This is written in response to a December 6 letter from “a librarian with 25 years’ experience.”
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says that the Harold Washington Library Center (HWLC) is not in the same league as the New York Public Library. Of course it isn’t. The NYPL is not a public library: it’s a privately funded research library. However, the HWLC is still the largest public library in North America.
concedes that HWLC has some “decent” collections. This is damning with faint praise. It has government documents, patents, maps, the GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) collection, listening rooms and practice rooms, material in foreign languages, newspapers (ethnic and neighborhood, often in complete runs), the Municipal Reference Collection, the Harold Washington Collection, the Chicago Collection, the Blues Archives, and the Chicago Artists’ Archives. Is there anything like this in any of the branch libraries? All of these specialized collections (of which I’ve named only a portion) require specialized workers. And sending the specialized workers to the branches, to act as children’s librarians (and often as baby-sitters for latchkey kids) is like telling a thoracic surgeon to act as a pediatrician–or vice versa.
Incidentally, there are too many branches and they are too close together. They cannot be staffed except by kicking specialized librarians out of the central library and sending them to the neighborhoods. This has two bad results. First, the central library is deprived of librarians it needs. Second, the branches acquire press-ganged, dragooned, demoralized librarians who are not trained to work with schoolchildren.
A Discouraged Librarian
