Pittman and Friends Podcast
Welcome to Pittman and Friends, the curiously probing, sometimes awkward, but always revealing conversations between your host, Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman - that’s me - and whatever brave and willing public servant, community leader, or elected official I can find who has something to say that you should hear.
This podcast is provided as a public service of Anne Arundel County Government, so don’t expect me to get all partisan here. This is about the age-old art of government - of, by, and for the people.
Pittman and Friends Podcast
Beyond the Library Shelves with Skip Auld
Modern libraries have transformed far beyond their traditional role as book repositories, evolving into dynamic community hubs that serve diverse needs. During his conversation with County Executive Steuart Pittman, Skip Auld, CEO of Anne Arundel County Public Libraries, shares his 50-year perspective on this evolution.
The Anne Arundel library system now offers a "library of things" - fishing poles, museum passes, and sewing machines alongside books, e-books, and audiobooks. Their 16 branches plus mobile outreach vehicles function as vital community centers where people gather, study, meet, and participate in programming that draws hundreds of thousands of attendees annually. The Discoveries Library at Westfield Annapolis Mall exemplifies this innovative approach, drawing visitors from across Maryland with its specialized programming.
During challenging times, these libraries have proven themselves essential. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, they distributed masks, test kits, and gun locks as part of broader public health initiatives. When faced with book-banning movements, the Board of Trustees boldly declared the system a "book sanctuary," affirming their commitment to intellectual freedom and diverse materials.
The future looks bright with several new branches in development. A state-of-the-art Glen Burnie Library will include a cultural resources lab and local history center. A unique partnership with the YMCA will create a new library in Millersville, while plans for a permanent Mountain Road branch are underway. These expansions reflect the county's recognition of libraries as essential community assets.
Behind these services stand approximately 470 dedicated staff members who select materials, develop programming, and ensure libraries remain responsive to community needs. Their kindergarten readiness initiatives are particularly impactful, helping prepare children for school success in partnership with public and private educational institutions.
Whether you're seeking knowledge, community connection, or practical resources, today's libraries stand ready to serve.
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Al right, welcome everybody to Pittman and Friends podcast. And I'm here today with a friend whose name is Skip Auld and he is the CEO of the Anne Arundel County Public Libraries - the whole system. Welcome.
Skip Auld:Thanks, Steuart. It's so great to be here. I appreciate you inviting me to be on this podcast. This is great.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, I'm kind of looking forward to this, because people think of libraries the way I thought of them as a kid. Books, books, books, books, book.
Skip Auld:Yeah, we still have books.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:You still have books, al right?
Skip Auld:Lots of them.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Good, good. They're more expensive now than they were, but we'll get into the budgeting too. But anyway, it's more than that, right?
Skip Auld:Oh, yeah.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Give us a sense of what the library system does and is so.
Skip Auld:I actually started in libraries 50 years ago, this month or next. I can't quite remember which. So I have seen a huge change in libraries. It was pretty much books, although in those days we had LP records. We now have. Now our books are e-books and e-audiobooks as well as print books. So we have all of that. But we have created a library of things too. So, for example, you can check out fishing poles, you can check out museum passes.
Skip Auld:And we've been working with other.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I saw the fishing poles down in Deal.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:That was pretty awesome.
Skip Auld:Yeah, yeah, actually I have a story from a customer who was trying to get a fishing pole and went on to a buy-nothing site and said I'm trying to get a fishing pole. Anybody got one and they recommended the library. So they went and got a fishing pole from the library. But a lot of the use of our libraries is in basically just people coming in for a place to be, to see other people, to meet friends, to book study rooms or to book meeting rooms, to have meetings. Programming has become a huge part of what libraries are, so we have kindergarten readiness programming that happens both in the library and outside the library. We go out into the community as well. Just many, many things. The Annapolis Library has a maker space and sewing machines are there and among other things.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So yeah, a lot of things. I didn't realize that. Yeah, yeah.
