8 Hospitality in Libraries

“I listened as the author Elizabeth Gilbert imparted words of wisdom from her mentor. To paraphrase her presentation, she asked, What are you willing to give up to be the library you keep pretending you are? […] We market our services, our programs, our collection, and then we throw barriers at people who try to use our services. […] I went home and made a list of everything I was willing to give up to provide services to all members of our community: protecting ‘our’ materials from patrons; my concept of fairness; teaching responsibility; and preventing ‘cheaters.’ It is not our business to teach people lessons. We are merely here to facilitate access to information. I decided three principal rules would govern our policies and procedures moving forward: (1) the public library is for the public; (2) people must be kept at the center of our policies; and (3) privilege is thinking that something is not a problem just because it is not a problem for you.”

–Carrie Valdes, Director of Grand County Public Library, 2023, p. 129

“Instead of imagining that those with less privilege need your help or charity, imagine that you need their help equally, if not more so.”

–Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, 2021, p. 329

Chapter Overview

The purpose of this chapter is to:

Introduce key vocabulary.

Explore concepts to help us sustain ourselves through the difficult work of customer service.

Introduction

Hospitality is a concept we often associate with how we make people feel welcome in our home. But it is also relevant to our work in libraries. Just as hospitality in our homes implies that we are prepared to offer comfort in the form of food, drinks, seating, music, or conversation, hospitality in libraries implies comfort through:

• the physical layout
• the attitude of the library workers
• the library’s responsiveness to patrons’ needs
• the board members’ and other leaders’ commitment to supporting workers who are striving to provide hospitality.

This chapter will detail the forms that hospitality takes in libraries and also introduces concepts that you can use to anticipate barriers to hospitality so you can remove the barriers and create a library that will improve patrons’ lives.

I hope that the concepts included here to help you support the patrons you serve will also empower you to recognize, confidently name, and fight against the inequities you will face as a library worker so that you can be part of creating a workplace that is also hospitable to workers.

Emotional Labor

The way you feel at work will have a strong influence on how you make others feel. Emotions are a common but often un-discussed part of work. A few jobs seem to allow people to feel and express their emotions (stand-up comedy, perhaps?) but most jobs require workers to follow direct or implied rules about what emotions are acceptable to express at work. In jobs where workers who feel stress, frustration, hurt, or fear are not allowed to show those emotions because they work with the public, the workers are required to do “emotional labor,” which is the “state of processing and balancing their emotional reactions against the display rules they perceive” (Matteson, Chittock, & Mease, 2015, p. 100). Research about library workers shows that they perform emotional labor “not just during interactions with customers but also with fellow employees” and supervisors (Matteson, Chittock, & Mease, 2015, p. 100). And it is not only the obviously stressful situations, like having to correct a patron’s disruptive behavior, that demand emotional labor but

situations seemingly as benign as a simple conversation with a colleague about the desk schedule or a description to a customer of the physical layout of the library’s service points [that] can create moments of emotional dissonance, leading to emotional labor. (Matteson, Chittock, & Mease, 2015, p. 100)

Since emotional labor will be required in Access Services work, it’s important to recognize when you are doing it and have some techniques for handling it.

Workers tend to use a few common techniques to carry out their emotional labor:

• surface acting
• deep acting
• withdrawing from the situation (Grandey, 2003).

Surface acting is pretending to feel the emotions that are considered appropriate at work. Research shows a close relationship between surface acting, exhaustion, and long-term burnout (Grandey, 2003). This means that if you mostly rely on surface acting as your strategy for handling emotional labor, you are very likely to get burnt out. Further research suggests that when workers believe they are doing the surface acting in service to others, they are even more likely to become exhausted (Pătras, Martínez‐Tur, Gracia & Moliner, 2017). But when workers believe they are developing themselves professionally by doing emotional labor, research suggests that their belief weakens the relationship between surface acting and exhaustion, allowing the workers to suffer less from the usual effects of emotional labor (Pătras, Martínez‐Tur, Gracia & Moliner, 2017, p. 328). So if you can think of surface acting as a skill you are building for your own benefit, that re-framing may protect you somewhat from burnout.

Deep acting is also a technique that protects workers from the exhaustion of emotional labor. Unlike surface acting, deep acting involves the worker intentionally adjusting their beliefs and motivations so that their actual emotions more closely match the emotions they are trying to convey. People who develop their ability to do deep acting when they are doing jobs that require emotional labor report less stress than people who rely on surface acting (Grandey, 2003).

The demands and negative effects of emotional labor are only partially controllable by the individual through emotion-regulation strategies. So sometimes the best option is to leave the emotionally demanding situation, at least temporarily. For example, people who are targets of racism, sexism, heterosexism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and so forth, are expected to perform emotions that are incongruent with the natural emotions ignited by disrespect and threats of harm that they encounter in their daily work. When you cannot or choose not to withdraw from an interaction that is so abusive it demands more than just surface or deep acting to get through it, you will need reflective strategies and a network of people who you trust to support you so you can process the effects of the stress.

I share recommendations for mindfulness, cognitive training, and deep acting at the end of this chapter because they are the only protections I know of that library workers can control for themselves. But that does not mean that the organizations we work for are not equally or more responsible.  As journalist Jill Filipovic explains in her essay about trauma, “Thriving requires working through discomfort and hardship.  But creating the conditions where that kind of resilience is possible is as much a collective responsibility as an individual one” (2023, p. 12).

The leaders of the libraries where we work are responsible for putting policies in place and fostering a culture that minimizes the amount of emotional labor required from us. If you are interested in what those policies could look like, please read the Sherwood Public Library’s 2022 update to their patron behavior policy, which the library manager explains was revised to provide “more consistent and empathetic oversight [using a] trauma-informed approach [that] furthers equity by actively working to create safer spaces that honor diversity, promote inclusion, and resist retraumatizing visitors who have experienced personal and generational traumas” (Calkins, 2023, p. 42). As you read the policy, consider how well you think patrons’ access and library workers’ wellbeing are balanced. If you are reading this book in print, please access the policy online by using the URL in the References at the end of this chapter.

