The library administration was one of the first things that needed analysis since it was reported early on that the departments themselves recommended the cuts. I personally would rather see a library open with reduced hours (much as I would complain) rather than close them entirely. I also think it's unconscionable to talk about the 2-mile distance rule and pretend no one would notice the distance between Rittenhouse and the main library.

I actually think all this stuff is after-the-fact rationalizing. I believe their thinking was made rather clear a while back: Philly has fewer residents than in the 1960s, therefore, we don't need as many library branches. And that makes sense as long as you're willing to completely ignore factors such as changes in usage and need.

That, I believe, is why none of their arguments make sense: they made a decision without community input, and now they are spinning away with bogus rationalizations to cover their asses. A question for anyone who doubts this is true: If they had really thought all this through before they made a decision, why didn't they announce their rationale when the first announced the closing, and why have their answers as to the reasoning behind the cuts morphed over time? It just doesn't add up.

This looks like a terrible decision-making process no matter how you slice it.

BTW, the entire problem would never have developed if they'd had a mechanism for public input into the budget process.

Participatory planning, anyone?

My understanding is that the library addition will costs around $130 million of which $100 million has been raised. Some of that came from the city's capital funds. Some came from the state and some came from foundations. And some has come from major donors.

But capital costs for the building are one thing. Paying the operating costs are another. I imagine that this high-tech library will be expensive to operate. Is that why library administration wants to get its operating costs down now? Is that why the library is taking a 20% hit when other agencies are taking no more than a 10% hit?

Don't get me wrong. The central library addition looks like it will be wonderful. It is being designed by Moshe Safdie who is a brilliant civic architect. (His City of Quebec museum is a wonderful public space as well as a wonderful museum.)

But I'm not sure I'm ready to sacrifice branch libraries for a new central library. And I fear that this is what is going on right now.

It's wonderful that our foundations are willing to kick in this money for a new jewel on the parkway. It is certainly wonderful for our new library director and our Mayor who will take credit for the new building will then use it to ride on to bigger and better things.

But wouldn't it be nice if, instead of thinking about giving Philadelphia a world class library that will be used by a tiny fraction of our population, all these folks were thinking about some kid in Fishtown or Kingsessing or Oak Lane whose life might get turned around if one day, while trying to do his homework in a crowded library, she accidentally came across a book on some subject that was totally new to her and got so drawn into the book that it gave her a direction and a life?

Overbrook Park and Wynnefield seems to be doing a lot better despite crappy circulation than SW Philly or North Broad/Ogontz/WOakLane geographically or South Philly or Fishtown in these closings. Plus easy access to other county libraries just across City Line. Just sayin'

-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

If it’s true that the decision to “down-size” or “right-size” the Free Library of Philadelphia ultimately resides with Siobhan Reardon, than we may want to contact the people she’s accountable to for redress of grievances. The Board and the Trustees were responsible for hiring her. Can we build a letter writing campaign to demand a change in policy. Perhaps we should argue for 3 day a week operations to temporarily spread the burden of the financial crisis, while at the same time preserving centuries of library building.

We could find the following addresses, but their were others on the board who were hard to track down:

Leslie A Miller
1111 Barberry Rd
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010-1907
—
William Sasso
2600 One Commerse Square
Philadelphia PA 19103-7018
—
Robert Heims
1460 Brickcrafter Rd
New Oxford, PA 17350
—
Deborah Fretz
1735 Market St Suite L1
Philadelphia PA 19103
—
Richard Greenawalt
8800 Montgomery Ave
Wyndmoor, PA 19038
—
Elizabeth Gemmill
608 Harts Ridge Rd
Conshohocken, PA 19428-2427
—
A. Morris Williams Jr
120 Righters Mill Rd
Gladwyne, PA 19035
—
Linda Johnson
287 S. 18th Apt 6B
Philadelphia, PA 19103-6112
—
Sherry Swirsky
2006 Naudain St
Philadelphia, PA 19146
—
Sandra Horrocks
215-686-5424

http://www.freelibrary.org/mission/FBOD.htm
http://www.freelibrary.org/mission/BOT.htm

You can perform your own search at:
http://www.campaignmoney.com/advanced.asp

It was a fucking farce. It was insulting. Those administrators looked so incredibly pained to have to actually listen to the human beings they so charitably deign to rule.