Skip Auld:Actually, this one person was trying to finish up a sewing project that her mother started and got it partway along with. This person didn't know how to sew and her mom died about 12 years ago. And then she heard that we had these sewing machines and we have training and classes and she came and was able to complete that project. So all kinds of things happen. There's millions of uses of the library every year, but every kind of use we measure it in statistics. But every use has a special story, kind of like that. It's incredible.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Wow, yeah, and I always have described them as. When I came in, I remember they had done a study in Anne Arundel County before me about whether we should have community centers and they decided not to. We have actually violated that study, and created some rec centers, Severn Center, and things like that. But what I always said was that our libraries are community centers.
Skip Auld:Yes, yes, absolutely. It is a community gathering place. There are so many things that people do in our libraries. It's kind of like senior centers in a way, or the places people go through recreation and parks. So, there's a lot of great services that are provided across the board in the county. We have great partnerships with a lot of these county agencies, which is great. But, yeah, as community centers, we are a center of community, and that's partly why it's been so good to partner with organizations like the health department and social services. Because our 16 libraries are very well located in the community. Kind of everybody in the county knows where the library is, and at least half of the people in the county have library cards and use the library regularly.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:How many branches in the county?
Skip Auld:We have 16 branch libraries and then we have outreach vehicles. Thanks to your support over the past six years. We've got, it's like, four different vehicles that go out into the community. They go to senior centers, they go to the Severn Center, they go to, you know, child care, licensed child care homes, child care all kinds of places that we go. We go to the schools, the pre-K programs, so library on wheels, yeah. So 16 libraries plus.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, I just can't overstate how much I have felt like libraries were there for us when we need them, and so, Covid as, one example. I mean, remember, you know masks, test kits.
Skip Auld:Oh yeah, oh yeah.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Well, you all stepped up and put out thousands and thousands.
Skip Auld:Yeah, we had a tremendous partnership with the Health Department. At the time it was Health Officer Nilesh Kalyanaraman, and now it's Dr. Toni Gediin, and we've continued this. We actually have vending machines now where we have Narcan, and we have a variety of kinds of machines in a couple of our libraries.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:But during COVID, we wanted to get a bunch of gun locks out too. Those simple little locks that you can put on a gun that make it so that you can't pull the trigger, and lots and lots and lots of people went to their libraries and picked those up.
Skip Auld:Yeah, I believe last I heard it was around 6,000, which is great, and we still are handing those out. The gun locks that was part of an initiative you put together on trying to first of all treat the gun violence issue as a public health issue, and part of that is the team got together and was brainstorming. They thought, well, let's get these gun locks out, that will at least help, because something like half of the deaths from guns are from suicide, and so getting the locks on there it just helps. It puts a barrier there for people. So yeah, so there's that.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So because you have all these branches in the communities and people know where they are, government turns to you and you all have been incredibly creative as well. I know workforce development people. They have staff that come into the libraries and people meet them there, right?
Skip Auld:Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Skip Auld:And recently I just met one of our interns that we got through Workforce Development, who's working at our headquarters operation, and she's great. Job searching is, of course, a constant thing for many adults, most adults. Maybe not constant for everybody, but we are constantly helping people out with exploring how to put together their resumes, exploring different opportunities, so we have all kinds of training for people that way.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Let's talk about that. We talked about the stuff in libraries, but let's talk about the people in libraries, because I know that they are a huge part of what makes it work. People go there, and they go straight to the desk, and they ask for help with something, to find something. But let's start with you. How did you get into this?
Skip Auld:Yes, yes, so it was 50 years ago. I think I mentioned that I had gone to college. I had a liberal arts background, majored in psychology, but I spent a year in the Peace Corps in Iran right out of college, came back really wasn't sure at all what I wanted to do. I had used libraries, but I didn't have any dreams of working in libraries. But a friend of mine I was living in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a friend told me that she was working at the Duke University Library so I applied for. Actually ended up applying three times because I didn't get the first couple of jobs. The third time I got a job as a clerk typist at Duke University Library and I spent a couple of years there.