The Effects of Unexamined Bias and Emotional Labor on Library Workers

In the previous chapter you read about unexamined bias and how it can affect library workers’ ability to serve patrons well. I believe that all of us who choose to work in a library are dedicated to the values of libraries, hope that libraries can improve peoples’ lives, and believe that libraries are for everyone. To prepare yourself to meet your own standards of excellent service and achieve your hopes of contributing to the library’s mission, you will need to anticipate two challenges: a) your own biases could negatively affect the people you serve and b) you will be depleted by the parts of the job that require you to fake your positive feelings. If you have unexamined biases that get triggered frequently in your library work, you will be less able to draw upon your deep acting strategies to protect yourself from the burnout that follows prolonged surface acting. Working to change your biases may be another protective strategy to sustain you through a career of providing emotional labor.

Cultural Humility

Recognizing and then countering your own biases may help you to develop cultural humility, a powerful tool for creating a welcoming and inclusive library that patrons enjoy visiting. Cultural humility starts with understanding what constitutes culture and cultural differences. A culture is made up of “knowledge, beliefs, art, morality, customs, and other habits an individual acquires as a member of a society” (Wokchieschowska & Topolska, 2021, p. 628). And “[t]he workplace is one stage where personal culture, societal culture, and professional culture interact and engage” (Swade & Bekele, 2023, p. 199), making it a rich but fraught environment for cultural conflict as well as cultural humility.

The word humility sometimes has negative connotations of being too timid to stand up for ourselves or our beliefs, but in the context of library work, cultural humility is a way of getting our ego out of the way. By cultivating our cultural humility, we can “see, and be seen, outside our own perspectives and attachments to ourselves as individual, atomized, and stable entities” so we can deeply connect with the people in the cultural communities we are serving and achieve our goals for providing excellent service (Cline & López-McKnight, 2023, p. 183). Cultural humility will open up possibilities for you to offer the kind of library customer service that makes people’s lives better by connecting them with resources they need when they need them and interpersonally connecting with patrons in a meaningful way while you do it. “The ultimate goal of cultural humility is to build authentic and long-lasting relationships with oneself and others, which requires investing time, energy, and love into that person” (Swade & Bekele, 2023, p. 190).

There are a lot of definitions of humility and librarians Hurley, Kostelecky, and Townsend (2019) highlight this one by June Tangney who works in the field of psychology because it is so applicable to preparing ourselves as library workers. According to Tangney, humility is a “neglected virtue” that requires:

• an accurate assessment of one’s abilities and achievements (not low self-esteem, self-
  deprecation)
• an ability to acknowledge one’s mistakes, imperfections, gaps in knowledge, and
  limitations
• openness to new ideas, contradictory information, and advice
• keeping one’s abilities and accomplishments — one’s place in the world — in perspective
  (e.g., seeing oneself as just one person in the larger scheme of things)
• a relatively low self-focus, a “forgetting of the self,” while recognizing that one is but
  part of the larger universe
• an appreciation of the value of all things, as well as the many different ways that people
  and things can contribute to our world (pp. 73-74). (p. 548)

Much like the concept of anti-racism that you read about in the previous chapter, cultural humility also “explicitly recognizes the importance of the structural context of an interaction and requires a commitment to redress problematic structural power imbalances” (Hurley, Kostelecky & Townsend, 2019, Introduction para. 10). Humility includes acknowledging the negative effects that traditional library structures have in many communities, which frees us to stop centering what is good for the library when we are weighing different options so that we can instead center the needs of our community, especially the people who are critical of the library because of the way that traditional library services, policies, and collections have been in conflict with their own culture. Humility slows down our decisions and makes us more responsive to signs that our gut reaction may have missed important details because they were not familiar to us. Taking time to make decisions gives us the opportunity to “weigh information in a non-defensive way,” which is what we all want to do so that our judgements are more accurate and so that we see our place in the problem or solution accurately (Peterson & Seligman, 2004, p. 463).

Because libraries are long-standing and large institutions, it has been common for library workers to expect communities to adjust themselves to accommodate the library workers’ expectations and preferences instead of the library workers adapting themselves to their community. Some library workers are interested in changing this balance to give more weight to their community’s needs and they are calling this change “transformative librarianship” (Morales & Williams, 2021, p. 89). These library workers are calling on all of us to notice when our adherence to library policies and our unwillingness to change “the way it has always been done” are unintentionally communicating to patrons that we care more about our library’s rules than we do about their wellbeing and connectedness (Morales & Williams, 2021, p. 89). Library director Carrie Valdes (2023) explains,

the US lives with the fact that our public libraries [and school and academic libraries] were segregated. We carry this history. If we are still operating under policies, procedures, rules, and standards from our past, we are operating under a racist umbrella. (p. 133)

Transformative library workers who practice cultural humility to make their community the priority can build trust “because they see pain and know that within their grasp lies information that may be able to help alleviate it” (Morales & Williams, 2021, p. 89).

To help library workers achieve transformative goals, Patricia Montiel-Overall (2009) developed a model of cultural competence specifically for libraries and it shows how cultural competence is not just about a general positive feeling toward other cultures or making sure that you don’t discriminate against people because of their culture. Cultural competence is made up of:

• self-awareness of your own culture and biases.
• knowledge about other cultures (especially the cultures most common in the community you serve).
• appreciation of the strengths of other cultures.
• caring for people from other cultures and for their freedom to maintain their cultures.
• working to change policies, standards, and practices so that they no longer limit people’s opportunities because of cultural differences.

