Siobhan Reardon is very new to Philadelphia. She was brought here by the Free Library's Board and Trustees to finish the work of fundraising for the Moshe Safdie designed expansion of the Central Branch. Immediately upon arriving in Philadelphia she made an incognitio tour of all branches with a predetermined agenda of closing "weak" libraries (her words). The idea is that for years budget cutting has meant that the labor pool is stretched thin across the FLP system. With less library branches, services can be concentrated at the "strong" branches with the smaller labor pool that the city is able to fund.

I don't mean to put too fine a point on it, but from a highly educated middle class perspective most of these 11 branches are "weak" because their patron base is either too poor or too powerless to demand better services. While at the same time, the Central Branch or other higher profile "strong" branches have to share labor and material resources with these "weak" branches. This makes fundraising difficult if Central, City Institute, Chestnut Hill, Lovett, or any number of Northeast branches don't satisfy the needs of the wealthiest and most powerful Philadelphians.

The financial crisis has mostly served as a cover for a decision that had already been made by Reardon shortly after coming to Philadelphia. This is why we are getting such confusing opposition to the Friends' demand of a shared burden of reduced services, or why there seems to be such a lack of transparency. The only thing the city is forced by financial circumstance to do for budget cutting is to lay off workers (librarians, paraprofessionals, guards, etc) since their salaries and benefits make up the majority of the costs. Librarians and our professional associations will be hostile to the idea of managing libraries without degreed professionals, but that probably isn't even necessary.

There's also the canard that since Philadelphia's population has declined since its peak at 2 million in 1960, we can afford to "right-size". However, Philadelphia only had 39 branches in 1960. Some may say given that fact Philadelphia is then even more over saturated with libraries. But that's ridiculous. Several generations of tax-dollars have gone into an investment in our communities during the ensuing 50 year decline in population. Now we are now trying to squander investment in building up our neighborhoods despite decline, mostly because the FLP Administration is now committed to redistributing library services upward. It's theft! The intent of building branches from 1891 to 1960 and beyond was to build branches for neighborhoods, not simply to maintain some bogus national level of libraries per arbitrary geo-political boundary. Our system is being compared with young sun-belt suburban "cities" where everyone drives and frankly more people have attained higher degrees and reasonably could be said to not need to use "the People's University" as frequently as those on the other side of the wealth (let alone digital) divide. That we have the system that we do should not only be a point of pride, it should also be recognized as one of the few non-dehumanizing institutions of the "State" in many neighborhoods that poor people actually enjoy interacting with.

The administrators claim they want to create bookmobiles as a new innovative 21st century way of better serving the communities who will suffer when their branch closes. But book mobiles are really the ultimate insult to a dense urban community such as ours. They're better suited for rural and perhaps third-world situations where communities are too sparsely populated or resource-poor to be able to build libraries. We may be in a global financial crisis but do we need start dismantling our civic infrastructure at this point? The administration is basically saying Kingsessing should be treated like rural North Dakota: "Too few readers, too few tax dollars to sustain a library? Let's send the bookmobile every other week to the urban prairie we just bulldozed under Neighborhood Transformation Initiative!" Philadelphians paid for these buildings or we fought for them or they were given as gifts, we can't let the administrators take them away just to put some polish on branches in the most functional neighborhoods.

At least since 1993, Philadelphians and others in our metropol have had access to free dial up internet via the Critical Path Project. Although the internet has perhaps outgrown the screeching whistles and pops of the telephone modem, thousands of low income people at least have access to 56K.

Critpath.org has its origins in a book that “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Scientist” Buckminster Fuller wrote with his protégé Kiyoshi Kuromiya in Philadelphia in 1981. Bucky’s work is being feted at the Whitney in New York at the moment. Kiyoshi Kuromiya’s legacy lives on in Philadelphia as the Critpath Internet Project, The AIDS Library, and ACT UP Philly.

With all the drama surrounding the Department of Human Services these past couple years their programs have come under increased scrutiny. Critpath.org got much of its funding through DHS grants, essentially with the goal of getting some internet services into the hands of poor Philadelphians. That funding won’t be renewed through DHS, which definitely needs to focus on its business of serving families, but we’re hoping the Mayor and the City can find funding elsewhere to keep this backbone of Philadelphia’s social justice internet up and running.

I encourage blog readers to read our sign-on letter

see what others have said and what else you can do:

Fax Mayor Nutter:
http://www.hallwatch.org/profiles/mayor/nutter

or even come to a community meeting:

Date: Friday, September 5th

Time: 9:30am

Location: The Church of St. Luke and The Epiphany, 330 South 13th Street (Between Pine and Spruce Streets)

Sincerely,

Adam Feldman
Reference and Public Services Librarian
AIDS Library and Critical Path Project
Philadelphia FIGHT
1233 Locust Street, 2nd floor
Philadelphia PA 19107