Skip Auld:I was in three different jobs while I was at Duke and the third job for a whole year was really tedious and in those days you don't know the tedium of it. And I thought, okay, I'm going to just apply to library school, get a master's in library science or at least go for a semester just to escape, because that was kind of how I was approaching it. And got to UNC library school, loved it, went through the program, got a job as a reference librarian at the Charlotte Public Library, got into branch management, was in branches in Charlotte and then up in Westminster, Maryland, where I was not making enough money to feed the family.
Skip Auld:Really, at that time I had taken a pay cut.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Even as a branch manager?
Skip Auld:Oh, even as a branch manager. Well, I had taken a pay cut. I had been 11 years in Charlotte, took a pay cut to come up to Maryland where the cost of living was significantly higher. And so I started looking for administrative jobs, and I got a job as an assistant director down in the Richmond area, and then became a library director in Durham again for four years before I came here almost 15 years ago, and this has been a great place to be. We have a Board of Trustees that is fantastic. There are 18 people, including a student member, a high school student member of our board with full voting rights, which is the only one in Maryland and one of. I don't know if there are any more around the country that have the full voting rights, but we have that.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And I should note that your Board of Trustees actually has a lot of power. You are a quasi-government organization, correct, so I actually don't hire and fire you. Quasi-government organization, correct, so I actually don't hire and fire you.
Skip Auld:They do right, they do. Yeah, hopefully not fire, but yes, I do work for them and I am an at-will employee for the Board of Trustees, so collectively they are my boss. We had a social gathering on Sunday and that was great with also with the Foundation Board, which is an independent organization of about another 20 people who work to raise money to supplement what the tax dollars provide. And, by the way, the tax dollars that are provided here come primarily from the county, but also from the state. It's very good support, but those dollars can't do everything, and so the money people give to the foundation really allows us to do things that we couldn't do, just incredible wonderful things, including, for example, they gave us $125,000. It was seven or eight years ago to start the Discoveries Library project, which started as a pilot project, and then, when you came into office, we came to you with a request to make it a permanent project and we moved kind of down the hallway.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:It was a pilot, because they were building the Michael Busch Library, right?
Skip Auld:Well, yeah, we were able to do that exactly.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:You moved everything over there.
Skip Auld:Well, it wasn't just moving things over there. What we did was we had all the staff who worked at the original Annapolis Library on West Street. They needed a place to go and needed something to do, and we had been doing some work with what was then Westfield Annapolis Mall. We had done virtual reality programs and a variety of things, and at a certain point our marketing manager, Christine Feldman, said to their marketing person boy, wouldn't it be great if we had a library here? And so we started a pilot because we had staff that we needed to place throughout the library system.
Skip Auld:But we didn't just take the Annapolis staff and put them there. What we did is hired a manager for that library and, with the sort of faith and hope that we might be able to make it permanent, we then had a full interview process. It was all internal and we got people to come in and we made that especially focused on kindergarten readiness programming. They have proven through the course of the last six or eight years that they've had the highest program attendance of any of our libraries. And it is our 16th branch. But yeah, that became a permanent library. Right before the pandemic, we opened in February of 2020 in a space that was 13,000 square feet, and just now we've expanded it to 16,000 square feet with a new expansion. That has been tremendous and we're really looking forward to using that space as we go forward.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I think a lot of the stores in the mall are jealous. All these people going to the library and not into their stores. But in fact it brings people to the mall, which benefits the mall and all of their tenants. Yeah, no question about that.
Skip Auld:It's kind of symbiotic, because we're bringing people to the mall and we're bringing people from all over. Because, we check the zip codes on where people are coming from and they're certainly from all over Anne Arundel County. But they come from Eastern Shore, they come from other counties in Maryland, Baltimore City, they come from all over and the programming is tremendous. And that's not to make light of the programming at all of our other libraries because we have a very high programming attendance. I think it's at least 250,000 or so people get to the programs around the county that.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, I mean moms with kids in strollers. There's no better place because you can walk around the mall and just kill time and the baby goes to sleep or whatever. They have a play area there. I mean, I remember with little kids, before there was the Discoveries at the mall, spending a fair amount of time at the mall.
