Showing posts with label Public Libraries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Public Libraries. Show all posts

Saturday, January 11, 2020

Bypassing Legislature

Norman Anderson III, "Bypassing Legislature," Salt Lake Tribune [Opinion, LTE], January 11, 2020, p. A10.

      There was a line of people at the Millcreek library for several days last week.  Just ordinary people waiting to sign the latest referendum petition, a referendum on the tax plan recently passed with little discussion by the Utah Legislature.  It is almost a certainty that there were lines at other petition signing locations, as well.
COMMENT

    The public library offers a place for citizens to sign a petition against an unpopular new law that raises taxes on food and services and seems likely to cut tax revenues for education. If enough signatures are gathered citizens will get a chance to vote on the law.  This letter to the editor says that people were lining up at the library to add their signature.  It's yet another way libraries can promote civic engagement, and maybe a few of those voters also went home with something to read.

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

N. Mexico Author Delivers Books to Migrants

Angela Kochera, "N. Mexico Author Delivers Books to Migrants," Salt Lake Tribune (original to Albuquerque Journal), January 7, 2020, p. A6.

     Along with giving books to migrant children and their families, the book drive helps a small library that serves children in Mexico living in Anapra.
     Chavez, Lenander and volunteers with the Border Servant Corps make monthly visits to the Biblioteca para la Vida to participate in Saturday morning storytelling sessions.
     "The kids will come in their pajamas and just put blankets and pillows all over the floor," Lenander said.
    In December, the children each got their own book bag with a book and toy and celebrated the season with a piñata shaped like a big book.  Chavez read from "Dragones y Tacos" during he Christmas party as the kids munched on tacos. 

COMMENT

    The article describes a project called Libros para el Viaje that collects books in English, Spanish and Portuguese for migrants at the U.S./Mexico border.  Part of the project is a children's library located in Mexico that offers story time, community, food, books to keep and a small sense of normalcy for migrant children.  The books help migrants pass the time,  and provide language practice, but most importantly they are a deeply humane gift.
    The Biblioteca para la Vida provides an opportunity for volunteers to hold story time.  The books and stories become a connection between people who might otherwise never meet each other.

Saturday, January 4, 2020

Fresh Litter

"Fresh Litter," (Talk of the Town), New Yorker, December 23, 2019, pp. 31-32.
The source material "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," is a collection of poems that T.S. Eliot wrote for his godchildren. "The poems were written in the nonsense tradition," Carolyn Vega, the curator for the Berg Collection, at the New York Public Library, explained recently.  Sara Beth Joren, publicist for the library chimed in: "And that's why when people hate on 'Cats' -- like "Oh there's no plot.' It's just like, 'Yeah, there wasn't supposed to be'. And anyway, there is a plot. There's a cat trying to get to the Heaviside Layer.  That's a plot.
     The two women were waiting for Francesca Hayward, one of the stars of the "Cats" movie.  Hayward, a principal dancer in the Royal Ballet, plays Victoria, a graceful white cat -- her first film role.  Vega was ready to give Hayward a quick Eliot lesson; she had brought out a first edition of "Old Possum" and some photographs of the poet. 

COMMENT

      An actor in need of information about her role consults a librarian.  Sure, there is plenty about T.S. Eliot on the Internet, but it could be quite a slog to discover how we got from Eliot the poet to the musical "Cats."  The librarian helps zero in on the nonsensical origins of what is, after all, a distinctly nonsensical musical.   Hayward reacts appropriately to the first edition, experiencing that spooky sense of history that is connected to physical artifacts.

Barbara Testa dies at 91

Katherine Q. Seelye, “Barbara Testa Dies at 91: A Discovery in Her Attic Rocked the Literary World,” (Obituaries) New York Times, January 3, 2020, p. A21.

    The story began in the 1880s with her grandfather, James Fraser Gluck, a lawyer who was also the curator of the library in Buffalo N.Y., now called the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.  He was a collector, and he aggressively solicited autographs and writings from contemporary authors, all of which he donated to the library.    Over the years, he had collected manuscripts from some of the biggest names in 19th-century letters, among hem Walt Whitman, Henry James and Louisa May Alcott.  He also had snippets from Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe, Keats, Shelley and Dickens.
     Mr. Gluck established a pen-pal relationship with Samuel L. Clemens — better known as Mark Twain — and at one point asked him for the manuscript for “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a novel that had shaken the rafters of the literary world when it was published in 1884.

