Hello, friends,
Four months into the pandemic, people in my New York City neighborhood still pause to clap for health care workers every night at 7 p.m. And there are so many others we should be clapping for, too—workers who are risking their lives to provide essential services, from grocery stores to mail service.
This week, The Markup’s Lauren Kirchner reports on the struggles of another group of essential workers who deserve a round of applause: librarians.
In the U.S., where there are 25 million people without broadband Internet access, and four out of 10 low-income households don’t have a computer, libraries are the only option for many people to connect to the internet and use a printer.
And with libraries closed, Lauren found, many librarians have scrappily transformed themselves into human web portals—helping their patrons get online and navigate unemployment applications, participate in remote classrooms, conduct job searches, and do online shopping.
The librarians Lauren spoke to have shown real ingenuity. Some moved their Wi-Fi routers closer to their doors and boosted the signals into their parking lots. Others lent out Wi-Fi hotspots along with their books and distributed them directly to homeless shelters. Some drive Bookmobiles into neighborhoods, pumping out Wi-Fi signals where they go.
This week, I interviewed one of those librarians to find out what it’s like on the front lines of the information pandemic. Tyler Hahn is the director of the library in Cherokee, Iowa (pop. 4,900), where many patrons have only spotty cell service or inconsistent satellite internet service at home. The library is one of the few places in town with a reliable broadband connection. And since the pandemic began, he has been spending his days helping residents navigate the online world by talking to them through the window in his office.
The interview is below, lightly edited for brevity.
Angwin: How has library patronage changed since the pandemic?
Hahn: We normally average about 200 to 250 items per day. The day before we closed our doors [March 16], we circulated 1,700 items. It was an immense rush. People were stocking up on books, DVDs, and people were coming in to make copies. One of our older patrons, Nancy, had to sit down because she was overwhelmed by how reminiscent it was to the polio epidemic in the 1950s, when she had to leave her family farm.
We were closed to the public after that. But we made sure that our Wi-Fi was on all the time. We were able to boost the signal by moving things around and running wire here and there. We were able to get a fair signal from the parking lots in the front and the back of the library. It might not have been the best, but it was at least some signal.
We had a full parking lot and people would be sitting on the benches around the library. In March, we had 706 visits from unique devices. That’s significantly more than we had in February, when we had 237 visits from unique devices.
Angwin: What kinds of things did people need help with when they came to your window?
Hahn: Zoom! There were so many people who hadn’t heard of it. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been Zooming since 2018.”
Another thing we really worked on was orders on Amazon because we don’t have a store in the area where you can buy towels or home goods. If you need a pair of slacks, there is a feed supply store, but they don’t necessarily have the best selection. So many people had never shopped online before. They were hesitant, but they were forced to because there was literally nothing else open.
And they inevitably ordered something wrong, and the entire process of how to ship things back was very mystifying to a lot of people. What really threw people for a loop was printing return labels. That was one of the busiest things we had going on day to day—printing return labels for people.
People would just hold their phone up to my window for me to see and start scrolling—and there was a lot of stuff there that I didn’t need to see. My staff and I were talking about how often we were inadvertently flashed by something on a screen!
Angwin: Are there library patrons who you haven’t seen during the pandemic and you are worried about?
Hahn: There were some kids in particular that I know their home situations weren’t the best—they were afraid because they were LGBTQ or had parents who were abusive. I can imagine they are scared and having trouble reaching out. I tried to check on them if I knew where they were working, but I didn’t want to invade their privacy.
I’m hoping that as we move through reopening that they will touch base again and check in. The library was their safe space.
Angwin: What do you wish you could provide to your patrons?
Hahn: Being able to circulate hotspots for people who have had trouble getting to the library would have been a lot of help. Or having a Bookmobile that we could drive to neighborhoods and bring Wi-Fi.
One of the hard things right now is that we have a meatpacking plant that is getting ready to open and ramping up hiring. People want to come in and use the computers to apply for jobs. We want to open up the computers but are down to our last two boxes of Clorox wipes, and we are rationing wipes.
We are using diluted bleach to wipe down the countertops, but it leaves a weird dusty milky film that is kind of gross. The CDC guidelines say to leave the bleach on for 10 minutes and let it air dry, but how can we do that without dousing the entire keyboard?
Theoretically we could go ahead and open up two computers upstairs and two downstairs and cycle the keyboard and mice out between patrons and then quarantine the keyboards for two days. So that is something we are facing.
We are a portal for all information now. It’s an amazing responsibility.
Thanks as always for reading, and stay safe.
Best,
Julia Angwin
Editor-in-Chief
The Markup