Skip Auld:And now there's actually a library with programming.
Skip Auld:And we have adult programming. We have adult programming, we have teen programming. We are a lot of times. I'm getting requests for permission to have a lock-in so that the teens can have supervised events on Friday evenings or Saturday evenings. So we'll close the library at 5 pm but then they'll be there until 11 and have some great programming for teens that way, among other things. And adults we've got film programs, we've got book clubs. I mean all among other things.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:There's a program that's gone for many years at Severna Park Library which is called the Geist Book Club, and so it's kind of an interesting one, yeah. So let's get back to the people inside the libraries who do the work. I mean, what are the opportunities if somebody wants to work at a library?
Skip Auld:So we have 470 staff at this point in time. Of those, 257 are full-time. So there's, you know, people can start work in a library at various stages of their lives. So we have people, high school students as well as adults who come in and start shelving books.
Skip Auld:I have a neighbor where I live, down in the Riverwood area of Davidsonville, and she started as a page and she worked a couple of years and then was able to get a position in circulation, that is, checking the books in and out, and it's a lot more complicated than that.
Skip Auld:There's a lot of training we do. But beyond that, people who have bachelor's degrees, they can work on the information side. So we kind of have the circulation side, and the information side, and this is I'm just focusing here on our branch libraries and our public service. But a lot of times we hire people from schools or from other library systems. So we are always hiring, so we have people get promotions from within the library system. Sometimes people will work on their bachelor's degrees while they're working for us and then they'll seek promotional opportunities. There's, of course, the whole management side of things, managing the branches or assistant management of aspects, and then in the back of house at our Truman Parkway headquarters, we have a full range of other kinds of non-library opportunities. So we have an HR department, IT finance and a variety of others. There's a whole bunch of books downstairs.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Oh, yeah, yeah, they all come through there, right, yeah, yeah.
Skip Auld:Every one of the physical books comes through there and our IT department manages getting the electronic books in as well. But yeah, we are constantly having a flow and that is seasonal too because of the way the publishing industry works. But it's pretty cool to see the downstairs area at our headquarters where all those thousands, tens of thousands of books come in each year. They get processed. So we have a cadre of part-time staff and full-time staff doing that work. We have people who are making the selections on exactly what we should have in the libraries, and also then getting them placing the orders.
Skip Auld:It's a lot of work placing the orders, getting them in, tracking the orders. We call them finishers. Actually they do the finishing work of putting on the plastic book covers, the labels, getting them cataloged. Getting them cataloged isn't that simple either, but a lot of work. We also provide a lot of training for our staff. So staff who get on board with us, at whatever level, they have a lot of opportunities to learn, to develop their careers, their knowledge, their background. So our staff are constantly being trained and there's always new stuff for people to be learning the target of.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I don't know if you call it controversy or sort of a target in some cases. I remember there was a lot of controversy when I was running for office about the story time that you were doing for county leaders and then more recently there's been the whole book banning movement I guess you could call it and then the counter movement. Tell us how you see your role in some of these social issues that when they pop up and everybody's pointing fingers and screaming and yelling at each other.
Skip Auld:Yeah, well, from my point of view, it's really very simple. We care about people and we care about all people, whether they are members of our staff or members of our community, and so we are there to, in terms of our customer focus. We're there to meet the needs of our entire community, and that means, especially in the context that we have highly creative staff members developing all kinds of programming, from escape rooms to just all kinds of stuff.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I don't even know about, so the drag queen story time.
Skip Auld:That was the big controversy and it still draws a protest when we do it. We do them every now and then. We did the Drag Queen Storytime. That was the big controversy and it still draws a protest when we do it. We do them every now and then. We did the first one in 2018.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And that and these are by the request of a group that does these, right?