Cultural humility and cultural competence are habits of mind that we have to intentionally build in ourselves. Librarians Xan Goodman and Twanna Hodge (2023) advise that

if library workers do not understand their [own] identities, and if they lack cultural awareness and knowledge and do not understand how this affects their work, they cannot provide services or programming; […] they cannot conduct outreach that is culturally validating or tailored to what the patrons need. (p. 19)

When applying for jobs in libraries, you should prepare to explain how you are working to develop your cultural humility even though the interview questions may not use the phrase cultural humility to describe the skills they are seeking. I once heard a white person who was being interviewed for a community college professor job give as evidence that they were skilled at working with diverse students is that they grew up in Southern California and had always loved tacos. It’s true that we are fortunate in Southern California to be in proximity to communities that are striving to maintain many different cultures. But just being around a variety of cultures and recognizing that we may share some tastes in common is not the same as consciously and consistently challenging ourselves to accurately assess our cultural assumptions and our abilities and mistakes as they relate to intercultural collaboration. There are power imbalances that we benefit from by being part of a large, respected organization like the library. Cultural humility helps us acknowledge our power and non-defensively learn from the implicit and explicit critiques of the library that we can understand as cultural conflicts between the community and the library. Although criticism of our libraries can feel unfair, humbly engaging in these challenges strengthens your ability to provide excellent service that improves patrons’ lives.

Hospitality in Libraries

Researchers in the field of library hospitality define it as the delivery of library services by employees who are motivated “to fulfill the library need of a patron in an environment conducive to the provision of those resources” (Johnson & Kazmer, 2011, p. 383). Much like using a library mission statement to guide decisions, you can use a “lens of hospitality [to evaluate our libraries and] help focus the decision-making process, acting as an overall guide to the shared service philosophy” (Johnson & Kazmer, p. 397). Researchers Eric Johnson and Michelle Kazmer explored the professional library literature from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries to find historical precedent for these overlapping elements of library hospitality:

Library Resources

Ever since the 1800s, this element of hospitality has included the library’s collection and space as well as events like lectures and readings that can make “the library to some extent a center for the cultural life of the community” (Johnson & Kazmer, 2011, p. 388-389). Now it also includes access to technology and to the training people need in order to benefit from technology (Johnson & Kazmer, 2011, p. 392).

Employees, behavior, and motivation – this is “providing welcome and assistance to patrons out of a sense of generosity rather than through a motivation of mere duty” and also acting on the knowledge that many people do not feel comfortable in the library, so library workers should be explicit about being welcoming, recognizing library anxiety (Mellon, 1986), and feeling happy to help even with questions that may seem unimportant (Johnson & Kramer, 2011, p. 389). As library workers, we sometimes take it for granted that patrons will be welcomed into libraries and will have positive experiences when interacting with staff, but at least one large-scale international survey of library users showed that only five percent could recall positive interactions with library workers and 23 percent have negative associations with library customer services (Johnson & Kazmer, 2011, p. 393). Clearly library workers’ intentions to provide excellent service do not always result in actions that patrons feel positive about. And while we also must consider that sometimes patrons’ experiences are shaped by their own biases rather than anything a library worker did or did not do while providing customer service (Montoya & Polkinghorne, 2023), it is important to approach such findings from a place of inquiry. It may be tempting to dismiss reports of poor customer service as being the result of patron biases or other forces that cannot be controlled but it is more responsive and hospitable to spend time considering how library workers can have more positive interactions with patrons.

Ensuring that the library workers are from their community and share the same background or have similar experiences as the patrons may make it easier to achieve hospitality because cultural differences affect definitions and perceptions of hospitality. Library workers who are not part of the community they serve may be striving to offer hospitality but may be unknowingly creating an inhospitable library for many people in the community. Cultural humility can help us to notice and change our behaviors if they are making patrons feel unwelcome. Training to improve library workers’ abilities to offer hospitality often focus on changing body language and non-verbal cues and making positive word choices even when explaining limits (Johnson & Kazmer, 2011, p. 394). But library workers may also find that there are times when they hold “less power than their patrons” because of [stereotypes around] race, gender, age, class, language, or professional status and so, rather than consciously challenging library power-dynamics to share power with patrons, the library workers may have to establish their authority as experts in order to provide excellent service (Montoya & Polkinghorne, 2023, p. 42). Power-dynamics make the goals of hospitality and humility complicated, requiring reflection and learning through a lot of trial and error.

Fulfilling Needs

The definition of “needs” has varied over time. Sometimes library workers have emphasized providing collections and programs that uncritically respond to the needs that their community expresses and other times library workers have emphasized creating collections and programs intended to improve their community even if the community did not express a desire to be improved or see the collections and services being offered as improvements (Johnson & Kazmer, 2011, p. 390). Libraries in the United States grew in the late 19^th century because they were used as part of the government and philanthropists’ efforts to “promote certain civic and moral goods” like reading for self-improvement, assimilation of recent immigrants into mainstream culture by eliminating their language and traditions, and inculcating positive views about democracy and capitalism (Honma, 2005). Recognize that different patrons will have different needs and interests and try to connect people with the collections and services that they are most likely to enjoy (Johnson & Kazmer, 2011, p. 391). As longtime library website developer Laura Solomon (2022) reminds library workers to ask ourselves,

Every time you interact with a patron, are you connecting them to something that’s truly relevant to them or just pushing something the library hopes people will come to or do? Just telling people about your library’s stuff isn’t enough. Benefits sell. People need to know, plainly, what the payoff is going to be for them. (p. 30)

Libraries in the 21^st century continue to walk the line between providing what patrons want and offering what the library workers and library boards think that patrons should want. Finding the right balance is part of achieving library hospitality.