It's pretty clear that politics played a roll in about half these closings. Some make total sense (Hadington, Dunham and Fumo in particular) but Eastwick, Kingsessing and Holmesburg don't.

One answer is found in Holmesburg - Reardon said so last week:

In a brief interview yesterday, Reardon agreed that Holmesburg had "big numbers" in terms of circulation.
But, she said, when she looked at the distribution of low-functioning libraries to be closed, she noticed that many were in the south and west of the city.
"For equity's sake," she said, "we cannot leave the Northeast untouched. And that's when we looked at Holmesburg's numbers."

So the Northeast has to sacrifice, but not CC?

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pWKvTi1GOfTUMHNl1ybHYYQ

To be clear, everyone understands they are different budgets. However they still draw from the same revenue stream and so clearly if you feel that good geographic distribution of the branch libraries is an important social good, an important piece of our civic infrastructure to hold onto, then you have ask why are we trashing infrastructure thats already paid for to save a relatively small amount on operating costs at time when we are still willing to pump millions and millions into expanding the Central Library? Is $8 million that much when elementary school kids who don't have libraries in their schools are going to be asked to go 1.5 or 2 extra miles as the crow flies, sometimes longer in practical terms,to get access to the internet and reading materials?

Specifically Philadelphia received 25 of its libraries from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation. 4 of the 11 scheduled to be closed forever are Carnegie Libraries.

Carnegie a partially self-educated immigrant knew that access to libraries was key to the poor having access to the tools to escaping poverty. He donated libraries across the country under very specific criteria to foster an social environment conducive to what around the turn-of-the-century was called "self-improvement"

From wikipedia:

Books and libraries were always an important part of Carnegie's life, beginning with his childhood in Scotland. There he listened to readings and discussions of books from the Tradesman's Subscription Library which his father helped create. Later, in the United States, while working for the local telegraph company in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Carnegie borrowed books from the personal library of Colonel James Anderson, who opened the collection to his workers every Saturday. In his autobiography, Carnegie credited Anderson with providing an opportunity for "working boys" (that some said should not be "entitled to books") to acquire the knowledge to improve themselves. [1] Carnegie's personal experience as an immigrant, who with help from others worked his way into a position of wealth, reinforced his belief in a society based on merit, where anyone who worked hard could become successful. This conviction was a major element of his philosophy of giving in general, and of his libraries as its best known expression. He was however aware that the actual society he lived in was not strictly meritocractic and that black people were sometimes denied access to his libraries in the Southern United States. Rather than insisting on his libraries being racially integrated, he built separate libraries for African Americans. For example, at Houston he funded a separate Colored Carnegie Library because of the difficulty black people had accessing the first Carnegie Library there.[2]

Based on the idea that libraries were crucial to giving those who wanted to pursue education and enlightenment the opportunity, the Carnegie Libraries were given to communities that met specific criteria and there was a trade-off. If the city accepted the gift of the library, they were committed to keep up their end of the bargain in paying for operating costs. This was an explicit part of the deal which several of the current proposed closings are directly reneging on.

Carnegie believed in giving to the "industrious and ambitious; not those who need everything done for them, but those who, being most anxious and able to help themselves, deserve and will be benefited by help from others." [3] His other stated "best fields" for donating surplus wealth were universities, health care institutions, public parks, assembly halls, public swimming pools, and churches.

Nearly all of Carnegie's libraries were built according to "The Carnegie Formula", which required a kind of matching from the town that received the donation. It must:

* demonstrate the need for a public library;
* provide the building site; and
* annually provide ten percent of the cost of the library's construction to support its operation.

Philadelphia was given a tremendous gift to serve its provide its poorest citizens with local access to books and information but in order to eligible to receive that gift we had to agree to commit ourselves to maintaining that gift.

It seems to me we are dishonoring that commitment in proposing to close those branch libraries. Who knows, some might even argue that a good lawyer might suggest that there was something legally binding about the agreement the City of Philadelphia made with Carnegie in order to accept the gift.

Carnegie was emphatic about the binding nature of that commitment. I'm most familiar with my local branch, Kingsessing, which is one of the 11 on the chopping block. As you walk in the door there are two enormous plaques that state in no uncertain terms that the library was given to the City of Philadelphia was given the building to use as a library "for ever". I believe all 25 of the Carnegie Libraries in the city have a similar plaque or inscription on them and they were placed there under strict conditions laid out by the Carnegie Foundation.