COMMENT

    Long story short, Clemens sent Gluck his handwritten manuscript, but half of it was lost until Testa found it in the Attic in 1990.  She was in need of money and wanted to sell it, but the library filed suit, arguing that Clemens gave the manuscript to the library.  Still, the library paid $1 million to settle. 

    This is another collection development story in which a librarian follows a personal obsession rather than following an arbitrary standard of popularity or high circulation.  I believe that libraries should do more to deliberately support this kind of personal collecting which can produce extremely valuable and unusual collections.  One possibility would be to assign each librarian a small personal collection development fund to be spent on whatever they think would be good to have in the collection. 

Friday, January 3, 2020

Educated




Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir, 2018.

Sometimes, when she was delivering herbs, if we’d finished our chores, Mother would  drop us at the Carnegie library in the center of town.  The basement had a room full of children’s books, which we read.  Richard even took books from upstairs, books for adults, with heavy titles about history and science.    Learning in our family was entirely self-directed: you could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done.  Some of us were more disciplined than others. I was one of the least disciplined, so by the time I was ten, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code because Dad insisted that I learn it.  [p.46-47]
...
     I stared at them as if they were behind glass. I’d never heard anyone e use the word “feminism” as anything but a reprimand. At BYU, “You sound like a feminist” signaled the end of the argument.  It also signaled that I had lost.
     I left the café and went to the library.  After five minutes online and a few trips to the stacks, I was sitting in my usual place with a large pile of books written by what I now understood to be second-wave writers — Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir.  I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut.  I’d never seen the word “vagina” printed out, never said it aloud.
     I returned to the Internet and then to the shelves, where I exchanged the books of the second wave for those that preceded the first— Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill.  I read though the afternoon and into the evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I’d felt since childhood. [pp. 258-259].

COMMENT

   The first story from Westover’s childhood describes using the children’s collection as a kind of babysitter.  The kids were inconsistently homeschooled, and the shelf of library books didn’t compensate for a lack of educational direction.


    In the second library story Westover is enrolled in college and realizing how many things she doesn’t know about.  This time the library reveals its secrets. The books offer a vocabulary to talk about feminism that was not available in small town Idaho nor at a Mormon religious university. 

American Gods



Neil Gaiman, American Gods. Tenth Anniversary Edition. Author's preferred text. 2011.

     "Hinzelmann, have you heard of eagle stones?"
     "Up north of Rhinelander? Nope, that's Eagle River. Can't say I have."
     "How about Thunderbirds?"
     "Well, there was the Thunderbird Framing Gallery up on Fifth Street, but that closed down.  I'm not helping, am I?"
     "Tell you what, why don't you go look at the library.  Good people, although they may be kind of distracted by the library sale on this week. I showed you where the library was, didn't I?"
     Shadow nodded and said so long.  He wished he'd thought of the library himself.  [p.372]

COMMENT

      The entire library episode actually extends from p. 372-377 -- too long for me to type out.  What does Shadow do at the library?  He requests a library card,  has a discussion with a librarian about a man who stole rare library books, researches Native American traditions, talks to a neighbor and purchases weeded library books at the library book sale.  
     Two of these book sale books are probably perfectly appropriate to weed, but one of them should certainly have been kept in the collection unless it was a duplicate-- Minutes of the Lakeside City Council, 1872-1884.  If this was indeed the only copy of local history it was completely irresponsible for librarians to send it to the book sale.  However, the contents of this imaginary book turn out to be a plot point since is contains evidence about children killed by a resident demon.  In real life Gaiman is an outspoken supporter of libraries. As a writer, he had to to betray the librarians and send this particular  book to the book sale in order to give his character  more time to read it.  

Thursday, January 2, 2020

As the Ball Dropped, Our Life Fell Apart

Tammy Rabideaum, "As the Ball Dropped, Our Life Fell Apart," (Modern Love) New York Times, December 29, 2019, p.ST5.

