Library Hours in Month Twenty of the Lockdowns

Dear Diary,

Yes, it's been a long time.

I ran into trouble trying to make a map of Tacoma, and used that as an excuse to stop trying to write in you.  As a result, I've made much faster progress in resuming parts of my pre-homeless life (including, at the moment, a full-time temporary job) as well as parts of my homeless life unrelated to you.

The most related to you of those parts is the spreadsheet of library hours that I'd already uploaded to this public folder in my Google Drive space.  I just finished updating that today.

Some comments:

Seattle Public Library hours

One roadblock was something I avoided facing as long as all branches of the Seattle Public Library were open on the same schedule every day - either 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. or closed Monday through Saturday, either noon to 6 P.M. or closed Sunday.  But once they started trying to resume approximations of their pre-pandemic schedules, it was impossible to continue the spreadsheet the way I'd been doing it, keeping each library in its pre-pandemic hours bucket.

By this I mean that before the pandemic, Seattle Public Library branches kept just four schedules.  About half kept this:

• 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. Monday through Thursday
• 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Friday and Saturday
• Noon to 5 P.M. Sunday

These are the libraries my spreadsheet used to sum up as "Big".  Central Library kept the same schedule except that it was open until 6 P.M. on Sundays.

Four libraries, which I summed up as "Medium", kept this schedule:

• 1 P.M. to 8 P.M. Monday and Tuesday
• 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Wednesday through Saturday
• Noon to 5 P.M. Sunday

And the rest, which I summed up as "Little", kept this schedule:

• 1 P.M. to 8 P.M. Monday and Tuesday
• 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday
• Closed Friday
  
• Noon to 5 P.M. Sunday

Four schedules for twenty-seven branches.

There are now twenty-six branches open, and they are keeping *thirteen* schedules.  Eight of the big libraries are keeping a single schedule, but each of the other five has its own schedule.  Central has its own schedule.  Each of the medium libraries has a different schedule, but University shares its schedule with two little libraries.  Three each of the little libraries follow two other schedules.  I list the thirteen schedules below.

The only libraries that are keeping their pre-pandemic schedules are Fremont, High Point and Montlake.  No library is open longer hours than before the pandemic any day of the week, which is a change from the summer, when all the small and medium libraries that were open on Mondays through Saturdays, and all libraries open on Sundays, were keeping longer hours each day they were open (eight hours vs. seven M-S, six vs. five Sundays).  Of course, now that each re-opened library is open at least four days of the week, and most five to seven, the total hours most libraries are open have expanded considerably.

Related to hours, I've found yet another lie from city government.  The most recent hours announcement from SPL claims "Beginning Sept. 1, most reopened branches will be open every day of the week."  This isn't even close to true.  Here's a list of schedules:

1. Ballard, Broadview, Capitol Hill, Douglass-Truth, Greenwood, Rainier Beach, Southwest, West Seattle (main big schedule) - in fact open seven days
2. Beacon Hill (big) - in fact open seven days
3. Central - in fact open seven days since September 15
4. Columbia (big) - in fact open seven days
5. Delridge, Magnolia, Queen Anne (little) - closed Fridays and Saturdays
6. Fremont, Montlake, University (little/medium) - closed Fridays
7. Green Lake, Madrona/Sally Goldmark, Wallingford (little) - closed Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays
8. High Point (medium) - in fact open seven days
9. International District/Chinatown (medium) - closed Saturdays
10. Lake City (big) - closed Sundays
11. Northeast (big) - closed Saturdays
12. Northgate (big) - closed Mondays
13. South Park (medium) - closed Sundays

So on September 1 (when Central Library was still closed Sundays and Mondays), eleven of the twenty-four then-reopened branches were open seven days of the week.  On September 15, twelve of the twenty-six.  How is this "most" ?  Before the pandemic, eighteen of the twenty-seven were open seven days.

In case I don't actually get around to the three remaining pages intended about Tacoma, I feel obligated to note something about the Tacoma Public Library.  They re-opened to their full schedule in early July, all but one branch, modulo some construction at their Main Library.  They keep significantly shorter hours than Seattle's Central, big and medium libraries, but they restored the hours they do keep before anyone else in the neighbourhood.  I'll steal another bit of fire from the Tacoma pages by noting that the librarian at Pierce County Libraries' University Place branch who told me that the Tacoma libraries, like the Pierce County ones, also had disabled their water fountains - well, maybe she believed that, in which case it wasn't an outright lie, but it certainly wasn't true.  As best I can tell, the Tacoma libraries' water fountains were available as soon as those libraries re-opened.  And the branch that librarian specifically mentioned provides good water.

University library hours

I first started keeping the spreadsheet after I'd essentially started living at or near the University of Washington, so it's always included a bunch of university libraries.  They currently present a big contrast with the Seattle Public Library.  The latter wants us to believe that most branches are open seven days a week even if it's not true; all university libraries to which I've paid attention are unapologetically closed to the public on weekends at present.