Environment

This element includes the beauty and usefulness of the library space, like the quality of the light and how the books are displayed on the shelves (Johnson & Kazmer, 2011, p. 391). Clear and relevant signs and other way-finding design features like color also make a library hospitable by anticipating how the patron is likely to want to interact with it. These elements can make a large library seem more manageable and a small library seem less cramped. Furniture can make using the library easier. An interesting example is the computer carrels with attached play areas at the Fairfield Area Library in Virginia that are designed to meet the needs of caregivers doing computer work while accompanied by small children (Conway, 2022). Whether and how patrons can enjoy food and drinks in the library are also part of hospitality (Johnson & Kazmer, 2011, p. 396). When library workers determine that no food or drinks are allowed in the library, they should consider the tradeoff they are making between hospitality and maintenance. Maintenance may still have to win out as the top priority, but library workers should recognize what is being lost when patrons are completely barred from eating or drinking anything in the library. And remember, as many library workers have pointed out when advocating for relaxed food and drink rules, patrons eat and drink around their library materials all the time at home (Johnson & Kazmer, 2011, p. 396). So, libraries may be a good place for students and others to practice being careful when eating and drinking near library materials.

Offering hospitality to library patrons requires library workers to either create a surface appearance of calm and caring, which may exhaust us, or to create an inner peace in ourselves that we can then project outward to patrons and co-workers, which energizes us as library workers. Library techs who participated in interviews for this textbook shared examples of hospitality like playing soft music in the school library; removing un-needed shelving to create more gathering spaces; ending the fees that the library had previously charged for some services; using constructive, non-judgmental language to create connection when a patron’s materials set off the exit alarms; protecting patrons’ privacy to ensure their freedom to read; providing games and entertainment; getting to know patrons and their families; and calling patrons to gently encourage them to search for and return long overdue items.

Hospitality Applied to the Library Website

Remember that the library’s website is also an environment where the principles of library hospitality should be applied. And it is an environment that some patrons will spend more time in than the physical library environment (Johnson & Kazmer, 2011, p. 396), so the feeling that patrons get when visiting your library’s website is a significant part of your library’s overall hospitality.

Solomon (2022), offers the following advice:

• An effective online presence really comes down to not putting one’s ego first. […] As soon as any person or entity’s ego overrides the need of the online patron, the library loses. (p. 31)

I encourage you to take a long, hard look at what your library does online. Are you really doing it for the patrons or to please someone or something internally? A library does good work online when it realizes that the people doing the reading of the content matter more than the people doing the creation of it. (p. 31)

• Does [the library website] scream ‘PROMOTIONS’ or ‘WE HELP SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS’? (p. 11)
  • The website should primarily make it as easy as possible for patrons to find solutions to their problems, including providing instructions about how to get what they want from the library (like a library card or storytime) and also how the library can help them solve problems that they might not have associated with the library (like networking events, help with applications, and homework help). Rather than thinking about how to promote library services and events, library workers who practice hospitality will use the website to show that they understand patrons’ needs and will work with them toward solutions.
• For libraries to truly serve all patrons equitably, a focus on web accessibility is critical. Libraries need to understand that accessibility isn’t an optional feature. (p. 26)
  • This means designing the website so that it does not exclude any patrons because of vision-differences or sensory-differences. Ensuring that the site has high contrast, descriptive link text, and image descriptions are all part of making it a hospitable environment.
• [L]ibraries need to get a little more comfortable with promoting the idea that staff are important (and available) and not only the services and collections they provide have value. (p. 27)
  • This means providing some information about library workers on the website. This does not mean that every library should list the name, contact information, and photo of all staff, since in some settings this could make stalking or other threats to library staff more likely. But Solomon suggests that a balance should be found so that people using the website are aware that library workers are available and happy to help them.

As with hospitality in the physical library, hospitality on the library website requires putting patrons’ interests ahead of library workers’ interests so that library workers can achieve their goals of providing meaningful service.

Strive for “Surprisingly Good” Customer Service

This is something of a catch-all category because preparing yourself to offer surprisingly good customer service includes choosing hospitality over your own ego; uncovering and countering your biases; valuing and knowing how to apply principles of anti-racism, inclusivity, diversity, equity, disability justice, and accessibility; and analyzing and countering the elitism and other barriers that libraries have built into our processes and policies over time. Once you have committed to building your capabilities in these areas you can then achieve what customer service expert Wendy Sheaffer (2020) calls features of good customer service:

• “Learn about your [patrons] and how to serve them” (para. 13).
• “Always follow through. […] If you say you are going to do it, do it” (para. 12).
• “Think of ways to ‘convenience people […] Can you solve a problem they didn’t know they had?” (para. 14).
• “Be more than a voice on the phone […] build a one-on-one relationship” (para. 16).
• “Addressing your [patrons] needs, pain points, and complaints quickly and effectively will help you to create […] lifelong advocates” (Sheaffer, 2020, para. 18).

Examples of Surprisingly Good Service

In her interview for this textbook, Danielle Davis, Lead Library Programming Technician at the Patrick J. Carney Library at US Marine Corps Camp Pendleton shared an example of how she helps patrons who have technology questions about software she is not yet familiar with. After trying to troubleshoot with the patron in the library, Ms. Davis requests the patron’s email address so she can follow up after she has gotten the information they need. Once she takes a patron’s email address, she makes sure to contact them with further information. She always follows through.

Elisa Hernandez, Library Associate II at Escondido Public Library gave this example of being more than a voice on the phone:

I call all the patrons when we need to speak to them about missing items or all kinds of problems. I’m in charge to call the patrons who don’t speak in English, like Spanish speakers, and let them know what’s going on. Sometimes you say, ‘Don’t worry, just look over your car, the item might be there.’ Or sometimes I tell them, ‘Oh, you have these items you haven’t returned. Please return them as soon as you can.’ Things like that. That’s a skill I learned over the years. Because, in the beginning, I would say, ‘Bring the book!’ [laughing] but that doesn’t work like that. Now I say, ‘I noticed you have items…’ in a very good way. And when they get started getting mad and say, ‘I don’t have that book!’ I say, ‘Okay, I still see that in your record, it could be a mistake. We’re going to look here in the library, but you can also be looking at your house,’ and try to be positive.

