[LINK] "Unemployed Americans turn to libraries for help"

[rfmcdonald]

As a former library worker and continued fan, Alice van Duyn's article makes me happy.

Located next to a 99-cent store and opposite a pawn broker, the sleek, glass-fronted Bronx Library Center is an oasis in one of America’s poorest inner-city districts, clad inside with stylish pale wood and dark leather furniture.

The library’s employment centre has seen attendance surge as people [. . .] seek better-paying positions, as overtime and other perks are lost. A growing number of US libraries have developed similar specialist services aimed at helping people find jobs. In the past, many of these functions were performed by librarians, but increasingly they are the work of career development and education specialists as expertise is needed to navigate the mass of information available on the internet.

Janice Moore-Smith, who runs the employment division on the fifth floor, would normally see seven “patrons” – as the users of the library are called – every day a year ago. Now she sees 10 or 12 people each shift.

“There are a lot more people now due to the economic downturn,” says Ms Moore-Smith.

New York city’s comptroller said last month that unemployment in the city would soon hit 9.5 per cent – with the largest number out of work for more than 15 years. For black New Yorkers, a large part of the Bronx’s population, the figures are much higher. The jobless rate for all blacks in the city rose to 14.7 per cent in the first quarter, according to analysis by the city’s comptroller, up from 5.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2008. During the same period, the unemployment rate for white New Yorkers rose to 3.7 per cent from 3 per cent.

Finding a new job is more closely tied to having internet access than ever before. Internet usage statistics illustrate just how different the landscape is now compared with the last time unemployment increased, after the collapse of the dotcom bubble. In 2000, according to the Pew Center, a research group, 46 per cent of American adults used the internet and 5 per cent had high-speed access at home. Last year, 74 per cent of adults used the internet, with nearly 60 per cent having broadband connections in their home.

The collapse in classified advertising in newspapers, as free sites such as Craigslist take over, has led to a financial crisis for many papers, especially local and regional ones, with some of the best-known titles in the US closing down.

I'm less pleased by the certainty that, in the United States as elsewhere, libraries are liable to be closed down given financial pressures. Libraries are supposed to open up the information world to people; closing them down, or limiting their services, do us all a great disservice.