A Library Hours Update

Dear Diary,

Your most popular recent page wasn't about parks at all, nor at all North Seattle-specific, so it's a good preparation for the next set of pages supportive of my claim that Seattle throws away public amenities.  But anyway, it needs a little bit of updating.

When I came to Seattle in 2006, knowing which Seattle Public Library branches were open which days and which hours was an arcane art, because each branch kept its own hours.  It's becoming increasingly impossible to date events as many centuries ago as, say, 2010 with Google searches, and it didn't occur to me to, um, ask a librarian when I was in the Green Lake branch tonight, but in some year after 2006, SPL standardised into the four schedules I outlined in that previous page, making it somewhat more possible to guess whether a branch one happened to be near might be open without consulting the Web.

SPL is now promoting a survey whose technical purpose is to re-allocate funds from a library levy passed in 2019, given that the original allocation went completely haywire starting in March 2020.  But the way I heard about it, and so the way I expect others to have heard about it, is that it has to do with preferences over library hours.  So I expected that the fix was in, that the clock would turn back to the bad old days of no two libraries having the same hours, to which what we've seen so far was only preview.

But this was wrong of me.  At Green Lake they had physical copies of the survey available, and in that, the first two pages are indeed devoted to hours preferences.  But the third begins thus:

Oh, for crying out loud.  That's my second try, and it's increasingly obvious that neither my phone's camera nor Blogspot wants to make this easy for anyone to read.  The questions at the top of the third page read:

"Which of the following statements do you agree with most?"

6 A. "All branches of the Seattle PublicLibrary should be open the same hours and days of the week."

6 B. "Each branch of the Seattle Public Library should be open during hours and days of the week that best meet the needs of the surrounding neighborhood."

7 A. "All branches of the Seattle Public Library should be open at least six days a week and at least 8 hours per day (except Sunday)."

7 B. "It's OK if some branches are open for fewer days and/or hours if the Library provides self-service options to pick up holds when libraries are closed."

6/7 C. "No opinion."

Now, the biased wording of question 6 B. suggests to me that the fix really is in, that these surveys are quite likely to be used to bring back the bad old days, but question 6 itself does at least offer the possibility of fighting that.  Basically, "the needs of the surrounding neighborhood" surely has to mean "the results of this survey", so everyone who reads this should fill out the survey anyway so as to stake their own personal claim.  But if everyone with half a brain also votes for 6 A., it's possible SPL might listen.

Exotically, question 7 is rigged the opposite way.  The four-schedule system had nearly half the libraries open only seven hours per day, and about a third open only six days.  Question 7 A. therefore appears to promise an expansion of hours at nearly half the libraries, funding allowing.  Question 7 B. reads to me as obviously just as intended to lose as question 6 A., and so, in my opinion, it should:  a fancy new automated hold-pickup system (probably not even designed yet) would not compensate for fairer treatment of the branches.

In other news, there isn't really any news from the university libraries (I didn't look at the community colleges, and don't have time now), except that I did go to the website of the library of Northwest University in Kirkland, and they're open to the public their full hours, the way the university libraries more familiar to me were in the past.  Northwest University turns out to be basically Pentecostal.  All the private universities I mentioned except probably City University are more or less Christian-sectarian, so this isn't a big deal by itself.  But it means that as a Pentecostal institution in the pandemic, they have to tread a fine line between the demands the state is making of institutions, and the expectations of the religious culture that supports them.  Anyway, as the only university library in the area currently open to members of the public with full-time daytime jobs, they deserve luck treading that line.

Well, enough for now.  I voted in a park tonight, but hope not to visit any during the forecast downpour, and to finish work on your next few pages Friday and this weekend, rainy though those too will be.  Until then, dear Diary.