The Cost/Benefit of Charging Overdue Fines

You have read about several critical concepts that library workers and libraries should adopt in order to successfully meet the needs of their communities. Let’s apply those concepts to analyze how well library policies are aligned with our stated mission and goals. We’ll apply the concepts of cultural humility, targeted universalism, hospitality, antiracism and analysis of systemic racism, whiteness theory, inclusion-diversity-equity-accessibility, disability justice, and surprisingly good customer service to the issue of overdue fines that we covered in a previous chapter.

Historically, library policy around overdue materials starts with a fine that increases every day an item is overdue. Once the amount of the fine reaches a predetermined amount, the patron is not permitted to check out any more items until the fine is paid. Some libraries are eliminating fines for overdue materials to increase equity and inclusion because library fine policies and procedures have distributed advantages and disadvantages to library patrons along racial, class, and ability lines, perpetuating the same damaging divisions that we hope libraries can reduce.

Researchers Morales and Williams (2021) call eliminating overdue fines an initiative that centers libraries’ most vulnerable communities. In their review of fine-elimination decisions, they describe how

[l]arge public library systems in Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Washington, DC, to name a few, have gone fine-free or created automatic renewals to remove barriers to access that would have disproportionately hit working-class or poor communities of color harder, but now the entire community of library users benefits. (p. 88)

Eliminating fines can be seen as an example of interest convergence (a concept defined in the previous chapter) because it creates a benefit not only for minoritized communities but for the library leaders, too, by generating better usage statistics as patrons who had been blocked from using the library because of fines start returning and patrons check out more materials because they are no longer weighing the threat of fines.

In California, public library systems including San Mateo, Contra Costa, Berkeley, San Francisco, and San Diego eliminated fines in the late 2010s (Stuhldreher, 2019). As part of their decision to eliminate overdue fines, the San Francisco Public Library leaders worked with their city treasurer, José Cisneros, as part of his Financial Justice Project to study the effects of fines on library patrons (Long Overdue, 2019). Their study is available to read online and offers insights that library workers can use to challenge our own assumptions about the neutrality of library policies and the effects of changing what we may think are foundational library policies, like overdue fines. The Financial Justice Project’s findings show that in the San Francisco Public Library system:

“Library borrowers regardless of income miss return deadlines at similar rates. About one-third of borrowers owe overdue fines at any time” (Stuhldreher, 2019, para. 9). This means that there is no relationship between poverty and the likelihood that a person will owe fines. But people with low incomes are more affected by the fines they incur than are people with higher incomes. “Upper income people can usually pay fines in a snap. But if you’re living paycheck to paycheck and cannot pay up, consequences can snowball, growing the intended ‘punishment’ to unintended extremes” (Stuhldreher, 2019, para. 20) and ending some families’ ability to use the library because their cards are blocked for non-payment.

Blocked accounts from overdue fines are a disadvantage that is distributed unequally along racial and other demographic differences. The study showed that in one of the lowest-income neighborhoods of San Francisco, 11 percent of library users have their cards blocked for unpaid fines, which is “three times as high as at branches in high-income areas” (Stuhldreher, 2019, para. 10). And the library branches that serve the highest numbers of African American patrons and patrons without college degrees also had “more blocked accounts from overdue fines” than branches serving more white patrons and patrons who had attained higher education (Stuhldreher, 2019, para. 11). These data from SFPL demonstrate that “Institutional Racism is present [because the] library’s enforcement of fines has a disproportionate impact on people of color, who are overrepresented among low-income populations due to the racial wealth gap” (Sonnie, 2018, p. 8).

The fines are not a significant proportion of the SFPL budget, so eliminating them does not reduce the library’s ability to provide excellent service to all patrons (Stuhldreher, 2019, para. 18). But for some libraries, eliminating fines will affect their budget. For example, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where overdue fines were an important revenue stream for paying for technology updates, the library director worked with the city mayor to secure a new budget line to sustain the library’s technology, allowing them to eliminate fines for children’s and young adults’ materials and allowing other fines to be waived through a read-down program without reducing services (Eliminating, n.d.; Wyant, 2018). This collaboration between the library and the city government is an example of how policy changes can reduce “Structural Racism [that] exists whenever libraries rely on revenue from fines to cover general operating expenses” (Sonnie, 2018, p. 8).

When the Grand County Public Library eliminated fines because “they most penalize families who can least afford to pay,” they put “a large donation jar at the front desk, and when someone feels guilty about returning items late or damaged, we offer the jar as a solution” (Valdes, 2023, p. 130). Although people are used to paying them, fines are not the best way to get people to return materials on time. Instead of fines, libraries have found the following ways to get materials returned: “send earlier and more frequent reminders by text and email when books are due [and] [i]f other people are not ‘in line’ waiting for your book, it will be automatically renewed” (Stuhldreher, 2019, para. 17).

By eliminating fines, library workers reduce the opportunity for unconscious bias to affect how policies are carried out for different patrons. For example,

interpersonal racism may play a role when library staff apply subjective criteria to enforcement of library policies. In the case of library fines, staff decide whether to renew a lost item to give the patron more time, mark it as ‘claims returned’ or waive charges. The decisions are largely based upon staff judgment where implicit bias may play a role. (Sonnie, 2018, p. 8)

Without fines, a library worker will automatically offer the same benefit to all patrons, not only the ones with whom they identify or toward whom they have positive unexamined biases.

Library Techs’ Perspectives on Fines

Library techs who participated in interviews for this textbook reported many ways that overdue fines affect their hospitality, their ability to serve all patrons well despite the influence of systemic racism, their cross-cultural communication, and their opportunities to provide surprisingly good customer service. Yvonne Brett, LMT III at San Marcos High School explained,

Most of what we do [with students] is a positive interaction. You know, you’re helping somebody find something or they’re excited about a book. And really the only negative thing is when you’re asking somebody to pay for something that… you know… But they need to learn the consequences.

