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Q&A Question & Answer
Mary Dempsey Ed Wojcicki, who chairs the Selection Committee, interviewed Dempsey about the future of the library. This is an edited version of that interview. Q: Libraries are changing, aren't they? They are. Libraries have always stood for open access to information in a variety of formats. The changes relate to new formats. In other words, when libraries were first founded over a hundred years ago, it was books, and then maybe it was journals and books, and then maybe it was microfilm and microfiche, and now, of course, it's technology and online information. Q:You have said the city is putting state-of-the-art libraries in neighborhoods. What is a state-of-the-art library? A state-of-the-art library is a building that is both welcoming and functional, that can accommodate books and periodicals, but also is capable of having data jacks so you can put Internet terminals or computers with online databases just about anywhere you need them. Q: Are you putting these in all neighborhoods? It's in all neighborhoods. The city's done 39 [new] libraries in the last 11 years. So we've encompassed every conceivable ethnic and demographic group, and we have about 20 more projects to do between now and the year 2005. Q: So what's the future of the library? We're building these buildings to last for the next hundred years. Each one of our building projects is from $5 [million] to $7 million. We're buying top-of-the-line construction, furniture, surfaces, books, computers. It is important for libraries to continue to be seen as a neighborhood anchor in Chicago. Chicago prides itself on being a city of neighborhoods. People see their neighborhood library as an essential component of their neighborhood. Q:What do you do to be a community center? We have community rooms, which are available for library programs. We do children's story hours, we do adult book discussion groups, we do gardening programs, we do author talks. We also invite the local quilting group if they want to have a meeting. The police beat meetings are held there. Any neighborhood group can come in and use the community room and see the library as a real community center. We do literacy classes. We do English-as-a-second-language classes. We provide material for immigrants. Our mission is to continue to be first of all a cornerstone of democracy. It sounds corny, but it's absolutely true. For many immigrants, we're their first port of entry into American culture, and we're a very unthreatening government entity. Q: You say you offer Internet services. I suppose that would be for people who don't have it in their homes. Anybody can use it, but most people who use it don't have it in their homes. All the discussion about how we bridge the "digital divide" [between rich and poor], well, public libraries have been doing this for about the last five years, and at Chicago Public Library, we've been very actively doing it for about the last four years. You hear the politicians talking about how "we have to cross the digital divide." They're absolutely correct, but public libraries have been quietly doing it in America. We know that the people we see, especially in lower-income neighborhoods, are the folks who do not have the Internet at home or do not have an office that has Internet access. We have people who use it for e-mail. We have people who use it for research. We have people who use it for entertainment. We have children who use it every day after school on their homework projects. In fact, we are finding that in some of the schools the teachers are assigning homework that requires the children to use the Internet. We're their access point frequently. Q: Does that mean some training, too, for these library patrons? Yes, it does, and that's a challenge, because librarians are trained to use the Internet, but they're also responsible for doing a lot of after-school homework help or traditional reference. So what we've done is not only train our reference librarians to do this, but we've hired college students, and we'll be bringing on elementary school teachers working in our libraries after school. We've hired college students to 30 December 2000 Illinois Issues www.uis.edu/~ilissues
be cyber-navigators, and I think we're going to start hiring some high school students to do the same, so that people can come up and say, "I'm really not equipped to do the Internet; I'm afraid of it. Help me understand it," and they will get the help they need. And we have found not only children, but seniors loving it. Lots of seniors are getting on the Internet at the public library. We felt if college students were their instructors, there would be a great community spirit, and we were correct. The college students and the seniors are hitting it off very, very well. Q: You have electronic books. What are they? There are a couple of formats. One is actually a hand-held device — they call them e-books or rocket books, and they look like a Palm Pilot, but slightly bigger. You can load multiple complete texts and titles complete with pictures and everything on this, and you can sit at home or on the El or, you know, on an airplane, and you're reading a book, or you can be reading two or three books that are all on this one handheld device. Q: Does the library lend the devices? Yes, we lend the devices with the books loaded on them. In our case, we own about 12 of these, and we've loaded maybe 10 mysteries on one, or you can check out 10 science fiction books on another or 10 business books on another and 10 nonfiction books on another. You might say, "I'm a mystery buff, I want the mystery one," and so if it's available, check it out. And if it's not available, like any other book, you've got to wait for it. And it's worked quite well so far. Q: What does one of these devices cost? They cost about $200, and the cost is going down every day as the technology is being improved and these things are becoming competitively priced. Q: Are they popular? Yes, they are. They're very popular. We've had all age groups checking them out. Q: And what is the other form of electronic book? The other form is something called NetLibrary, which is available right through our Web page. It's a commercial entity. NetLibrary makes up to 1,500 titles available in all subject areas with full text, photos, images. They're making it available to us free of charge, and we're testing it with our patrons. Q: How does it work? You can read a preview of a book and say, "Yes, that's the one I want to check out." You type in your library card number. We check it out to your terminal. You can read the whole book, and at the end of the loan period it automatically returns to our terminal. NetLibrary [allows you to] print a couple of pages, but you can't download the whole book, which is their right. They've secured the copyright permission to be able to do this. They've got a combination of classics, fiction, some new things, nonfiction. Their challenge is to get copyright to a variety of