Libraries are hot, but not in a good way

First, the good news, but it began as bad news

In March the current president issued an Executive Order to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). If you’ve never heard of the IMLS, you would be in the majority. It’s a little-known, but essential, federal agency that provides funding to museums, libraries, and archives.

The budget for the IMLS was miniscule, as all museum and library budgets are. Always. Its entire budget was 0.0046% percent of the total federal budget. A mere blip, a trifle, and yet, as is true of all cultural heritage institutions, the IMLS does mighty things.

Do you like children’s museums or science centers? Mostly likely they have received IMLS money. Do you attend art museums or history museums? The IMLS helps fund these, too. What about zoos? The IMLS even provides funding to zoos.

With 45/47’s Executive (dis)Order in March, IMLS staff positions were cut and grants that had been promised to organizations had to be yanked away. “Sorry, nope, we can’t give the money we promised.”

That paltry 0.0046% of the federal budget was regularly distributed among 50 states, and in each of those states are state libraries that use the funds for vital services like inter-library loan or ILL.

The IMLS dismantling caused the state library of South Dakota to shutter its inter-library loan service completely, effectively restricting access to materials available only at an individual library. In Iowa, a courier service that aided the ILL process was cut from an already-squeezed twice a week to one day a week. This, sadly, is what trickle down really looks like.

That’s not all. With IMLS funds, state libraries provide education and training to individual libraries. In Iowa, IMLS grants help fund the All Iowa Reads program and the Bridges eLibrary program. Library users of electronic books will recognize Bridges by its mobile app name, Libby. IMLS funds help create summer reading programs, which are hugely popular. And that’s just to name some of the more public-facing programs that federal money supports.

Why would someone axe a program that, in the grand budget scheme, was financially inconsequential and yet every day makes people’s lives better? These programs bring joy. They educate and inform and stimulate the mind. They enrich a community in countless ways.

These are good, good things, but in the administration’s dark purposes these were non-essential and filed under “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Now for the good news portion!

In April, 21 state attorneys general sued the administration over the president’s decision, which the Department of Government Efficiency had been only too happy to carry out. On Nov. 21, U.S. District Court Chief Judge John J. McConnell ruled that the administration’s decision was unconstitutional.

This piece of news is beyond good. It means that funding will be restored to the IMLS so that they may resume their important work, staffers who lost their jobs may get them back, and all federal grants will be restored.

Of course, 45/47 will appeal the decision. Furthermore, he may try to shrink the budget even more, but for the moment, there is a lot to celebrate for museums and libraries.

Now for the bad news this week in libraries

In her “This Stays Here” column on Substack, Sioux Center novelist and essayist Nicole Baart wrote about an event at the Sioux Center Public Library involving a book that came under scrutiny.

I’ll boil it down, but trust me, read Baart’s column for yourself: A 13-year-old checked out a book from the adult section. The 13-year-old’s mother was in the library, too. After reading what her daughter had checked out, the mother became upset. An independent “news source” (and I use the term loosely, like underwear-that-won’t-stay-up-anymore loosely) decided to record the father accosting the library board for allowing his daughter to check out the book in question.

Baart’s essay witnesses a community riven apart over an incident that got blown wildly out of proportion. Some of the comments on Facebook were simply inaccurate, confusing the role of a school library with that of a public one, but the worst were hateful and vindictive and sad to read.

A fever of book fear has been breaking out all over the country, but it’s usually been focused on school libraries. For it to infect a public library in a close-knit community like Sioux Center is disturbing and injurious.

Settled by Dutch pioneers, many Sioux Center residents still have ties to the people who staked out some flat prairie land in extreme northwest Iowa. Webs of relationship are thick here, and so when a controversy turns mean, families and neighborhoods and church associations are affected in deep ways.

It’s all so unnecessary. Parents can handle such issues, and I speak from experience. Years ago, my son brought home a library book that was inappropriate for his age. I could have made a lot of difficulty for a raft of people.

I lived in Alta when they had a combined public-school library, and my son had checked out the book during school hours. Instead, I explained to him why the book wasn’t appropriate for his age, and I made him take it back. Problem solved.

Because I grew up 14 miles away from Sioux Center, I can hear the pushback to my solution. To those voices in my head, I say, “There are real dangers where our children are concerned, and one of them lives in the White House.” Moreover, I’m continually amazed by how blasé parents are about their kids’ activity on smartphones.

Ultimately, I can’t know what’s in the hearts and minds of the Sioux Center parents who are reacting disproportionately to the danger they see in one book with sexual content. My sense is that the parents who are upset about this book have been intentionally guided to focus on books because it’s a manageable target. The internet is not.

These outsized reactions suggest that other forces are at play and given the involvement of the “news source” that broadcast this dust-up, good sense was not one of them.

Fear can be all too easily stoked, and to borrow Baart’s imagery, a match has been lit in Sioux Center, and the self-appointed “press” that fanned this flame is not resting.

Joan Zwagerman celebrates good library news when it happens and mourns when parents make librarians’ and library boards’ jobs even harder.