Abandoned Pages, part VI: Libraries

Dear Diary,

Of the pages in you that aren't about parks - even glancingly, as in "The Biblically Heroic Sweep of Cowen Park" - a solid majority are about libraries.  So why am I calling them "incomplete"?

Because libraries still exist, still post hours, and I haven't looked at those hours for years.

Why?

I'd kept library hours important to me on an index card the whole time I'd been homeless.  But when the libraries started re-opening during the pandemic, those hours wouldn't fit on one or even two cards any more.

This led me to write a popular page in October 2021.  Six months later, I knew a lot more about libraries, and started to share it. 

Also, library hours could be tracked at my desk, without much hiking.  Library hours became my bad weather go-to, the way topography, in part III of this page, and the counties, in part X upcoming, shouldn't have been.

What?

To start with, I just translated the Washington Secretary of State's Directory of Washington Libraries.  Embarrassingly, it took me a long time to notice the existence of the Ocean Shores Public Library, which at that time wasn't in that directory.

I think I did a good job in and, um, after, April 2022, explaining public libraries' card eligibility and rules as well as hours, and covering, with varying degrees of geographic completeness, other categories in the directory.

In October 2022 I finally began academic libraries, the main category thus far omitted, and updated public libraries' hours and rules.

Finally, in October 2023, I extended public library coverage to all of western Washington, and added a category of "institutional libraries" because a Skagit County librarian with whom I'd talked suggested I learn which schools still had librarians.

Why not?

Well, I never figured out how to deal with the schools, and found myself blocked.

By October 2024, I was in school myself, and not only too busy to think about you much, dear Diary, but also too pre-occupied with real accounting to want to do the pseudo-accounting that tracking library hours basically is.

What made me busy in October 2025 and will make me busy next month differ, but the soonest I could try is anyway next year.

What now?

Some of what I did was, I think, a sort of public service, and I'm open in principle to resuming it, but to the extent that I work as an accountant, the uncanny valley element of hours tracking will remain.

I tend to think of the library hours pages as among my most confident, so I was surprised, re-reading today, to find how much I allowed my sources to steer my writing, and how much I flailed around.  It would be very nice to know how to do it and just get it done.  Notably, public and academic libraries.

One of the things I was trying to do was convince librarians to improve their websites.  I thought I'd actually made a difference in a few cases, tribal libraries covered in October 2022, and community college libraries never actually covered (as best I can tell now), but of whose librarians I'd asked some questions.

We'll see.