Lora Diaz, LMT III at Mission Hills High School shared her experience with ending fines and her philosophy about the benefits of ending fines:

My boss, at the time when I got hired, had no idea that we were still charging kids for late fines. And I brought it to her attention. I was like, ‘Listen, our library policy still is that for every day that it’s overdue, it’s five cents. Why are we doing this?’ And she’s like, ‘I don’t know.’ I’m like, ‘Can we stop?’ She’s like, ‘Sure.’ so we just stopped. And that was nice because now I don’t have to count all those quarters [laughter]. But also, how are we going to make this a welcoming place if you don’t turn in a book on time and I charge you a nickel for every day if you don’t return a book? What if you need the book for a longer time? So we also expanded the time you’re allotted with the book from two weeks to four weeks, so that they could have more time with it. And if they need to renew, they can. Basically, I’m just like, ‘You’re checking out the book, it’s yours until you’re done reading it. I don’t want it to come back unless you’re done reading it or you’re done with it entirely.’ So that’s been kind of an interesting shift away from more traditional library rules.

Regarding her reasoning and philosophy about charging fines, Lora Diaz explained, “[California] Ed Code is kind of the overarching legislation that we have to abide by. So Ed Code says, ‘It’s free education. You shouldn’t be charging kids for things unless they purposefully damage them.’” So Lora worked with her vice principal to end the policy of collecting overdue fines from students even though

not everyone was super thrilled to have that change happen. [Because t]here is a philosophy that you’ll run into in school libraries that you are preparing [students] for the real world. But my argument against this [policy] in particular was the public libraries are moving away from fines for a lot of reasons. So if they were to go to a library anywhere else, they wouldn’t charge them. And I don’t believe necessarily in the punishment aspect of it being somehow helpful to them understanding something about the world. It’s just a different perspective. So, it was helpful to have the public libraries also start going in that direction. And that’s directly something I pointed to when we got rid of the fines. And I’m just like, ‘Well, public libraries aren’t doing it anymore either. Why are we doing it?’ And honestly, because it was like 5 cents a day, it wasn’t contributing a huge amount to our income, so to speak. So it was just a matter of talking with my team and having everyone kind of come around to the idea, because you’ll get people that are very stuck in ‘This is how we do things.’ And it’ll take them a little bit to let that go. So that was a challenge in that regard. But now kids are, ‘I’m so sorry this is late. What do I owe you?’ I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, we don’t have you do that, but thank you for returning the book. We would rather have the book back than your money.’ You know, so it’s a definitely a philosophy change, but I think everyone’s going in that direction anyway.

Much like the increased circulation reported by other libraries that have eliminated fines (Stuhldreher, 2019), Lora also found that the number of books students are checking out has increased since they eliminated fines, which she hopes might be evidence that convinces the schoolsite council to provide additional funding for more materials or at least discourage them from cutting the materials budget.

At her public library, Christina Lorenzo explained that the city’s decision to eliminate fines was driven by their interest in eliminating the need for library workers to handle and secure cash.

I want to say it’s been like five or six years that [library directors have] been trying to change [the fine policy before] it finally got approved [by the city]. Come on! It shouldn’t take six years to change something like that, you know? Other libraries are doing it and it’s proved to be successful. One of the things that we changed [during COVID] was going cashless; we don’t accept cash anymore. Everything is you pay by card and what I mean by cashless is people can’t ask for change. So, they can pay for their copies, for example, with cash, but unless they want to stick a $20 bill in there for a 20 cent copy and get everything back in quarters…you know. But the point of that is what ended up happening is because we went cashless after COVID had already hit and we were reopening, people were coming back and wanting to pay their fines. Well, a lot of the families that we serve are undocumented. They don’t trust banks. They don’t have a debit card. They don’t have a bank account. So they’re like, ‘Well, how do I pay it?’ ‘Well, you can’t pay it unless you have a debit card.’ So what can we do? ‘All right. They can’t pay it.’ They want to go cashless, so waive the fines. There’s no other way to pay it. And what we realized when we would do that—I mean, we wouldn’t advertise it obviously, so it was just like case by case. But when we would [waive fines], the families—like it could have been five bucks—but they were so grateful and so happy to come back because their card wasn’t blocked anymore. And it made that big of a difference.

Because of the ambivalence that the city leaders felt about the decision to eliminate fines, the library workers did not feel empowered to publicize this policy change. So, there are certain to be families who still do not go to the library because of the fines they have not paid, not realizing that they are no longer blocked from checking out materials. Promoting the new policy widely in the community would be a way to increase equity and inclusion and answer common questions that people are likely to have about the new procedures (Fine free, n.d.). Hopefully, the families who were pleasantly surprised to find that they no longer are blocked from using the library will tell their neighbors, word will spread, and people will return to the library.

Efforts to Limit the Disproportionate Impact of Fines & Fees

Library techs who participated in interviews for this textbook also described how even libraries that still charge fines have tried to reduce the ways that overdue policies distribute advantages and disadvantages to library patrons inequitably along racial, class, and cultural lines. Fine caps and fine forgiveness or alternatives are common approaches that need to be carefully evaluated to see if they can achieve the same goals of equity, hospitality, targeted universalism, and inclusion that are achieved by going “fine-free.”

Fine Caps

Alysa Hernandez, Library Support Specialist III at Cal State University, San Marcos, explained,

We do collect fines and we cap fines. I think it’s up to 20 or 25 bucks for equipment checkouts or book checkouts. If a book goes into the lost-status, it’s obviously more. Our philosophy for the role of the fines is very case by case. You know? There’s some students that are like, ‘Oh no, I forgot to bring back my calculator when you guys were closing at midnight!’ So we’re like, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s very understandable. Things like that happen sometimes.’ For small cases like that, I think [the decision about how to apply the overdue fine policy is] very staff to staff. If there’s anything bigger, it goes up the ladder to someone else. But for the small cases, circulation staff takes care of them. I feel like [eliminating fines] might have been a discussion. And I think the compromise was limiting fines. Limiting how much a student can acquire in fines. So, I think that’s why they’ve capped it up to $25 to make it more affordable and more equitable for students.

