The justice system, as was
shown in the Aboriginal Justice Report and by many other prison
activists, is working against Aboriginal and racialized people in Canada.
This can be seen on a global level as well—justice is not blind.
In the past year, we have started to use our two hour time slots for
author talks and writing workshops, the first of which involved Niigaanwewidam
Sinclair – a local Anishinaabe (Ojibway) academic and activist. For this event,
Sinclair chose to read an excerpt from the book “Manitowapow: Aboriginal
Writings from the Land of Water,” a collection of writings from Indigenous
people across Manitoba. Over the course of an evening, the book was discussed
with two groups of patrons, many of whom knew some of the contributors within
the book, creating a personal connection within the context of the session.
Sinclair made known to those in attendance that these stories were their
stories—a potentially life changing thing to hear while incarcerated. For our
patrons at the Remand, this brought a new and exciting dynamic to the open
library experience, and because of the success of this session, we are looking
to continue to host writers and speakers as we develop this project.
Still, I am not tragic
Not even in my addicted moments
A needle hanging from the vein of my creased arm
I was not tragic
Even as I jump from a boat in a vain attempt to join my
ancestors
I am not tragic
Even in my disconnection from song, from dance,
I am not tragic
Even in seeing you as privileged,
As an occupier of my homeland in my homeless state
Even as men abduct as I hitchhike along these new
highways
To disappear along this lonely colonial road
I refuse to be tragic
I have included an excerpt of Indigenous writer Lee Maracle’s Poem Blind
Justice. I strongly encourage you to click through for the full piece.
Maracle’s words point to the difficult relationship we can encounter as a
volunteer in the prison system. On a basic level, our committee opens a couple
of cupboards filled with books and we wait for people to take them out and talk
about the books with them. Prison librarian Brenda Vogel writes about the
possibility to make a difference: “You are guaranteed to make a difference in
the life of anyone who lives in a prison or jail by opening the door to a room
filled with books or by distributing free reading material to someone sitting in
a cell or lying on a bunk in a housing dorm” (Vogel, 175). Niigaanwewidam
Sinclair referred to our committee as a group of “brave librarians” who provide
this library service in the prison. I appreciate this, as I think he meant it in
the sense that we brave the often complicated and bureaucratic system in order
to provide books to people who are seeking a connection, whether it is to a
story or a conversation, or both.
Being involved in the prison library project has provided many
insights for volunteers and we have received many gifts from working with people
serving time. For those of us who are white and able bodied, we experience being
inside of the prison in particular ways. Many of us are identifiable as
“helpers” coming in and we would never be mistaken for inmates. It is easy to
get stuck on thinking only about our successes and see our project as something
that is “better than nothing.” We are offering a very limited service using
volunteers for something that prison librarians should be funded to do. This is
the nature of the system we are working in. The underlying power dynamic is
always present but sometimes we can fool ourselves into thinking we are all
equal. But we aren’t, some of us in the room aren’t able to leave. However, as
Maracle so beautifully says “Still, I am not tragic” and to see the people we
are working with as tragic is to accept the dominant narratives around those in
prison. It has also been an incredible gift to work with some of the people who
are inside who are so resilient and are survivors of things many of us can’t
even imagine.
Looking Ahead
Currently the Prison Library Committee is working on building a
library service at the Women’s Correctional Institution in Headingley, Manitoba
which is about a half hour drive from downtown Winnipeg. This facility will
require a different model to get the books to the women. There is a library
space, however, we are not allowed to have the women come up to the space to
check books out due to some internal issues within the prison. Instead, we will
have bi-weekly book talks, with volunteers bringing books to classrooms for
women to choose from. We also plan to offer author talks in this institution. In
addition to our volunteer projects in the prisons, a number of librarians from
across Canada are part of a newly formed network under the Canadian Library
Association. We will be communicating and sharing information about our
challenges and successes through an email list-serve.
In a time of “tough on crime” legislation, increasingly harsh
sentences for property crimes and drug offenses, and the stripping down of
services to the incarcerated, librarians such as ourselves need to be speaking
out about these realities. Our volunteer run open library is something, but it
is not enough.
Disclaimer: Not everyone on the Prison Library Committee may share
the same views expressed in this article.
Many thanks to Sarah Clark whose work this article is based on.
Thanks to Ellie Collier as my In the Library with the Lead Pipe editor for her
dedication and expert editing to help me create this article and to Kathleen
Houlihan for her thought provoking and insightful comments as an external
editor. Thanks to the Prison Library Committee for enabling me to explore this
project through writing and to Syrus Ware for inspiration.
Curry, A., Wolf, K., Boutilier, S., & Chan, H. (2003). Canadian
federal prison libraries: a national survey. Journal of Librarianship and
Information Science, 35(3), 141-152.
