By John Walker
Special to Inside
After 26 years of continuos public service—and in violation of the contract between the American Federation of State County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1215 and the City of Chicago—reference librarian David Williams is being transferred along with some two dozen other veteran reference staff from the Harold Washington Library Center (HWLC) and from Sulzer Regional Library to far-flung branches.
On Oct. 1st, Williams was officially notified that he will be sent to the Bessie Coleman Branch in Woodlawn on Chicago’s South Side. “I have no objection to serving the African-American community, but I feel that I can better serve it through my knowledge of the collections at Chicago’s main library where so many of the African-American community come to look for adequate informational resources,” Williams said. His transfer and the other 24 or more involuntary transfers will be fought through AFSCME grievance and labor arbitration channels, but public exposure and protest is needed as well.
The appointment of Mary Dempsey as Richard A. Daley’s new Library Commissioner in 1994 accelerated the downsizing of the main library’s book collection and reference staff, despite the completion of the vastly expensive gleaming marble edifice at 400 S. State Street. Since 1994 the already inadequate official Chicago Public Library (CPL) book budget (which had been almost totally zeroed-out for all of 1993) has not been increased despite a steep rise in book prices, and much of this budget has been held-up or diverted through a myriad of bureaucratic budgetary mechanisms. In 2002, the book budget was frozen for the first seven months, and then 20 percent was lopped off to pay for more Internet databases.
It is the rise of the Internet since the early 1990s which has enabled Commissioner Dempsey to justify and mask the relentless cutting of HWLC reference staffs and of collection development activity while purporting to provide enhanced information services. Of course, CPL librarians have known better but, fearing reprisals, have been afraid to speak out. The aura of better library service has also been promoted by the stepped-up building of additional library branches, in most cases to contain tiny book collections and uniform magazine collections, typically “fluff” periodicals found in supermarkets and department stores, along with limited but much-touted Internet access.
According to Williams, the primary purpose of these CPL “outposts” is to buttress Mayor Richard Daley’s community re-development and gentrification schemes and to establish a web of civic information “kiosks” while pretending to provide more traditional library services. On paper or from the exterior, these new buildings look like they enhance the community, yet they are vacuous inside.
In the meantime, the staging of famous author events and extravaganzas such as “Book Month” and “One Book One Chicago” have generated a smoke screen allowing the Daley & Dempsey machine to chop away at the integrity of HWLC and the two regional libraries, Sulzer and Woodson, as research facilities. Daley was even anointed as the “Book Mayor” of the year by Library Journal in 1998 and Dempsey has bragged about the “Chicago Model” as a prototype for the rest of the United States.
The uproar surrounding Dempsey’s assault on Sulzer Regional Library in August 2001 briefly lifted the curtain on the Commissioner’s plans for downsizing CPL’s serious book collections and reference staffs. The Sulzer affair died down when the Sept. 11 terror attacks filled all the news, but the City budget gap (exacerbated by such Daley boondoggles as Millennium Park and the Soldier Field makeover) announced in June 2002 afforded a new opportunity to advance Dempsey’s agenda. Given the Daley administration’s insistence on building more library branches while refusing to hire more staff, there remained little choice but to strip the already understaffed HWLC of many of its remaining reference librarians and subject specialists. Along with layoffs and demotions, Dempsey is now undertaking a “balancing” of the workforce by doing just that.
According to the AFSCME contract, balancing is supposed to be done by “reverse seniority” as in any standard union contract governing layoffs and involuntary transfers but here Dempsey is flouting the contract by removing many of the most experienced reference librarians and subject specialists, leaving the less experienced librarians on the frontlines of what is supposed to be Chicago’s premier public research facility.
Thus it will be that science, history, literature, music, or foreign language librarians (or government document specialists) with many years and even decades of experience will be scattered to the branches where the paucity of such collections will insure that their particular knowledge and skills will be underutilized, and largely unavailable to the throngs of students and general readers who descend upon HWLC precisely because of the inadequacy of branch collections.
The transfer of so many veteran staff will be followed by the installation of more Internet terminals at HWLC and more “flexible” use of remaining staff migrating from counter to counter to service these computers. The fate of the dwindling book collection in this environment of hyper-technology and scant time for remaining librarians to pay attention to subject collections can only be imagined.
The planned and on-going degradation of CPL services will only be reversed and remedied by aroused library users and concerned citizens who demand the library collections and services they deserve in America’s so-called Second City.
As useful as the Internet is for many purposes, it cannot substitute for in-depth library book collections and adequate staffs of subject specialists with the knowledge and time to devote to such collections. Some will argue that such collections already exist in universities, but Williams argues that most of this city’s colleges and universities also lack adequate research collections and therefore HWLC regularly functions as their surrogate library. Besides, the tax-paying public deserves a genuine research library rather than Millennium parks and other corporate welfare boondoggles.
Originally intending a career in academic libraries, Williams joined the staff of the CPL’s Social Sciences & History Division (SSH) in 1976 because it offered the combination of a research-size collection with the opportunity to serve the general public in a major American city.
In his early years in SSH, he led a successful campaign in the Division to establish the Chicago History Collection as a specially organized and designated collection for more convenient in-house reference and research use. Previously, the Chicago materials had been scattered in the open and closed stacks in the library.
In 1987, Williams started the Society in Focus series at CPL which has held hundreds of officially-sponsored public programs with guest speakers on a variety of topics. These programs addressed historical questions as well as contemporary social and political issues, movements, and events in the United States and around the world. The series were sometimes among the best-attended of department- and branch library-level programs not blessed with strong administrative sponsorship. The programs were often organized and publicized with relatively little support from the Library’s central administration, leaving much of the publicity to be done by Williams himself, in his spare time. The Society in Focus series was canceled in June.
Williams has always believed that despite its physical size and numerous branches, CPL lacks a book collection commensurate with a city of this size and with CPL’s real public mission, which is to serve not only the general adult reader but also the Chicago Public Schools whose own libraries are often in a pitiable condition, and a host of area colleges and universities whose administrations are skimping on library collection development.
In numerous “letters to the editor” and other expressions, Williams has tried over the years to alert the public to this relative lack of library service and its consequences for public education and enlightenment. For his willingness to speak out in spite of the risks to his employment and career, Williams has been denied promotion in his entire 26-year career at the Chicago Public Library.
For more information, call David Williams at (773) 244-1480 or e-mail him at dvdwilliams51@hotmail.com. Protest letters can be sent to Mary Dempsey, Library Commissioner, Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St., Chicago IL 60605, and Dempsey’s office can be called at (312) 747-4090. |
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