As Alysa Hernandez’s description illustrates, some overdue fine policies are likely being applied differently by different staff for different students based on personal reactions to the students’ explanations about why their materials are overdue. Capping the fine totals may prevent a student from getting into a debt that they cannot pay and losing library or university access, but it still hits students with less money harder than it hits students with more money, making it a policy that perpetuates systemic oppression.

Fine Forgiveness and Alternatives to Money Payments

Yvonne Brett, LMT III at San Marcos High School recognizes that even what she considers very minimal fines of five cents per day, not including weekends and holidays, can still catch some students by surprise,

But we always forgive them, too. So we have an amnesty week and we’ll send an email saying, ‘Hey, your books are due but it’s amnesty week! Bring ’em in!’ And they’re just like, ‘What does that word even mean?’ [laughter] And we go, ‘All you have to do is ask.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah.’ [laughter]. So we just kind of kid around with them on that. But I mean, the fines are minimal.

Yvonne Brett’s observations show the challenge that library workers and patrons face when they communicate across cultures. Although amnesty is a common concept in libraries and means that people can return materials to have their fine debts erased, some patrons are likely to be unfamiliar with the word, making them less likely to get a benefit from the policy. Whiteness theory and cultural humility help us to anticipate that patrons whose culture is similar to the culture of the library are more likely to understand what fine amnesty is and to ask for their fines to be waived even without a fine amnesty program. But patrons who are marginalized by libraries’ culture are less likely to be aware of amnesty or other ways to request that their fines be erased. That makes already marginalized patrons more likely to either pay fines that other patrons have avoided or to have their library access blocked because of unpaid fines that they didn’t realize they could ask to have waived.

Lora Diaz, LMT III at Mission Hills High School, also described an alternative to charging students for replacing lost books. Students can work in the library to clear their fees.

They come in and I’ll be like, ‘Okay, what’s the minimum wage these days? How much do you owe me? You owe me whatever. Okay, let’s just call it an hour of your time. I need you to shelf-check, make sure everything’s in order.’ So we were really flexible with that. At the end of the day, I would rather have either the book or the kid learning something versus the money.

Note that if you work at a school library that does not currently use student assistants or volunteers, you should consult with your supervisor before starting a policy of inviting students to “work-off” their fines in case there are any labor concerns related to having work done in the library by non-employees. Also, to ensure that this option is offered to students fairly without bias, library workers should keep track of students who work off their fees and students who still owe fees at the end of the school year. By using student demographic data, the library workers could determine if there are patterns that suggest the advantages and disadvantages of this policy are being distributed along racial, class, gender, or cultural lines. It’s also important to note that the option to work off fines potentially creates a disproportionate negative impact on some students by taking away time they could be using for other things such as another wage-earning job, study group meetings, participation in clubs, and so forth. It may also have a stigmatizing effect — other students can find out that you’re working off fines that you could not afford to pay.

Reconsidering Other Charges and Fees, Too

Libraries that stop charging for overdue items often still charge for replacements, damage, and for services like printing. This may be necessary and certainly sounds reasonable because library workers have to be stewards of the collection on behalf of their community. Nevertheless, based on her reading of California Ed Code and her philosophy about the role of the library for students, Lora Diaz, LMT III at Mission Hills High School, explained that

We’re working on [reconsidering charging for unintentional damage] right now with the Chromebooks. So, if [students] damage their Chromebook right now, they get charged for whatever needs to get replaced or fixed or whatever. And the most basic screen damage repair is 40 something dollars and I really don’t want to do that. But we’re getting there. It’s a district wide thing that we’re all trying to do. All of the library techs are trying to get more clarification about the district [policies]—what we should do and why and all that. So that’s still getting fleshed out. And we don’t charge kids for printing. So if they wanted, like the kid who came in today prints, we tell them it should be school related or something. You know, you print out their documents, and things like that, where I’m like, we are a service; they should get this. They may not have access to a printer at home.

All of us who work in libraries and advocate for library budgets should share Lora Diaz’s willingness to question what library users should be expected to pay for and her empathetic openness to understanding how much patrons really need from their library.

Suggestions for Doing the Work

This chapter and the previous chapter make it clear that there are many social, cultural, and financial challenges that library workers need to be aware of and prepare ourselves for so that we can achieve our hospitality goals, provide life-improving library services, and sustain our physical and emotional health over the course of a long career.

Building trust and deserving trust are the most fundamental components of successful library work. To be a library worker who deserves trust, you can contribute to the strength of your community and your library by learning positive coping strategies to manage the stress of the work. From this perspective, your efforts to develop personal coping strategies have even greater significance because they are not something you are doing in isolation but, instead, are part of working toward the larger goal of creating hospitable, useful libraries. We need to be careful not to allow ourselves to be exploited in the name of the larger goal of libraries, which can sometimes seem more important than we are individually as library workers (Ettarh, 2018). But when we strive to strengthen and sustain ourselves so that we can contribute our labor to libraries, we are not saying that the individual worker is less important than the greater goal. Instead, we are recognizing our inter-dependence and honoring the fact that “each person is vital for the fulfillment” of our shared goal (Roy & Moorhouse, 2023, p. 11).

