A Day in the Life: Connected in the City

It's a Thursday afternoon in late February at the main branch of the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL), CT. A pleased patron tells the checkout desk clerk he'll return tomorrow. Sorry, he's told cordially; the library is now closed on Fridays.

That exchange could have been worse. The man said he'd return Saturday. Still, NHFPL staffers now find themselves with the unenviable task of reminding customers of truncated hours—even hour-long closings for lunch four days a week in the system's three smaller branches. Meanwhile, the staff has shrunk, from 73 a year ago to 50 today.

The current fiscal crunch—which NHFPL shares with many libraries nationally—has produced "a very strange time in our emotional lives," declares Cathy DeNigris, head of public services. "We've had such cutbacks, but we want to zoom along and add services."

The library, like the city surrounding it, has been through some painful gyrations in the past decade or so. In the early 1990s, main library hours were down to 27 a week; more recently, they rose to 68 but have now receded to 49. Current mayor John DeStefano, in office since 1994, has boosted library support. That continued to grow after James Welbourne took the library's helm nearly three years ago—until, of course, the city and state suffered the fallout from a poor economy.

For Welbourne, formerly a top administrator in the Pittsburgh and Baltimore public library systems, the cutbacks have hampered but hardly reversed the library's effort to face multiple challenges. Like other urban libraries, NHFPL must redeploy staff, adapt branch service, work with other government and nonprofit agencies, and find ways to measure effectiveness in a heterogeneous city where simple circulation numbers don't tell the whole story.

"In an urban environment, you really have to be seen as a place of connection," Welbourne says of library programs, from job training to family literacy to promoting local artists. Indeed, he was initially taken aback by his title, city librarian, which implies much more than a directorship. Now, he says, "I've come to realize that it really means the librarian in the city."

New Haven, population 123,000, was an early 20th-century manufacturing center, but its jobs evaporated and its working class became impoverished after World War II. In the 1950s, the suburbs grew, and the city shrunk; New Haven was dubbed a "model city" for its ambitious but flawed redevelopment efforts.

Now New Haven leaders have tried to redefine the still-poor city around its neighborhoods and its cultural life, which is centered—though not wholly dependent—on Yale University, the largest employer.

Mayor DeStefano, also the current president of the National League of Cities, has involved the library in city projects ranging from literacy to downtown development to promoting healthy children. "He immediately asks, 'What's the library's role?'" reports Welbourne. That means partnerships with city departments and initiatives, such as a program to put library cards in every third grader's hand and a new art gallery space, featuring local artists, on the library's third floor.

Welbourne spent 15 years after library school working in community development, since he thought librarianship was too insular. Now, he says, "I see the kind of dynamism I was looking for when I got into the profession."

Nevertheless, the library lags behind national averages, if you consider traditional indexes such as circulation, which remains under two per capita. Welbourne prefers to point to NHFPL's programs, which more than tripled from 2001 to 2002.

Because New Haven has two other universities besides Yale, the library need not serve high-end research needs. At the same time, the universities provide support for a constituency that appreciates learning. "I don't have to fight for recognition and value," Welbourne declares. "Pittsburgh did a lot to shape my vision," he adds, citing the role of a library in neighborhood development.

New Haven is built around nine squares. At the center is the New Haven Green, a park with three churches along its central axis, Yale's Old Campus on its northern flank, and City Hall and office buildings to the south. At the western flank is a shuttered mall, expected to revive. The handsome 1911 Main Library sits on the southeast border of the green, its columns harmonizing with those at the courthouse next door and the nearby churches. It's a component of downtown, not a centerpiece.

The library entrance suggests both lingering gentility and urban grit. The entrance rotunda has two curving staircases, currently roped off, and an elegant, colorful skylight. On the marble walls are posters for tax forms and local transportation. Crudely lettered signs warn against bringing food into the library.

Inside the door, the high-ceilinged main hall is outfitted in classy dark red carpeting. Small sets of shelves offer new fiction; another, nonfiction. Both the checkout desk to the left and the information desk up ahead boast snazzy black signage. The library is deceptively mid-sized, thanks to preservationists who organized to renovate instead of knocking the building down. A successful 1990 expansion added 65,000 square feet to the 38,000 square foot original building.

Dale Johnson, coordinator of main library services, is working the reference desk, part of the response to the staff crunch. "It makes people stretch," she declares.

Downstairs, a table hosts a selection of Classic Black Authors—February is Black History Month. The computer lab is full, thanks in part to the T-1 line E-rate telecomm discounts have brought. Next to it, the Patent and Trademark Depository Library has closed, its collections having been moved to Hartford and Washington. And not a moment too soon. In May, the space will become NHFPL's new Gates lab.

A display case houses Yale University Press books (the university donates all current and backlist titles). Such donations are a sign of collaborations with Yale that have increased in the past decade. Now Yale students get city library cards, students volunteer in the library, and Yale student publications have touted the library.

Yale has been a major collaborator in developing the library's Technology Access Centers, a consumer health information center, and the city's New Haven Reads Book Bank. Near the library checkout desk, an oversized poster, provided by Yale, trumpets Ben Carson, the internationally known pediatric neurosurgeon who sponsors a local book club for kids.

Yale also has donated 100 computers and provided historical back issues of local newspapers; NHFPL has brokered access to Yale's collections. On a leadership level, the chair of the library board, Michael Morand, is Yale's associate VP, Office of New Haven and State Affairs, and one of the few nonlibrarians on the board of the Urban Libraries Council (ULC). Morand says his term on ULC has reinforced the notion that NHFPL's missions require partnerships "with other cultural, educational, and community development organizations."