Forever means forever in my book - not "until a downturn in the economy makes it politically expedient".

The Inquirer's Inga Saffron has written persusaively on the Carnegie legacy.

What will happen to Carnegie's four temples of knowledge is anyone's guess. Some might be used for other city purposes. Some might be sold, assuming the Carnegie deed permits the transfer. But others could be left to sit vacant, transformed into temples of gloom, monuments to opportunities lost.

It's not just books that people are losing. Carnegie libraries - indeed, all library branches - are more than quaint storage units for the musty old media. They are community hubs around which whole neighborhoods revolve.

The Philadelphia branches, which were all freshly renovated during the John Street years, serve as meeting halls for neighborhood groups and as oases of quiet for kids seeking to escape noisy rowhouses. Preschoolers learn to enjoy hearing words read aloud as they sit in a carpeted corner for story time. Most important, libraries provide a lifeline to the increasingly wired modern world for the legions of Philadelphians without computers.

Statistics are the language of bureaucrats, not the language of real life. So while it is undeniable that Philadelphia supports more than its statistical share of branches, it is also true that it has a larger proportion of poor families than most big cities. Many of their kids go to public schools that have no libraries.

The poor, as Carnegie understood, are destined to remain poor unless they have access to information. In 2008, that information is digital. Yet, in Philadelphia, barely half the households have computers and Internet access, compared with 77 percent nationally, according to information compiled by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The lack of daily experience with computers is one more way that the city's poor young people are tethered to a life of low expectations. It's not just that their more-affluent peers save time using computers for homework. They also incorporate the Internet into their lives in a myriad of ways, from social networking, to making PowerPoints, to downloading the latest video.

Without the same Internet fluency, Philadelphia's youth will be about as competitive as villagers in the Amazon. You can hardly apply for a job today except online.

Defining poverty has always been difficult. Half the branches slated for closing are in neighborhoods where library statistics show more than 20 percent live below the official poverty line. But when I visited the Carnegie library in Holmesburg, where a mere 11 percent of families are officially poor, not one child I interviewed had a computer at home.

Vincent Yarnell, a fifth grader at the J.H. Brown school, told me he spends every afternoon at the branch, a stately brick structure, doing homework, reading Charlie Bone novels, and researching school assignments on the library's computers. Because he lives a block away, he often returns after dinner.

Vincent doesn't own a computer, nor, he says, do any of his friends. But he impressed his teacher recently when he printed out a portrait of the 18th-century African American astronomer Benjamin Banneker for a project. Once Holmesburg closes, the nearest branch will be Tacony. No way will Vincent's parents let him take the bus there on his own.

The argument that we are "right-sizing" our library system is flawed. It disrespects the gift that was given to the City under explicit terms and it throws away one our strongest assets for fixing what ails this city the most.

Perhaps as the Mayor lights the official Christmas tree at City Hall this Saturday (BTW we can afford to put up and staff a City Hall "Christmas Village" but not to keep branch libraries open?) he should think about a possible visitation from a Dickensian "Ghost of Christmas Past" in the form of Andrew Carnegie's ghost.

-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

I posted some documents Sam Durso obtained directly from Siobahn Reardon purporting to enumerate the exact criteria for the closings. The strange thing is that although it enumerates the criteria in chart form in which each of 6 criteria is either checked or not, several of those slated for closing have relatively few or none of the criteria while many of those not slated to remain open have as many or more "strikes" against them.

Its well worth taking a look at.
http://youngphillypolitics.com/reardon039s_actual_library_closing_criter...

-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

I'm having trouble with those links. They give me a google page with the following message:

Sorry, the page (or document) you have requested is not available.

Please check the address and try again.

And when I'm not signed into my google account I get a sign on page for gooogle docs.

Is there something special you need to do to make these docs availale to the general public?

is that their own maps show that several of the closings are particularly badly chosen in terms of geographic distribution and poverty.
Closing Map

Kingsessing, Queen Memorial, the string around Logan/Ogontz, Holmesburg. Those all are obviously leaving a lot of kids, parents and elderly traveling farther than they are likely to go for library access.

Just for fun I roughly mapped the 11 closings onto a map from PolicyMap.org showing children (under 18) living in poverty. Over 40% of children in poverty areas are purple. Notice a funny pattern.
Children in Poverty, Library closings

-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.