“People have been predicting the demise of the library for years but we keep adapting.” “It’s about how we adjust to the new reality,” said Joyce Cooper, director of branch library services, who is partial to Irish stories and romance novels. Social worker Edna Osepans was recently hired at the Central Library to tend to agitated patrons beneath the pastel-toned murals of Westward colonization that shine in the rotunda. Over the last eight months, 435 of the library’s staff of nearly 1,200 have undergone Narcan training, and at least six drug overdose victims have been revived on library property. Addicts sit slack-eyed amid foreign language books and a bust of Gibran Khalil Gibran. Those with mental illnesses murmur among Homer, Virgil and Aristotle. Homeless people shoot up and wash in library bathrooms, belongings piled at their feet. That’s why people are sleeping here during the day.” “When did we as a society stop caring about the less fortunate?” she asked. “We are a reflection of our neighborhoods,” said Karen Pickard-Four, who coordinates security and social services at the Central Library and all the branches. The library is at once a sanctuary of the world’s knowledge and a canvas of a nation’s failings. Two moms are at the center of the fight against book banning in America: ‘It’s exhausting’ “I don’t want to lose it, but this is valuable space. “How often does this get requested?” said Szabo, who calculates the future in centimeters and paragraphs and recently read a book about how U.S. Founded in 1951 for those who grout tile and hang cabinets, the periodical was no match for Prince Harry’s memoir or a Stephen King novel. He stopped at a shelf holding years of “Family Handyman” magazines. He passed a slumbering homeless man and, with the efficiency of a spy, disappeared into stacks of bound archives, hundreds of thousands of relevant and obscure pages - including the 1991 “Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan.”Ī tall man with sparks of gray in his goatee, Szabo, the city librarian, oversees 72 branches, a $241.8 million budget, 17,000 restaurant menus, 64 ukuleles, a Shakespeare volume from 1685, and lockers of puppets for a children’s theater. John Szabo stepped out of the elevator and walked through the sunlit atrium of the Central Library.
0 kommentar(er)