Fight for Justice

Ideally, structural changes would reverse the lasting effects of oppressive systems so that libraries could function in a more cohesive and healthy society. I encourage you to fight for the structural changes we need. As Lankes (2011) explains, libraries are necessary for our community’s engagement in these difficult political struggles over who will control access to resources and shape the future:

Our dreams demand libraries and librarians. It is in the potent mix of ideas and reality – of the radical and the mundane – in the glow of both solitude and community – that we care-take the dreams of a nation. Librarians are political because we all need to be political and join the debates of how power and resources are divided in this nation and indeed the world. Librarians, however, have a special responsibility to ensure that all participation is informed, nuanced, and ongoing. (para. 10)

And to ensure that libraries can prepare patrons for political engagement, Lankes (2011) clarifies what “being political” means for the role that library workers should fill:

when I call for librarians to be political, I am not calling for them to be partisan, that is picking winners and losers. If there is one thing that librarians understand, it is that the world is much more complex than that. Librarians see many sides of one issue. They may believe strongly in a given idea, but they are open to all ideas, and at least seek the merit in them (realizing they may find none). If librarians were to become partisan, they [would] threaten their ability to serve and the communities’ trust. (paras. 5-6)

As librarians and scholars Morales and Williams (2021) put it, transformative library workers

go where the problems are and serve the people who are most affected […]. They go there because that’s where real information and real solutions can be unearthed. […] These librarians are political actors. They work every day to engage with truth and facilitate trust. Transformative librarianship is a pathway that could allow us to fully lean into our purpose of transforming and upholding libraries as the cornerstone of democracy (p. 89)

if we fight oppression, “challenging it and ourselves at every turn” (p. 89).

Practice Mindfulness, Optimism, and Reflection

The strategies I offer in this section focus on you as an individual. They complement the strategies above that focus on structural problems of libraries. Although many of the negative mental and physical effects of employment cannot be overcome by any one of us alone because they are caused by “poor working conditions, toxic […] cultures, low wages, bad bosses, unrealistic job demands, a lack of health insurance and stable employment, and meaningless work” (Purser, 2023, p. 10), there may be some protective habits you can form to re-energize your work by offering hospitality, building community, and enjoying the career you have chosen.

One of the enemies of transforming libraries is library workers’ egos. Ego is the self-protecting beliefs and behaviors that most everyone falls back on when they feel challenged. It is similar to being self-centered, which creates a barrier to making meaningful connections with patrons and with colleagues because the self-centered person is always making decisions based on what is best for them, not based on what is best for the relationship they are trying to build or for the service they have committed to provide. When we experience stress at work, we are likely to act out because of wanting to protect our ego. And if we have a strong feeling that we need to protect our ego, we are likely to experience even more stress at work because every disagreement, uncomfortable interaction, or the things that people do without even thinking about us can feel like an attack. So, for all library workers it’s important to practice letting go of the feeling that you need to protect your ego and that every unpleasant interaction at work is an intentional and targeted assault on your wellbeing. Cultural humility, described above, is one element of quieting our egos. We can also use research-based mindfulness and meditation practices to actively work against the anxiety that ego-protection causes by using “meditation and breathing exercises to pay attention to the present moment, without letting distractions, worries, and opinions creep in [and] learning to neither dwell on the past nor fret about the future [so that] your mind can find peace” (Ruhlmann, 2017, para. 5).

Mindfulness can also help us to strengthen our optimism. For many of us, optimism is not our default mental habit, but some research suggests we can work to develop it (Moore, 2019). Optimism means generally feeling a sense of empowerment and assuming the best of people and situations. You can take a free online optimism quiz (Nobbe, 2022) to start investigating your current level of optimism and you can use cognitive methods to build your capacity to challenge negative thoughts (e.g., Wantuch & Cunningham, 2016) if you find that the negative thoughts are contributing to your stress or discouraging you from continuing the work that you value. If you are reading this book in print, you can access the optimism quiz online by using the URL in the References.

Although we often feel that we are aware of our thoughts, feelings, and motivations and that we are in control of them, evidence from psychology suggests otherwise and shows that reflective writing, in which we write to explore our own thoughts rather than to express our thoughts to others, can help people to manage stress. Leesa Renée Hall is a psychologist who has shared some of her suggested reflective writing prompts online for free. Hall offers some prompts to help explore white fragility (2017) and some prompts to help recognize the inner oppressor (2020).

Integrating a regular practice of reflection into your worklife can make empathy easier to achieve and can improve your ability to focus even when you are surrounded by distractions (Ruhlmann, 2017). You can also cultivate habits of optimism by disputing your own negative interpretations of neutral events (Seligman, 1990). But I also want to acknowledge that using mindfulness and optimism to make it easier for you to do your job is a distortion of the origins and traditions of meditation. As philosopher Justin Smith (2022) points out, meditation’s power is “the openness to radical transformation of the self and deconstruction of one’s goals” (p. 36). When we apply meditative techniques to achieve a specific goal like being present and useful at work, we may miss the chance to be changed in unexpected ways. Meditation’s full power is achieved by bringing your full attention to “properly attend to something [and] allow it the potential to become something […] unfamiliar within the context of your prior range of references and expectations” (p. 36). So I encourage you to both explore the benefits of mindfulness in your library work and also to pursue the type of meditation practice that can be transformative.

Empathetically Engage with Co-Workers

By building solidarity with other library workers, you will create a team within your library or across multiple libraries who can work together to analyze and change structural oppression and support one another in offering transformative, community-engaged library services without regard for the artificial professional hierarchies that are too common in libraries (Holliday, 2021). Librarians Quiñonez, Nataraj, and Olivas (2021) offer an excellent model of mutual support that library workers can follow to identify allies when the culture of library work is marginalizing and oppressive.

Empathetically Engage to Develop Future Co-Workers

You can help children and young adults to see libraries as a place where they want to work. Research about young people’s career goals, especially young people who are marginalized in ways that are related their race and class, shows that they most want to find a career where they can be themselves, bringing their full identity to their work (Byrd, Storlie, Albritton, & Cureton, 2022). By being a library worker who brings your full self to your work and who creates meaningful relationships with young library patrons, you could help to ensure the bright future of libraries by welcoming in the next generation of transformative library workers.

Remember that there are as many ways to offer excellent library service as there are different library workers and patrons. Your way will be unique to you and to the patrons you serve. You will make a lasting positive change in your community through your work in libraries.

References

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