     During Kristils' freshman year of high school, she announced that she wanted to attend a high-level college and began searching what was needed to be accepted. One summer day we drove to the library to pick up books she had on order. Awaiting us were three bins and some 60 books, many of them "how-to" manuals on getting straight A's, mastering standardized tests and winning admission to Ivy League schools.
     At home, Kristil lined them up in stacks along her bedroom wall, then mapped out her reading and study plan for the summer. 

COMMENT

     Despite a period of homelessness, Kristil eventually ends up at Barnard College with a full scholarship.  Some librarians are skeptical when a student like Kristil checks out more books than a person could reasonably read.  This story illustrate that someone who checks out a lot of books might actually be using them.  The librarians would surely be pleased to know how their library books helped get their borrower into the college of her dreams.

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind

Jason DeParle, “Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind,” New York Times, December 17, 2019 p. A1-

     Money helps children in part because of what it can buy— more goods (cheesy chicken spaghetti) and services (gymnastics classes or tutors).  Ms. Bradford, the teachers’s aide, is so eager to invest in her sons that she has used tax refunds to send them on Boy Scout trips to 42 states— even when a flood left them living in her car “I’m trying to instill in them that it’s education that gives you knowledge and power, not cars or clothes,” she said. Before traveling to Washington and visiting the Vietnam Memorial the boys — Tony 17, and Micah 13— wrote a report on a Monroe man killed in the war, which the public library added to its collection.  Finding the soldier’s name on the wall, Micah said, “felt like touching history.”

COMMENT

     The article is about people who are too poor to get the full amount of a child tax credit.  In this example, the extra money helps buy educational experiences that aren’t available at public school.  The library is part of an education plan that includes schools, extra-curricular clubs, field trips and independent research. 

     The student work was added to the local history collection.  This kind of hyperlocal collecting is important for community identity.  What’s more, the library collection is a way to validate the importance of student research.  Academic libraries typically require graduate students to deposit dissertations and theses, but many also allow professors to submit selected undergraduate work for the collection.  In public libraries, display space is available for K-12 students to show off artwork and projects to the larger community. Since people without kids seldom have reason to go into a school building, the library becomes a link between students and community 

Monday, December 9, 2019

Electric Woman

 The Electric Woman

Tessa Fontaine, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-defying Acts, 2018.

    Story goes as a high school student in New Jersey, Tommy elided he wanted to be a circus performer, but a six foot two and possessing little grace or flexibility, his options felt limited. He didn't come from a circus family and didn't have the physique of a typical aerialist or tumbler.  What he wanted most of all was to wrestle an alligator.  When he learned about sword swallowing, he thought it could take him to the circus, the gators.
     He checked out a bunch of books on swallowing swords from the library and spread them across his bed, desk and floor.  Their illustrated pages provided step-by-step instructions and accounts of some of history's most famous sword swallowers.  He got to work.

COMMENT

     Nowadays would a wannabe circus performer learn his skills from youtube?  Or would he still go to the library to get those books about the most famous sword swallowers in history?   In the book Fontaine writes a scene where experienced performers try to teach her to swallow swords, so maybe the real trick is to learn how to swallow swords directly from another person. 


Sunday, December 8, 2019

Christian Doomsayers Have Lost It

Peter Wehner, “Christian Doomsayers Have Lost It” New York Times, December 8, 2019, p. SR3.
Sohrab Ahmari— a convert to Catholicism who is both the op-ed editor of The New York Post and a contributor to the religious magazine First Things— was so outraged that drag queens were reading stories to children at a library in Sacramento that he has relegated civility to a secondary virtue while turning against modernity and classical liberalism “To hell with liberal order,” as Mr. Ahmari put it. “Sometimes reactionary politics are the only salutary path.”

COMMENT

     Judging by the political behavior of Trumpist Christians, you’d think that enforcing stereotypical gender roles was a foundational principle of Christian religion. Mr. Wehner suggests that such prejudice is, in fact, contrary to a practice of spirituality, joy, gratitude, kindness and healing grace.

    As a target of self-appointed morality police the library takes on two roles that appear in other library stories: 1) a target of censorship 2)  a defender of free speech and diversity.




Sunday, December 1, 2019

Amazon's Expansive, Creeping Influence in an American City

Scott Shane, "Amazon's Expansive, Creeping Influence in an American City," New York Times, December 1, 2019, p.1, 26-28.

