LJ Talks to Kit Hadley

-- Library Journal, 06/01/2005

Kit Hadley, director of the Minneapolis Public Library, came to the post in early 2003 after serving 13 years as director of the state’s housing finance agency. Since then, she’s weathered significant budget cuts, begun the library’s first private capital campaign and managed a building plan that includes a new central library, designed by Cesar Pelli, scheduled to open in the spring of 2006. Hadley spoke to LJ’s Norman Oder

LJ: How did a lawyer like you get hired?

KH: They’d gotten the authority to look at hiring a non-librarian. The city charter had been changed. The first search, with librarians, had not been successful. So I was immediately taken with the prospect, the promise, the challenge. The challenges were clear, the governor was about to release a budget that would slash one of our major revenue sources: LGA [Local Government Aid]. There were other major issues, building this new library. It’s not like it seemed an easy job. But the whole mission of the public library was incredibly engaging.

Was it hard to convince people you could run the library?

People at that point were very open to looking at a non-librarian. They were more interested in whether I could develop political working relationships, be able to increase the visibility of the library in the community, handle the capital campaign. I know this is a big issue in the library community, non-librarians being the head of libraries. It has really not felt like an issue here. My whole professional career has been around bringing more social justice to the community. That’s a huge part of the passion for this job.

How hard was your learning curve?

Clearly, technical issues about library operations were not known to me, but there are outstanding people at this library. In some ways, the steepest parts have been getting to know the unusual government and finance structure in Minneapolis. The Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library are undertaking a public education campaign. People do not understand which bodies in the city could increase funding for the library system. They think it’s the library board. It’s the City Council and the Board of Estimate and Taxation.

The budget cuts and the building program have converged. How do you balance cuts and growth?

Good times come and go; we are preserving the physical infrastructure, so when some more money comes into the system, we have the basic system intact. The terrible layoffs [25% of staff] and cutbacks in hours are discouraging. On the other hand, there’s an excitement that goes along with [the new central library and capital plan], how what we do is changing, how our role in the city is changing. The staff—they are so wonderful and they are so committed to the library; part of the frustration is not being able to deliver for patrons. A year from now, we’ll be moving into this library, 350,000 square feet. It’s about 15% bigger than the old one, but that had 85% of this magnificent collection underground, with no access. The biggest difference is public space, of all different kinds.

How will you make the library more public?

We restructured the library in summer of ’03. The newest division is the division of partnerships and development. I think a lot of libraries do those things, but I’m not sure they structure it that way. Then we created these three new partnership coordinators, one for families/children/teens, one for neighborhoods, one for business and cultural organizations. For the first time ever, the summer reading program will be a single program for the whole city. We’re working on a variation on the “one-book, one city” program, in partnership with cultural institutions.

What other directors have you learned from?

I feel like such a sponge. My first professional meeting was the Seattle PLA conference [in 2004]. I set up appointments with five different directors, Deborah Jacobs [Seattle], Susan Kent [then Los Angeles], Herb Elish [then Pittsburgh], Glen Holt [then St. Louis], and Ginnie Cooper [Brooklyn]. Ginnie has a connection to Minneapolis, Susan used to be the director here. We talked about all kinds of issues, from the global to the prosaic, mission and how that’s changing, what their big issues are, what I was seeing here,.

How do you see library service changing?

The issue of serving people remotely is a huge transformation. What used to be readers’ advisory still is readers’ advisory, but how do we do that in a proactive way? The new Hot Topics section on our web site—it’s not waiting for a particular question. What are the hot issues in the community and the world that becomes part of the librarian’s job, this web-based proactive content development.