Public libraries to the rescue! Helping sign folks up for health insurance

You may have seen a short piece about the Obama administration turning to public  libraries to help educate the public and sign people up for the health insurance options available to them under the federal insurance law.  Here is a bit longer AP piece that probably underlies the short TV and newspaper bits. According to the article, up to 17,000 libraries nationwide may be recruited in the effort. Tomorrow, Sunday, there will be an official announcement at the ALA conference in Chicago.

The article notes that there are already informal efforts underway at many libraries, of course.  Librarians are already linking people to the information they need, using the computers available.  But the article estimates that the federal program will enroll about 7 million new people for insurance coverage next year.  People without access to the Internet, and without the skills to search will be unable to reach the Web portals that are key for this sign-up effort.  Public libraries will be important to bridge the gap for those people.

The ever-fabulous Super Librarian image is courtesy of New Jersey State Library and New Jersey Library Network.  Whatta cool image! 

Almost a bookmobile, not quite a library

The Uni Project is a "portable reading room" designed for urban spaces by a design firm in Boston for musician, philanthropist and former NY Legal Aid Society attorney Sam Davol. The first Uni Project is scheduled for New York this fall. Davol's idea is to improve on the venerable bookmobile by adding features like furniture that encourages community members to hangout and enjoy the books and each other. The module is made of boxes that hold books enclosed by pieces that come apart to re-configure into tables, benches,and chairs. Thus, you have all the portability and protection for the books that you have with a bookmobile, plus you have added a community-building aspect, if Davol's idea is correct. It is aimed to improve literacy, but can also be used for open air meetings, arts and crafts, classes, and more. Boston Street Lab is the 502(c)(3) organization which the Davols have created to fund and staff the Uni Project, though it also ran a storefront library in Chinatown in Boston, for less than a year, and several other initiatives.

Mr. Davol and his wife plan to drive the first uni reading module from Boston, where it has been built, and hold a kick-off. They have already held an online fundraiser where they managed to raise more than the targeted $20,000 for the project.

It is striking that, while Mr. Davol has volunteer librarians who are Simmons Library School 8/07/the-uni-project/">graduates lined up for the Uni Project, the project is not involved directly with any public libraries. At least as far as I can tell from any of the articles on the web or in papers I have seen so far, there is no connection to the official library community. I cannot tell if this is a decision by the Davols or if they reached out to the library community and were rebuffed. Perhaps they were thinking that if they wanted to be offering books on the street level, they were operating in a different social sphere than libraries.

It will be an interesting experiment to watch. Hooray for private philanthropists who see a need and just act to fill it! I do wish there were some link to the library community. And I cannot but be wistful that this will be showing up in NYC first, though designed and built in Boston.

Cats in the Library

I am the most frustrated of cat lovers because I am violently allergic to cats. Growing up, my family always had at least two and sometimes three cats (as well as birds of various types, frogs, turtles, and whatever else turned up), but as an adult, I developed serious allergies to them which made it impossible for me to have even one cat. So I must admire cats from afar--a huge frustration, as I said. I have never worked in a library with a resident cat, although many libraries do have them. The most famous was probably Dewey Readmore Books, who lived at the Spencer Public Library in Spencer, Iowa. Dewey was found in the library book return in 1988 when he was still a kitten, and adopted by the staff after the authorities approved. He was vaccinated, neutered, declawed (I have big reservations about declawing cats, but that is a subject for another day), and named as the result of a contest. The staff and public contributed their soda cans to pay for Dewey's food and care so that he would not cost the taxpayers anything. There is a webpage devoted to Dewey, who died in 2006 at the age of nineteen, and a book has been written about Dewey by the retired director of the Spencer Public Library.

Dewey was a member of the Library Cat Society, whose founding was inspired by Royal Reggie, the resident cat of the Bryant Public Library in Sauk, Minnesota. "The Society is now defunct, but at its peak, it had dozens of member libraries that offered safe havens to cats dumped in their parking lots or stuffed in book-return chutes." This description comes from Wikinut, "an online publisher for the masses." Wikinut goes on to say that "a fact sheet published by the American Library Association ... [states that today] there are 16,671 public library buildings in the United States today. Today there are 200 library cats in the United States but only 35 are the permanent residents of a library." Of course, book stores, especially used book stores, frequently have resident cats. I have only heard of one academic library that had a resident cat, Wesleyan University in Connecticut, but perhaps there are others.

Researching this subject, I came across an article entitled "Does Your Library Have A Resident Library Cat?", written by the same author, Jerry Walch, who wrote the entry in Wikinut quoted above. According to Walch,

Cats have been a part of library history dating back to the middle ages and beyond. Experts trace the origins of library cats to ancient times, when Herodotus reported the existence of libraries in Egyptian temples. While many felines prowled the fields of early Egypt protecting crops, others underwent special training to stop rodents and serpents from infesting houses and temples, where preserved papyrus has since been unearthed. In the Middle Ages, records indicate that monks deployed domesticated mousers to their medieval monasteries to prevent rats from eating costly manuscript[s].

Down through the ages many library cats have [been] immortalized in stone and bronze after their passing on. The New York Public Library's sculpted lions, who have been greeting patrons since 1911, symbolize felines as guardians over literary works. They were sculpted by Edward Potter and were originally dubbed Leo Astor and Leo Lenox for library founders John Jacob Astor and James Lenox.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia renamed them Patience and Fortitude in the 1930s, and they have been known by those names ever since. Wondering how many library cats there were worldwide, I came across the Library Cats Map, which has not been updated for almost two years. Iron Frog Productions is responsible for the map, and would like the public's help in compiling a definitive list of library cats. The map shows nearly 600 library cats around the world, but this number is probably not accurate.

This research project began when my husband showed me an online list of public libraries from the New York State Library. As part of the list, there is a small cat icon that indicates if a library has a resident cat. If so, there is a link to a webpage about the cat. I counted only seven public libraries in New York State with resident cats. Still, I thought this feature was charming and really humanized the public library system in my state.