Public libraries are stocked with digital audiobooks from Amazon's Audible, and browsers can check reviews on Amazon's Goodreads.

COMMENT

     In this article about the Kraken-like tentacles of Amazon.com libraries feature in the role of customers.  When libraries lend audio books, Amazon skims a little off the top.  Instead of turning to librarians for book recommendations, readers can plow through crowdsourced reviews on Goodreads (which are a lot less useful than you'd think with regard to finding something good to read).
     Libraries are a keystone of  literary culture.  They support books and reading by buying stuff, putting money back into writing and publishing. Yet in the world of librarianship there has not been much acknowledgement of this role. Instead, there is a tendency to prioritize efficiency and cheapness.  During the transition to online newspapers, librarians never asked the question of how journalists would get paid.  Likewise, librarians have cut down on purchasing books from university presses without ever asking how young professors will get tenure if there is no place for them to publish books.
     Librarians like to point to libraries as core institutions for community resilience and civic engagement.  Yet abandoning newspapers and academic presses for the sake of "cheapness" was not socially responsible.  It's probably not socially responsible for libraries to switch procurement to Amazon.com either, particularly since prioritizing convenience and cheapness are exactly what lured librarians to make bad decisions in the past.
     Somebody (ALA?) should take a hard look at library spending in order to understand exactly who and what it's supporting. The long and short is, Big Tech distributes information but does not create it.  Amazon.com is the new Wal*Mart, vacuuming up dollars and sucking the life out of communities.  Only now it's happening to cities and not vulnerable small towns.   The article ends with Emma Snyder, the owner of an independent bookstore who says that her customers will pay $10 more for a book just because they don't like the world Amazon is building:  "Part of what people don't like is that Amazon debases the value of things.  We're commercial spaces, but we fundamentally exist to feed and nurture people's souls."  What if libraries applied this idea to spending?  Is there a way to re-focus collection development on building strong communities, not just on getting cheaper best-sellers?

Can Marriage Counseling Save America?


Andrew Furgesun, "Can Marriage Counseling Save America?" Atlantic, December (2019), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/better-angels-can-this-union-be-saved/600775/

     Yet there I was one bright summer Sunday, wreathed in skepticism, gathered with a dozen others in the community room of a suburban public library in Northern Virginia to test whether this nation, or any nation so fragmented and so polarized, can be united and saved by a workshop.
     This was not just any workshop, of course. I was at a “skills workshop” put on by a grassroots citizens’ group called Better Angels. The group got its start in the shell-shocked weeks right after the 2016 election, and it takes its name from Abraham Lincoln’s famous plea, in his first inaugural address, that his divided countrymen heed the “better angels of our nature.” (They didn’t.)
     Paid-up membership in Better Angels stands at a little over 8,000, but the group creates a commotion bigger than that of organizations many times its size. On any given day somebody somewhere in the United States is hosting an event like the one I attended. There are an average of eight to 10 such events a week. The mission everywhere is the same, explained by the inspirational mottoes on the posters the organizers had hung in the library. “Let’s depolarize America!” “Start a conversation, not a fight.”
COMMENT

     Librarians don't always need to re-invent the wheel.  Here is a citizen group dedicated to civic dialog that is using library space to host events.  The idea is simply to get conservative and liberal voters to talk to one another.

   This may or may not work. One problem is that for all they gripe bout civility, Republican voters seldom show up to such meetings. As the author puts it, "Now, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who will join hands and sway gently back and forth while singing “We Shall Overcome” with Peter Yarrow, and Republicans." This same problem occurred with respect to the transportation open houses mentioned in Better Busses, Better Cities--- the people who show up to such meetings are self-selecting and not representative of the whole community.

   

Monday, November 25, 2019

The Library Book

The Library Book


Susan Orlean, The Library Book, 2018.

The story of the Los Angeles Public Library and the 1986 fire required years of research and scores of interviews with current and past library staff, deep dives into the Fire Department’s archives and the City of Los Angeles’s court records, and a lot of digging through the musty boxes of material stashed in the Library’s Rare Books Room. There I found a trove of information, including newspaper clippings about the library from the twenties; book lists from the thirties; paraphernalia from every decade; and countless, fascinating odds and ends left behind by the hundreds of librarians who passed through Central Library at some point in their careers. This material was essential to the writing of this book.  I also found a great deal of valuable material in the many books and published papers about California and library history.  [p. 315].