Patrons may know that library hours are shorter and there are fewer books on the shelves, but they may not recognize that the shrinking staff is doing more. Everyone shelves. Numerous staffers help with programming.

The solution, in some cases, is job combination. "Every time we say our name and title, we have to stop and think," observes Nancy Moscoso-Guzmán, whose business card reads Hispanic Services Coordinator but whose job has expanded to cover branch and cultural services.

In the branches, "Everybody does everything," adds Diane Carvalho, manager of the Mitchell Branch. The two paraprofessionals on staff answer some reference questions and help with the computers. Carvalho herself spends less time ordering books and more time on the desk. Not long ago, NHFPL had a literacy librarian, a poetry librarian, and a branch programming librarian, not to mention a head of branches and deputy director. Those people—or at least their titles—are gone now.

It's natural to integrate branches and outreach, Welbourne says of Moscoso-Guzmán's new job. Will he separate the jobs should funding return? An assistant might be better. Then again, a cataloger, promoted to run the bookmobile, was elmer head left. allows he'll separate the jobs when money returns.

Yet, says Welbourne, "As I get more positions back, I'm focusing on junior librarians and [library technical assistants]." Both paraprofessional jobs can do some of the work MLS-holders do. Welbourne is frustrated that union rules hinder staff development, cross-training, and promotions but says progress has been made, especially since staffers recognize that, now that the library can't afford student aides, everyone must contribute to basics like shelving.

New Haven once had nine branches, several of them tiny; since the early 1990s, it has a quite diverse set of three. Fair Haven, a poor and working-class community separated from downtown by a factory district, has a strong Hispanic presence and, thus, bilingual programs. The 1917 Carnegie branch reopened in 1996 after a renovation that lacked money for expansion. A computer skills lab is funded by the Justice Department's Operation Weed & Seed. Next door is a junior high school under renovation. When the school reopens next year, the library will be stressed.

In Westville, a middle- and upper-class neighborhood well north of downtown, the Mitchell Branch leads in circulation. It has a strong book club, plus two new ones—one focused on African American fiction. Thanks to a city ordinance that requires art in new or renovated construction, the library boasts several sets of black metal cutouts, one of characters from children's books.

Up Dixwell Avenue, just five minutes from Yale, a weathered strip mall, Dixwell Plaza, is anchored by the library's Stetson Branch. On a weekday afternoon, it's buzzing with kids doing homework, some with tutors.

Branch Manager Maria Tonelli has ordered her own signage: starkly readable oversize lettering, color-coded by audience, including Adult, YA, juvenile, and African American. "My B&N look," she calls it. Tonelli would like to beef up her collection, not to mention have better security against theft and a full-time tech support person. "Nobody builds that in [to the budget]," she says.

The branch highlight is the collection of works by Carl Van Vechten, a photographer who specialized in works of the Harlem Renaissance. Tonelli has spoken several times at Southern Connecticut State University's LIS school: "It's largely through volunteers that we keep our doors open."

NHFPL's size, observes Welbourne, is "manageably ideal," given that the library can introduce innovation and technology around the system simultaneously. Ideal, at least when the two additional branches appear. The most desperate need is for a branch in the Hill neighborhood, west of downtown, which has lacked a facility since 1986. The area is poor but revitalizing, and the library has a plot of land and $500,000 Library Services and Technology Act funding to get started on the project; it still must get $4.9 million from city bonds. Another branch, still years away, is slated for the outlying Eastern Shore area.

NHFPL also needs books. Even though the bookmobile, with its outreach to senior centers and kids, has helped nudge up circulation, the book budget is less than 11 percent of the overall budget, now $33 million after a ten percent cut. Library fundraisers help support opening-day collections for the renovated branches. The library has a nominal Friends group that sponsors a book discussion series, and the library board has set up a Patrons of the NHFPL to receive donations.

One piece of good news was announced at the library's most recent board meeting: an unexpected donation of $400,000 from a former New Haven resident who died in California. The money may be used in part to fund furnishings at the Hill branch. The rest should go to books.

In a city with a few fancy bookstores, the library lags in creature comforts. The main library lacks a café; that is under discussion, Welbourne says, but hindered by the budget. Nor can the library do much about the area's limited public parking. Yale does provide free lots in the evenings and on weekends, and on Sundays city meters are free. That's one reason Welbourne hopes to keep Sunday hours.

It's on the mayor's agenda, Welbourne says, to restore hours; indeed, DeStefano told LJ last year that Welbourne had built a constituency of library advocates. Adds Welbourne, "I have sent a signal that protracted cuts will lead to closings of facilities and service points, but it will not simply be to test our support in the community."

NHFPL doesn't go looking for new programs at this point, since it has a tight budget and a full mayoral agenda. Once the library sees its hours restored, however, Welbourne has his wish list, mainly concepts derived from his work with Libraries for the Future and ULC.

He would like to construct multilingual reading centers, similar to that at Queens Borough Public Library, NY, and have the library play a greater role in teaching people how to participate in government, "to make local people feel empowered."

In previous jobs, Welbourne says, "I was educated to be a library advocate," a role that implied a need to look out for the institution first. "Letting the city and its initiatives help set the agenda puts you so much more into the swim. I don't feel we've sacrificed anything." That may be a mantra for many urban libraries in the current economy.