The little I’ve learned as Library Director

After a year-and-a-half of directing a small public library, I have learned very little, except that I really didn’t learn much about directing a library in library school. Library & Information Science education is all about becoming philosophically, intellectually, and emotionally a member of the profession. That means that I have come to understand, support, and subscribe fully to the principles of the public library as practiced in contemporary U.S. culture:

• The First Amendment, Freedom to Read
• Democracy, literacy, the ability to gather, evaluate, and express information
• Preservation of “the good” according to multiple perspectives
• Community, pluralism, balancing the greater good with individual dissent

Human nature combined with American culture, which form the personalities of both patrons and library workers, and workers and managers, tend to equip us with these similar but strangely perverted principles:

• The Freedom to determine what I can read, and what you should and should not read as well
• Valuing and demanding that others value my voice, while devaluing the voices of others
• Preservation of THE GOOD from my perspective
• Community, as long as it’s with “my kind of people,” exclusion of “the wrong kind of people”

This means library directing is tea time on the battlefield, a delicate balancing act in the middle of a brutal culture war. The opposition and the allies are exactly the same people: community members, library workers, the Library Board, politicians at all levels.

I’m painting kind of a bleak picture. There is no compromise with a zealot, but we’re all zealots and all insisting on having it our way. Conservative forces in the community demand–directly or indirectly, by intimidating Board and personnel into prior restraint–poverty wages for library workers, limited access if not outright bans for materials that appeal to whatever populations they don’t like, and other spiteful conditions. Longtime staff resist new directions and form grudges at the drop of a suggestion, which they clench in a death-grip. National organizations bankroll Board candidates bent on destroying the library from the inside.

And yet, there are those Library Directors who do this and do it well. It gets easier with experience. Or maybe one learns to live with it. Or a combination.

So, I continue to faithfully show the conservative majority in my library’s community that I serve them as well as those whom they fear and hate (LGBTQ+, Blacks, American Indians, Muslims, etc.). I continue to try to convince my staff I’m on their side, accommodating their quirks but not asking them to reciprocate. I continue to concede the battle to my Board, giving in to their fear of the conservative community while persisting in a push for saner fiscal actions (which happen to involve spending more money, not less). I also continue to examine my options and to remember that the way it is is not the way it will always be.