The public university and the private universities present, between them, three patterns.

University of Washington

The University of Washington branches to which I've paid attention include Suzzallo, Odegaard, Health Sciences, East Asia (now Tateuchi East Asia), Law and Music; I was intending to get acquainted with its Drama library when the lockdown came.  I've also spent a day or two at the Tacoma branch's library, but haven't made it to the Bothell branch's.

Before the pandemic, each branch kept a different schedule, and I was selective listing them on the spreadsheet - always Suzzallo, Odegaard, and Health, but I replaced Law (that is, the Gallagher Law Library) with East Asia at some point.  My visits to Health and Law were sometimes motivated by research - into the human senses (at Health) and into oddities of marriage relevant to income taxes (at Law) - but also by Law's proximity to the edge of campus, when I slept on Roosevelt, and by computers once available at both that allowed the general public to reach the entire Web, as opposed to the usual public computers at UW's libraries that block a confusing and changing set of domains.

Law didn't like people like me intruding on it, and so gradually changed many of its ways.  First it got rid of the public computers.  Then it designated the places I preferred to sit as restricted to people affiliated with the Law School.  Finally it insituted a sign-in requirement for the general public.  Since I haven't worked as a tax preparer since the sign-in went into effect, I haven't been back.  But I think it's a pity that Seattle closed its municipal law library, relying on the UW's, only for this to happen.  (There's still a King County Law Library, though.)  Anyway, today, the Law library is closed not only to the general public, but to the general body of UW's students, faculty and staff; it's open only to Law School people this quarter.

(The GoFundMe that got me housed was started by a woman who'd been a law student when I used to visit the Law library, and had seen me there.  So I have more reason now to regret the Law library's hostility than I had before the pandemic:  it's cut off a chance for similar interactions, if that's the right word, to happen that might benefit others.)

Two libraries whose hours I still tracked are closed to the general public this quarter - Odegaard and Health.  Odegaard's closure has been explained.  Odegaard used to be open to students 24 hours most of each week.  Since this presented a serious temptation to the homeless in the vicinity, when the University began opening it 24 hours, it also instituted a closure to the general public.  At 8 P.M., anyone without a current University ID card would be kicked out.  They got tired of the hassle of doing this, so now they're just closed to the general public entirely, this quarter at least, as an "experiment".  My main purposes in Odegaard were to look at the new book tables (Suzzallo stopped presenting new books in a special area long ago, I think before I became homeless here), and to read books Odegaard had but other University libraries didn't.  Assuming I get a library card, I'll be able to page those books from Odegaard, but probably not go back in to look at the new books.

(Odegaard is the "college library", so you might think, dear Diary, given that I've admitted to you that I'm an ogler, that ogling would be another reason I'd go there.  But that's silly.  There are undergraduates all over the UW campus, and nothing about Odegaard makes the ones there more attractive than the rest.  Also, most of its men's rooms are rather repulsive.)

Odegaard's closure reminds me of the reason I skipped two grades in grade school.  This was not because I was so very smart.  It was because I was smart, and so very disruptive, at a specific time.  I remember making up a song insulting a student teacher, in first or second grade, and I'm pretty sure I was difficult in other ways.  Anyway, an eighth-grade teacher got the bright idea that I should be in his classroom instead.  I wasted much of a semester there learning nothing, then when that teacher finally got fed up with me, spent the rest of second grade being taught in a coat room, separate from the rest of the class.  So I was pretty famous in the school by the next summer, when there was a teachers' strike.  The teachers won, were feeling their oats, and every single third and fourth grade teacher refused to admit me to their classes.  So I wound up going from second grade to the classroom of a fifth grade teacher my mother begged to take me.

Similarly, the pandemic has afforded the university libraries a chance to change their relationships with the public, and they're seizing that chance.  We'll see this again at the private schools, but Odegaard is another example.  I never went back to third or fourth grades, and I rather suspect I won't see the indoors of Odegaard Library for years, if ever.

I haven't seen any similar explanation for the closure of the Health Sciences Library to the public, but given how many of the public state- and nation-wide, if not so much in King County, are unvaccinated and refuse to wear masks, I'm pretty sure if it were explained, it would be on that basis.  In any event, Health got rid of its open-web public-access computers not long before the lockdowns (partly because I used them to copy YouTube links for a substantial set of postings to Usenet I was doing), so unless I resume my research into the human senses (unlikely while this book remains permanently checked out), I'm unlikely to have much reason to go there.

