Reflection on Class, 27 March

We spent a lot of time last week discussing the controversy over a plan to turn part of the Ann Arbor District Library's parking lot into a public park. Information on the (let's say) disagreement can be found here, though as always, I would advise against reading the comments.

This case sparked a lot of interesting conversations about how to handle inappropriate behavior in the library (and what constitutes inappropriate behavior), drug use as a community problem, and to whom a public library has an obligation.

Some examples of inappropriate behavior are pretty obvious - drug use or dealing, fighting, harassing other patrons, etc. Some are less so. For example, when is it loitering vs. enjoying the space? Are you loitering if you're sitting down? What if you've been there for the last eight hours? When does a patron's irritation over some detail become a behavior problem? Some of these examples strike me as especially problematic when you take into consideration a patron's identity. Maybe a young white middle-class couple is just sitting on the front steps to enjoy a beautiful day, but when it's two young black men, it's loitering. Maybe an older, articulate middle-class man becoming irate at the circulation desk can be solved by some smooth-talking from a staff member, but if the man is less articulate and doesn't appear to have bathed recently, security steps in. Clearly-written policies help with this (as Mari and I explored in our workshop), but there is still a lot of gray area that can result in librarians not serving patrons the way they should.

But even in cases where a patron's behavior is clearly inappropriate, there is some question of how best to handle the situation. I'll use bathing in the bathroom sinks as an example. It isn't illegal, it doesn't cause harm to patrons or staff, but librarians across the board seem to agree that we should not allow patrons to do it. As another student pointed out last week, though, where else can the offending patron go? If there are no shelters available and the patron is homeless or otherwise has no access to running water, what else are they expected to do? Just go without bathing until it's their body odor that gets them kicked out of the only place they have left to go? Another one of my discussion group members brought up the idea that a library's responsibility toward its patrons doesn't end at the library's front doors. Perhaps a case can be made that libraries should take a more active role in assuring that their patrons have access to resources outside the library. This might be too much to ask of smaller libraries with barely enough money to keep their own doors open, but in larger or more affluent communities (cough-Ann Arbor-cough), it might be doable.

This is an odd sort of thing to be thinking about a semester and a half into my MLIS. We spend so much time coming up with ways to get people to go to the library, and now we have to come up with ways to keep them out. Certainly it doesn't do anyone any good to have drug deals going on in the bathrooms, but I wonder if we're falling too much into the mindset that there are unwanted kinds of people rather than unwanted behaviors. I worry that in trying to make the library a better, safer place for everyone, we accidentally exclude the same people who have always been excluded.