Library Hours Six Months Later, part X: The Ocean Shores Public Library and a Foolish Mortal

Dear Diary,

How are you?

I've been having an eventful time getting and losing temporary jobs so fast that I haven't even been able to investigate the parks near them.  This has led me to work a lot on my resume, and since you're fairly prominent on that resume, I've been getting back to work on you, too.  I have basically three items on my agenda for you between now and when the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation shuts down water fountains and some restrooms for winter.

1. I want to do a water fountain hike of North Seattle.  (For the Seattle parks, that implies restrooms too; there are no parks at least in North Seattle with restrooms but not water fountains.  In Tacoma, it's the opposite, which strikes me as really weird.)  The last time I did a complete North Seattle survey was January 2021, and the last time not in winter was October 2020.  It's past due.  In particular, I think there should be no more lingering effects of the Durkan droughts of 2020 and 2021, so I want to establish what I think of as a baseline against which to measure deterioration or improvement going forward, most immediately this winter.  (I'm waiting with bated breath to see whether the city tries to lie again about restrooms open this winter, and whether the King County Regional Homelessness Authority will co-operate in such lying as the City of Seattle's homelessness office did in 2020-2021, or put forward its own lying or truthful list or map.)  This hiking has been held up while my budget has been in chaos, because I prefer to make the relevant photos with a newspaper front page in view, for purposes of providing evidence of the photo's date.  But, if only because I'm tired of getting fat by not hiking, I'm pretty sure I can now buy a few newspapers.
   
2. I want to continue last autumn's series on the parks of Seattle's downtown.  I had grandiose plans to survey also the parks near downtown, for reasons the rest of the downtown series would have made clear; I don't know whether I'll carry those out, but the main downtown series itself should be completed, and not just the artist credits I've specifically promised.  Some of that work should probably wait a while, but other parts of it are best done this month, while I have a bus pass going to waste.
   
3. I've also promised to return to library hours, specifically in October 2022, which is now, um, nine days away.  (The Seattle Public Library hasn't yet announced hours changes for autumn, but I'm guessing October may be different in that regard; that's one reason for waiting.)  Before that, I want to finish the treatment of private, non-academic libraries adumbrated in the previous library part.

Which brings us to today's topic.   The last paragraph of the previous part mentioned (and linked to) three additional lists I wanted to consult for private, non-academic libraries.  Two of these are older book versions of the Washington State Library's library database covering the state of Washington, whose current version has been my main source listing western Washington libraries in this page.

However, the third is an English Wikipedia article listing libraries in Seattle alone.  Just over half of the libaries listed are private and not academic.  Although the article claims to be based on two sources, all footnotes to the list itself refer to only one of these, and while working on the relevant libraries, I finally got curious.

American Library Directory is a catalogue of libraries in the US, Canada, and possibly other places.  Wikipedia cites it as a physical book, but like the Washington State catalogue, it's gone database.  Its subscription rates are high (the cheapest is $749), but it offers libraries' names and addresses for free.

So yesterday I worked on what I thought a pretty good list of private, non-academic libraries.  But last night on a whim I went through the American Library Directory catalogue.  I found ten private, non-academic libraries in western Washington that weren't in my other sources.  Also six governmental libraries, all federal.  Two academic ones.

The Ocean Shores Public Library

And today's topic, one public one.  My only significant source for public (and governmental) libraries was the Washington State Library database, and apparently one public library in western Washington doesn't talk to the Washington State Library.

That library is Ocean Shores Public Library, which is indeed two blocks from the ocean in a city surrounded on three sides by the ocean, in Grays Harbor County.

It already had relatively short hours in February 2020:  11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. Fridays and Saturdays, closed Sundays and Mondays.  It has followed a unique pattern, for public libraries in western Washington, in changing those hours since then:  it's increased its total hours and its weekend hours, but not changed its morning hours and decreased its evening hours.  That is, it's now open 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 4 P.M. Sundays, and closed Mondays.

(To repeat, my definitions for these hours categories are:  Morning hours are from opening to 3 P.M. Mondays through Fridays.  Evening hours are from 3 P.M. to closing Mondays through Thursdays.  And weekend hours are from 3 P.M. Friday to opening Monday.  By these standards, Ocean Shores Public Library is now at 103% of its pre-pandemic total hours, 100% of morning hours, 67% of evening hours, and 150% of weekend hours.)

The more general pattern of making up for cuts in evening hours by expanding weekend hours is common around here, but other libraries doing that have also expanded morning hours.  My interpretation of that is that librarians are probably coming in around 9 A.M. anyway, so cutting evening hours but expanding morning hours basically shortens the time the library is occupied, and is cosmetically, but not, for most patrons, actually, a fair trade.  Ocean Shores isn't playing such games.

The library's patron code of conduct (weird format which my Linux computer interprets as a picture) consists of the following sentence:  "Library staff will intervene to stop illegal, unsafe, disruptive, and inappropriate activities and behaviors."  Plus a list of "Illegal Behavior" that doesn't include any of the rules that usually trip up homeless people.  So although "inappropriate" gives the librarians lots of leeway, it doesn't look like they're specifically out to bar homeless people.

The City of Ocean Shores website doesn't seem to have anything about actual homeless people in town; search it for them, and one gets programs meant to prevent homelessness.  The January 2020 point-in-time count was in Aberdeen, 16.93 miles from the Ocean Shores Public Library according to this distance calculator, which also says the library is 100.66 miles from my house.  That 2020 count found somewhat over 100 homeless people supposedly in the county but, I think, in Aberdeen and nearby.  Casting further doubt on this number, a report in April 2018 to the Ocean Shores City Council, well documented in a North Coast News story, mentioned 44 specifically in Ocean Shores (plus an additional 110 couch-surfers and such).  The city took action in 2021 when it understood Martin v. City of Boise and some state laws as constraining it; what it did is in this 24 page PDF, while some attitudes involved are in this Aberdeen Daily World story.

When looking at other libraries' lists of reciprocal borrowing agreements in April, I found none listing the Ocean Shores Public Library, and the latter's own borrowing policy doesn't mention any.  I suspect the city's physical isolation is behind this go-it-alone approach; the contrary possibility is that it isn't really that isolated, and it's unable to afford its residents running up bills to Timberland Regional Library and maybe other systems.  The Ocean Shores library does sell cards on a quarterly or annual basis to non-residents, and TRL, it turns out, sells what it describes as "regular" cards to residents of Ocean Shores (as well as Mossyrock, Napavine, Pe Ell, and Vader, all in Lewis County).

While verifying that I wouldn't have still more egg on my face by omitting the Mossyrock Public Library, etc., I came across still a third list of Washington public libraries, maintained by the Municipal Resources Service Center whose own non-public library was covered in a previous part.  I went through the libraries it lists for the nineteen counties in western Washington that this very long page has tried to cover, and sure enough, it added another public library about which I hadn't known, the Roy City Library in Pierce County.  However, it turns out this library closed in 2018; the MRSC was also misinformed in that case.

Today I expect to get back to working on the private libraries, but at some point I'll also do what I can with the six extra federal ones.  And I hope to have other pages to write in you as well, soon, dear Diary.  Happy days and nights until then.