Category — Libraries

I’m a little behind getting these made, but hopefully you’ll start seeing these appearing around town in the next couple of days…

About 120 layoff notices went out to Providence Public Library staff this week. Not a surprise and not that many people will be laid off, but it’s still a scary prospect for the library staff downtown who don’t know whether they’ll be laid off for real or not.  Here’s the Providence Business News story about it.

There’s been a crazy whirlwind of news surrounding the Providence Public Library lately, and I’m sorry I haven’t been reporting on it as attentively as I should have.

Library trustees voted on Thursday to start transitioning the nine neighborhood branches to the City.  At the same time, they suggested closing the Central library to the public, because, according to library spokesman Tonia Mason, the PPL would not be able to adequately staff the Central Library if the city gave all its money to the branches.  The logic here is completely insane; in addition to the fact that the Central Library is the go-to branch for anyone who lives or works downtown, the idea that a hundred-and-twenty year-old non-profit library with a thirty-plus million dollar endowment could not raise the money to keep one building open to the public is ridiculous.  Especially since they’ve already cut back staff once in 2004 (in a move that led to the formation of the Library Reform Group and the unionization of employees.)

The Library plans to issue pink slip to nearly all staff this week; the branch librarians will presumably become city employees after June 30, and according to the PPL’s plan only twenty-one employees will be retained downtown.  Since it hasn’t yet been determined which twenty-one people would be retained, the PPL is obligated by the union to issue 60-day notices to everyone, regardless of whether they’re eventually laid off or not.

You can read about this all in Library Journal, the ProJo and in Providence Business News.  You can see an interview with Tonia Mason on Channel 10 here.

[Thanks to Patricia Raub for all the articles; if you're interested, the Library Reform Group periodically sends out newsletters that are a little more timely than I am.]

The winner of the Margaret Stilwell Prize, given each year to one of Providence’s young book collectors, is being announced right now at the Athenaeum.  I’m reeeeeeeally sorry I’m so far behind with the posting. (There’s also an organizational meeting for a new Friends of Washington Park Library that started fifteen minutes ago.  Which, again, sorry.)

There’s been a lot of action going on with the library; it seems as though the PPL may be ready to cede the city’s nine branches to the non-profit Providence Community Library, though the city’s not saying for sure yet which one it’s going to give the money to.  There have been lots of press releases floating around, but still no decision from the city.

In branch news, the brand-new Friends of the South Providence Library have a new blog, with a list of stuff they’d like donated.

And in other local book news:

The New Plays Festival started at Brown last night and runs through Sunday.

There’s a Publicly Complex reading at Ada this Saturday: Deborah Poe, Jon Woodward and Dobby Gibson.

There Will Still Be Light: A Freedom To Write Literary Festival hits Brown next week, with the literature of Burma being celebrated.  There’s a Burmese film festival happening (although it’s at four in the afternoon, for some reason.)  Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, and Amitow Ghosh will all be reading during the week, too.  The whole schedule’s here.

And a week from Saturday there’s a book/bake sale to benefit the Friends of the Smith Hill Library.

The American Library Association today released their annual list of the year’s most frequently challenged books.  Challenged books refer to those that patrons, parents, and others request to be removed from school or public libraries.  The number of challenges in 2008 was up almost twenty-five percent from 2007, a worrying sign, though books still aren’t being challenged at the rates they were twenty years ago.  513 challenges were reported last year, though it should be noted that the number only reflects formal written complaints; the ALA believes the actual number of books complained about may be as high as five times that figure.

Topping the list for the third year in a row is And Tango Makes Three, the picture book about gay penguins.  Following behind were Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Alvin Schwartz’ Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark series (which I loved when I was nine), Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks Of Being A Wallflower (which I loved when I was nineteen), the Gossip Girl books (which I love now), Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

According to the ALA, books were actually pulled from shelves seventy-four times last year.