COMMENT

The notes on the author's research process mention those d/musty boxes again.  This time they contain ephemera of a kind that might strike some people as especially useless.   Who would consider old library book lists worth keeping? And yet here they are informing a bestseller. Interviews, government information and published books and articles are also cited as part of the research strategy.   The resulting book is the story of a community told through the lens of its public library, quite literally putting the library at the center of community and community resilience. 


Better Buses Better Cities


Steven Higashide, Better Buses Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit (2019).

Agencies have to do better than "open houses" that draw eight people at the library and instead think seriously about how to get public input that equitably represents bus riders and activates allies throughout the planning process. They have to discard ponderous project development  processes that result in 5-year timelines for bus lane projects and try tactical approaches that change streets overnight instead.
COMMENT

Library open houses are portrayed here as an ineffective way to gather citizen input for transit improvements.  Many transit riders can't come either because such meetings conflict with work, of the bus stops running at night.   In order to get stakeholder input, it's essential to try to get a representative sample, not just respond to a few people who manage to show up in person. 




Sunday, November 24, 2019

Face it, Mom and Dad: I'm Not Special

Jenny Dolan, "Face it Mom and Dad: I'm Not Special," (Modern Love) New York Times, November 24, 2019, ST6.

     My parents owned a book called "You Can Heal Your Life" by Louise Hay along with a matching set of affirmation cards, which my mother kept in her nightstand. Hay claims all illnesses result from fear and anger.
     I went to the library and checked it out, wondering what am I afraid of?
     Confident I could solve the problem with mind power, I visualized myself as healthy.

COMMENT

     Of course, the writer is not healthy. She is diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, an incurable lung disease.  Her parents, however, are so committed to positive thinking that they are unable to offer helpful emotional support for their daughter who is facing a lifetime of chronic illness and the probability of dying young.   The self help book is worse than useless.

     The irony is that libraries are a public institution that stands against the current onslaught of fake news propaganda coming out of Washington D.C.  But library shelves offer plenty of fake news -- fake self-help, fake diet advice, fake politics.  A library would probably not buy a book by say, a Holocaust denier, but right there on the shelves was a book of science denial that places the blame for illness on the person who is sick.

    Yet even this fact-free book serves a function.  The author's parents own the book and believe it offers helpful advice.  Because the library has a copy she is able to  understand why her parents seem so dismissive of her worries. Later the parents give the author more self-help books for a Christmas present and because of what she learned from the library book her reaction to these books triggers the conversation that parents and child should have had much sooner.  

Friday, November 1, 2019

Here to Help

Tik Root, "Here to Help: One Thing You can do to Slay the Energy Vampires," New York Times, November 1, 2019, p. A3.

Another option is a Kill-a-Watt meter, which measures how much energy individual appliances are using.  they're available at most hardware stores and can sometimes be borrowed at public libraries.

COMMENT

   The library is not just for books any more! It's also a place where you could possibly borrow a  single-use tool in order to help cut energy consumption.

Saturday, October 26, 2019

In the Land of Self Defeat

Monica Potts, "In the Land of Self Defeat,"  New York Times, October 4, 2019.

The fight over the pay for the new head librarian had a larger context: The library moved into a new building, with new services, in 2016. Construction began during the natural gas boom years, and ended after the bust, just as the county budget was being squeezed and services were being cut. During the boom, the new building had seemed necessary, but with the revenue decreases, the county knew it was going to have a hard time paying the 2.1 million still owed on it. (Disclosure: My mother was on the library board when some of the decisions about the new building were made.) The library made its own budget cuts, but the savings weren’t enough to cover the shortfall in paying for the building, and there was a real danger of the library closing, leaving its new, hulking brick building empty. The people who didn’t frequent the library argued that the community didn’t really need it anymore, anyway. After all, if you have internet, you can get whatever you want in a day. 
COMMENT

In this article the public library serves as a synecdoche for community that is undermined by anti-tax zealotry.  The author writes that anti-tax Trump voters "view anyone who is trying to increase government spending, especially to help other people, with disdain, even if it ultimately helps them, too."  She notes that people who would like to live in a place with better schools and good public libraries have already moved away leaving behind a group of people wedded to an ideology of self-defeat since without community services to fall back on all of them are much poorer.

