Allan Appel Photos
Library lovers Dave Caron and Mary Newell at Thursday's planning session ...
... with City Librarian Maria Bernhey and Deputy Director Luis Chavez-Brumell.
Library leaders and patrons gathered on Grand Avenue to think through how to keep the city’s public libraries among the most welcoming, friendly, helpful, diverse places in town — as part of a planning process designed to make them even more effective at serving the New Haven community a half decade from now.
That was the subject of an hour and a half’s candid community conversation with 30 library patrons and neighbors at the Fair Haven Branch Library Thursday night.
The occasion was the second of what City Librarian and Director Maria Bernhey and Deputy Director Luis Chavez-Brumell have billed as ten community workshops being convened between now and Oct. 8.
Their aim is to gather citizens’ ideas for the future – how to fill gaps in other city services, how to hone current programs and/or introduce new stuff to the library’s already impressive menu of offerings – as part of NHFPL’s triennial strategic planning process.
Library lovers praised the system as it currently exists — and detailed an ambitious vision for its near future.
They said that if the library’s to continue to embrace students and the elderly, entrepreneurs as well as the homeless, those eager to learn algorithms as well as Spanish or English, and maybe even add Chinese and Pashto to its conversation groups, it absolutely needs to seriously up its digital game; market itself better; look spiffier; tell its true and dignified story to a broader swath of citizens and bring our many diverse groups more into a sense of one unifying community.
While library brass took attentive notes on their laptops, Fair Haven Branch Manager Kirk Morrison, whom Brumell termed the “trusted messenger,” elicited local evaluations, hopes, and concerns.
A resident of the area for only three years, Gina Toppins said she has lived in six states and 17 cities. When she arrives in a new one, her first stops are for voter registration and to get a library card. “This is the friendliest library of all.”
That theme – an organizational style of openness, helpfulness, and treating patrons with dignity – was echoed throughout the evening.
Three young South Korean women, for example, couldn’t praise enough Wednesday’s weekly English conversation group led by Susan Hackett at the Fair Haven branch.
Another interlocutor praised the neighborly atmosphere not only of the Fair Haven Branch but throughout the system. I’ve never seen anyone ever mistreated, she said.
Three more folks were enamored of the Spanish-learning conversation group, another liked seeing programs for adults and kids cheek by jowl, but said she would also appreciate more programs to help her with computer skills.
And Dave Caron, who as a 12-year-old used to bike to the library, now, at 78, really appreciates that there is now an elevator.
And a young woman who lives in a group home said she has met her best friends at library programs
Downside concerns: “Fair Haven is diverse but it’s also isolated,” Toppins added. “Arabic speakers should also be here” at the library, she said, and, by way of example, the Fair Haven Day festivities, often organized at the library, should feature not only Hispanic culture but, for example, Irish music, as well as all the cultures who have been part of the fabric of the immigrant neighborhood.
Bernhey was keen to know how the speakers heard about library programs, like the very program they were attending Thursday night.
The answers ranged from online email notifications, to announcements of library events at other gatherings like the community management team. And one speaker said the only way you really know the accurate and broad range of what’s going on is to walk in the door.
“It’s a marketing issue,” someone else said.
Another speaker said it’s embarrassing, that the only way people across the city hear of the library is when it becomes a political football around cutting hours of service
“It’s embarrassing that the library is not a priority,” said long-time library advocate and activist Paula Panzarella.
“It should not fall on the staff,” said Toppins, “but this library needs a marketing person with social media savvy, a separate dedicated person.”
Yet once more people come, will the infrastructure hold up?
Morrison said with the current building configuration at the Fair Haven branch it can sometimes be a challenge to have a quiet adult program, a kid program concurrently.
Library group leaders Susan Hackett and Folly Delgado.
And the immediate area around the library, especially if patrons want to come to evening programs, can be off-putting; then of course there’s the Perennial Parking Problem, which in the case of Fair Haven branch is exacerbated by the adjacent Fair Haven School’s parking requirements.
Since Thursday’s “visioning” included how the library of five years from now will fit in with the city of five years from now, the gathering wound down with concerns about all the spiffy new apartment buildings rising across town.
Will they house residents who will use the library? The self perception of attendees seemed to be that the libraries belong to the working and lower middle class and the future residents may well be far more well-to-do, less anchored in town, transient, and likely to organize their lives around info and programs online and in far less need of a physical library where you can touch a book and make a friend. Is this the way it should be?
How does that bode for library programs’ and buildings’ utilization in the future?
Click here for a list of the future engagement workshops, the next one of which will be on Sept. 23 at the Ives Main Branch at 6:30 pm.
Tasty sandwiches and beverages are provided to stimulate the forecasting.
After all the community listening, the deliverable of this process, according to officials, will be a Strategic Framework document that the library plans to release early in 2025 detailing the initiatives and the goals the Library plans to pursue during the second half of the decade.