Anyway, complete closure is one pattern the University of Washington's libraries are presenting to the public.  The other one is libraries open to the public 9-5 weekdays (Suzzallo, East Asia) or 1-5 (Music, Drama).  The explanation for this is that the libraries weren't able to hire and train undergraduates to help run the libraries in the run-up to re-opening this fall, so they can't resume their normal hours yet.  I don't know how quickly they intend to do so, but have been told that hours aren't likely to increase this quarter.

The Tacoma branch's library is open rather longer hours than 9-5 already, but still not on weekends.

Private universities' libraries

Before the pandemic, most private universities' libraries in this area were open to the public, although they provided widely varying levels of Internet access.  City University of Seattle was an exception, emphatically closed to the public, and I never had a reason and a way at the same time to get to Northwest University in Kirkland, so don't know about it.  But I've spent significant time at Seattle University's Lemieux Library and Seattle Pacific University's Ames Library, and visited more than once each Pacific Lutheran University's Mortvedt Library (in Parkland) and the University of Puget Sound's Collins Memorial Library (in Tacoma).  However, in early 2019, a forerunner to today's pattern went into effect at Lemieux.

All four of those libraries - SU, SPU, PLU and UPS - are now using a considerably more severe version of the policy Lemieux instituted in January 2019.  This policy is less restrictive than the one Odegaard gave up, but it interacts with COVID-19 restrictions to make it really problematic.  Essentially, this policy is a curfew.  Entry to each library after the curfew, and all day Saturdays and Sundays, requires a university ID.  At SU, whose curfew used to be 8 P.M., it's now 6 P.M., and PLU now has the same.  At SPU and UPS, the curfew is now 5 P.M.  People who get in before the curfew can stay, but as far as I know, can't re-enter if they leave.

These curfews struck me as ironic.  When I was homeless, it wouldn't have been much trouble to meet these curfews.  But now that I'm housed and working, it's really hard.  Given what I'd observed at UW's Law library, I figured at least part of the motivation for the curfews is to keep homeless people out, but if so, the libraries were going at it backward.  On September 23 I wrote to each library's general contact e-mail address saying so.  Three people have written back:  a reference librarian at SPU, and the heads of SU's and PLU's libraries.  The SPU librarian said "I know of no determination to make any of this permanent."  The SU dean specifically noted that barring the general public on weekends was meant to free up space for SU students and faculty, and gave no hint that anything currently happening *isn't* permanent.  The PLU director didn't say much.

Given that current mask requirements bar eating and drinking, it's much less comfortable to spend hours continuously in a library than it was in the past.  So the curfews interact with COVID issues in two unpleasant ways:  People who think ahead will have to postpone eating or drinking until they're ready to leave the library altogether.  People who don't think ahead will find themselves locked away from some of their property.

Seattle University's Law Library used to charge members of the general public $5 per day to visit; that fee may have been waived for me the one time I remember going there (for a novel, of all things, if I remember correctly).  It's currently closed to the public.

Community colleges' libraries

The Seattle community colleges' libraries have long been worse documented online than the other libraries discussed in this page, although they appear now to have Web pages of their very own:

• Seattle Central College's library says it's open, apparently to the public, Mondays through Thursdays; this is sort of consistent with signs I saw on a recent visit to its Capitol Hill location (though I didn't go inside)
  
• North Seattle College's library is apparently undergoing renovation.  I'm not sure to whom and under what circumstances its temporary home is open.
• South Seattle College's library is not yet accustomed to updating its Web page, which currently announces that during fall quarter 2021 it will offer item pickup.

(I should also note that South Seattle College doesn't have the only library unaccustomed to updating its Web site.  For years, the only reliable way to get Lemieux Library's hours on certain occasions, notably snow days and at quarters' ends, was to go there, which sometimes resulted in my being questioned by Seattle University public safety officers, since Lemieux is the only SU building open to the public, and I usually visited at times when it wasn't open.  I think this had changed more recently, so hope it'll change sometime soonish at South Seattle College.)

One thing I've been doing in the months I've been ignoring you, dear Diary, is re-compiling a list of non-fiction books about Korea that I built and then lost in one of my many electronic vicissitudes while homeless.  Several local community colleges' libraries outside Seattle report to Worldcat having some of these books that aren't at the UW, so in principle, I'd have reason to care about access to Highline College, Renton Technical College, Shoreline Community College, and others, as well as Northwest University.  However, at all these schools, any time I've actually clicked the Worldcat-provided link, it's turned out they've gotten rid of the book.  So for the time being, I'll stop picking on the small fry.

My experience of being at SCC's library is of having no Internet access (except on my phone, once I had a smart phone).  Librarians there told me that state law somehow bars the community colleges from offering Wi-Fi to the general public.

All for now, dear Diary.  This is, of course, all somewhat off-topic for you, but not really.  At a minimum, what I'm reporting is restrictions on the hours some restrooms I mapped for you a while ago are open.  Anyway, happy days until I can get a map of Tacoma made, or spare time to go on a water fountain hike of North Seattle.