The library building was built with boom-and-bust resource extraction money.  It's typical that a community would overspend, expecting the boom to go on forever.  It never does.  Politicians like to pretend that fossil fuel extraction is economic development.  In fact, extractive industries is a good way for rich people to make money specifically because it employs relatively few people and isn't permanent in a community and therefore doesn't have to worry about long-term community relationships.  They always go bust in the end and always seem to leave behind damage to the environment and economy.


Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Chen Wei Guo's Killer Has Been Extradited to Colorado, Charged with Another Murder

Stephany Cortez, "Chen Wei Guo's Killer Has Been Extradited to Colorado, Charged with Another Murder," The Utah Chronicle, V.29 No. 11, 2019 p. 9.

     The next day, Oct. 30, 2017, Austin Boutain was recognized by a librarian at the Salt Lake Public Library, after more than 200 officers and FBI agents conducted a lockdown to find the culprit and assure students were safe on campus.  Boutain pled guilty to two felonies: attempted aggravated murder and aggravated kidnapping, which qualifies for the death penalty in the state of Utah. 

COMMENT

     Vocational awe, anyone?  Though no part of this story is actually surprising.  It's not surprising that a fleeing murderer would go to a perceived safe space in a public library.  It's also not surprising that a librarian there had been following the news and was able to recognize the suspect. 

Sunday, August 18, 2019

Work Friend

Megan Greenwell, “Work Friend: A Closed Mind Amid Open Books,” New York Times, August 11, 2019, p. BU3.

The library recently hired a new children’s department head who has told me that she doesn’t believe in evolution and doesn’t think public schools are good and that “Mexicans don’t read.” She talks about religion constantly and has added several creationist “science” books and DVDs to our library collection.

COMMENT


     This library problem comes from the work-related advice column. The library profession generates “vocational awe” but some librarians are nonetheless incompetent.  Other library stories relate encounters with racist librarians and it’s clear that a librarian with this kind of attitude has potential to cause actual harm.  It's especially hard to get rid of people who have been given administrative positions.  No matter how bad they are, administrators somehow make themselves immune from accountability.
     A professional standard of neutrality is meant to keep personal bias from bubbling to the surface, but it can’t stop someone who won’t accept the standard.  I once got into a debate at a library conference with a librarian who wanted to preach anti-abortion from the reference desk. My point of view is that the best way to approach controversial topics is to get students to identify the stakeholders— the right answer is not to take sides but to encourage patrons to determine who cares about the issue and why. This librarian wanted to use the platform of the reference desk to “guide” patrons towards her own preferred political position. In any case, stocking the shelves with science-denial is not objectivity but just false equivalency.  There are not two sides when one side is simply wrong.   Academic libraries might have creationist propaganda for research reasons, but even so it's problematic because cataloging rules can make fake information look legitimate.  If we want to combat ignorance librarians shouldn’t be spreading fake news, even if there are people out there who want to read it. 

Arts, Briefly

Arts, Briefly: Library Arts Program Has Big First Year, New York Times, August 17, 2019, p. C3

     It’s been one year since public library cardholders in New York’s five boroughs were given expanded — and free— access to the Arts through the city wide Culture Pass initiative.     Since the program’s beginning in July 2018, over 70,0000 people seem to have taken the libraries up on their offer and signed up for the pass, the city’s public libraries said Tuesday.

COMMENT


     This program allows library patrons to reserve free passes for participating museums and other cultural venues. It proved to be so popular that tickets ran out for MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, while some of the lesser-known museums had noticeable attendance growth.  
     One question about this kind of program is how to advertise and catalog it to make it sustainable in the long run.  The article notes that most people who signed up did so early on when the program was first announced.  That suggests that there may be a need for continuous promotion since an arts pass is not something people expect to find at a library. It’s an issue with any innovative  library service. It might start with a bang, but in the long term, how will patrons know it’s there?  For instance, I remember that my own public library had a program to check out a pass for State Parks.  It’s a great idea, but even though I'm a public library user I have no idea whether or not that program is still operating.