materials, but they've got 1,500 titles right now, and at the end of the loan period — zip, it exits your terminal and comes back to ours. Q: One of the things we hear is that people aren't reading anymore. How do you respond to that? People are reading. I think they're reading more than ever. I just think they're reading in a variety of formats. We still put 80 percent of our materials budget into books and print, and our materials budget is $11 million. So, while all the technology is important and heavily used, people still are coming into libraries and bookstores for books and magazines and things in print. We find that most Americans come to their public libraries in search of a book. Now, they may also come to get on the Internet or to do some research that is readily available from Dow Jones on the Dow Jones www.uis.edu/~ilissues Illinois Issues December 2000 31 database, but they do leave with a book in their hands. Q: I imagine you track the number of books checked out. Could you quantify your comments? We circulate from the Chicago Public Library in a year over 8 million items in all 78 locations. That could be books, videos, books on tape. We re seeing a lot of people come for books on tape, not only commuters, but truck drivers. As the baby boom generation is spending more time in cars, they're listening to books on tape. I was just looking at our statistics for the first nine months of this year, and we're close to 6 million, and so we're on track to hit or exceed that 8 million mark again. Q: How does that compare to other years? We've steadily grown. I've been here seven years, and I think when I first arrived we were circulating six and a half million, and then we've gradually grown to over 8 million items. Part of that is a reflection of the new branches in the neighborhoods. When you go from [having] no library in a neighborhood to a library, or you go from a storefront branch to a branch library of 7,000 or 14,000 square feet, your circulation jumps dramatically because people realize the materials are there. We have also improved greatly how we acquire materials for all age groups. We have a [new] automated hold system, which allows you to reserve a book and get it much faster. All of that combines to increase our circulation. Q:The historic role of the library is to preserve the body of knowledge known to mankind. Is this still one of your roles? Yes. We have an archive with specific collections that relate to Chicago's history. Chicago used to be a publishing center. We've got a lot of the wonderful books that were published here. The original Wizard of Oz books and some of the original Raggedy Ann and Andy books are preserved here. We are preserving through the printed form, but also through the digital collection. I think you'll see that's what a lot of libraries will move into. The Library of Congress has been extremely progressive in this area. If you go on our Web site (www.chipublib.org) or the Library of Congress Web site or those of many other large public libraries, you'll see our digital collections. We have rare materials, we have photographs, we have the Harold Washington archives — all of Mayor Washington's archives, with hundreds of photos and documents that we've preserved, many of which we've scanned, put into a database, and you can access via the Web. So I think the preservation of rare documents or historic documents really has a future in digitizing. Q: And what about maintaining that body of knowledge? With that, we are limited only by our physical boundaries. We are reluctant to weed out great fiction. We are reluctant to take great classics off the shelves, because we know there's always going to be an audience. What we do weed out constantly is nonfiction. Science changes. Geography changes. Those items, we're free to weed out. But we at Chicago Public Library are a last copy fiction center for Illinois. So we try to retain last copies of fiction wherever possible because there is, hopefully, someday going to be an audience for that particular book. We still check out as many Theodore Dreiser books and Willa Gather books, I'm sure, as we do some of the Danielle Steele books. People's reading tastes vary, and so it's our responsibility to attempt wherever possible to respond to those reading tastes. Q: How do you see the future of the book? I think that with fiction people still prefer to have the book in their hands. I think we will see more technology in that area, but I think that for the conceivable future the book will still be the preferable route. Q: And journals? With journals and periodicals, they're going to become more online. We're seeing publishers of references who prefer to put it online. It's certainly more economical for us to be able to purchase reference works and network them to our 78 locations than it is to purchase a hundred copies of a particular reference work. But there is a balance you have to strike because some people are more comfortable with print. Libraries will be doing that transitional balance probably for the next 10 years to see what works for people. I'm certainly not privy to the industry of specialized journals, but I suspect they will increasingly go online, just because publishing costs are such that it's cheaper to do things online. It's also easier to retrieve them. I think that in the professions, in the sciences, and in law and accounting, I think you're going to see a lot more online. Q: And what about the mass circulation magazines such as Time and Better Homes & Gardens? Those who are sitting on the airplane want to be able to grab that Newsweek in the bookstore as they're running through the airport. I think there will always be an audience for that. Q: Are you optimistic about the future of libraries? I am very optimistic about the future of public libraries. As politicians and educators continue to focus on the need to increase reading, I think the role of the public library must remain prominent. If you can't read, you can't do anything else. That's what our mission has always been, to provide the access to that information. There are others who are better at teaching reading, but we've got the materials to help keep people going. So I'm very optimistic that libraries will continue to be seen as a very important resource. Audrey McCrimon of the Illinois Department of Human Services, the other recipient of the Motorola Award for Excellence in Public Service, will be interviewed in an upcoming edition of Illinois Issues. 32 December 2000 Illinois Issues www.uis.edu/~ilissues |
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Commissioner of the Chicago Public Library since 1994, Mary Dempsey continues to move forward on a plan to put that city's residents online through their neighborhood libraries. For her efforts on this and other programs aimed at broadening the reach of the library, she was one of two to receive this year's Motorola Excellence in Public Service Award. The award is co-sponsored by Motorola, the North Business & Industrial Council (NORBIC) and Illinois Issues.