Skip Auld:Well, no, really, what happened that year was that, and I had never heard of this until that year. But there was a presentation by a group at a library conference called the Public Library Association about drag queen story times, and actually, six months before that, one of our staff members at the Crofton Library asked. The branch manager said hey, I'd like to do one of these drag queen story times and we were just learning about it. Well, after that conference that happened, about six or eight staff from different libraries said hey, we really saw this really cool and interesting thing that would be very interesting and meet a lot of needs for a lot of people, and so that's how it came about. It came about from our staff saying let's do this and we always try different things. So I think it was May of 2018, we started publicizing a program that was going to happen in July. It ended up happening at the Glen Burnie Library that year, and it turned out great. We had like 100 people. So it's really a program where parents or caregivers and their kids come in.
Skip Auld:There is a drag queen who just tells stories, and a lot of times the stories are about being accepting, being understanding, learning about people who are different from you. It's that type of stories that are told. That was where we first had that type of a controversy and it did kind of polarize the community. We had some people in the community who just thought this was terrible that we were even offering this and others who were really happy that we were offering it. So it did kind of polarize our community a little bit.
Skip Auld:Bringing it forward to the last two to four years, we've seen terrible efforts to ban books, to keep them out of libraries, to keep them out of school libraries, public libraries of libraries, to keep them out of school libraries, public libraries. It goes along with the idea of eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion ideas. It goes along with eliminating what's known as CRT or critical race theory. These became highly political issues. They charged the presidential campaign of the last one and even over in Virginia there was which is sort of contrary to the whole idea of libraries, right. I mean, you're supposed to have lots and lots of different ideas that people can read about in your library. Right, right.
Skip Auld:And if people don't like it, don't check it out. If you don't like this program, don't go to the program. But our whole effort is to try to make the entire world of knowledge and learning and imagination open and available to everybody. So when you have attacks on that, it's kind of attacking the heart and soul of what we have always been about, and we really are here for everybody. And we try to have things across the board, across the political spectrum, and just if we don't have it, ask us, we'll try to get it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, your staff felt very strongly about this because they were trained to understand what the public needs were, to understand what's out there, and to make wise decisions about what to have on the shelves. And to have that politicized was a real affront. It was an affront. That's the way I saw it.
Skip Auld:Yeah. Well, that led us last September to create a book sanctuary. Our Board of Trustees voted that. That would be really important for us to take a strong stand and assure people that we will always be here, we will have materials. We will not be taking materials out because of any sort of political reason or anything like that. We'll be putting materials in the libraries because of the positive selection criteria that we use to create our library. So we are a book sanctuary.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Okay, good. Good. So folks can read about the history of the people that they're from, the countries that they're from the history of any group within this country or the world.
Skip Auld:Yes, yes.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:It's not going to be banned in Anne Arundel County. Amen. I signed on.
Skip Auld:Amen, I'm supportive. Double amen.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So we got some new branches and new ideas and new things. I mean, the new branches have been. Just so great.
Skip Auld:It's incredible.
Skip Auld:Yeah.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And Michael Busch opened in Annapolis. Yes, just expanded the idea of what a library is. Yeah, tell us about some of the others.
Skip Auld:Okay, so that was fantastic to get that. We actually got the original funding from that, from Laura Newman and then under the Steve Schuh administration that money was split so that allowed us to open the Revere Beach and Annapolis libraries. Now, under your administration, we've gotten funding for the Glen Burnie Library. We're well underway to designing that. That will be the size of the Busch Annapolis Library, but it also will have a cultural resources lab and local history center, which will basically make it the size of the Odenton Library, which is about 40,000 square feet.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And the current Glen Burnie Library was not in great shape, right?
Skip Auld:Oh, it's kind of like the old Annapolis Library. They were both built in the 1960s. Not built for what modern libraries provide. So, yeah, the Glen Burnie Library is doing great things, but they are so anxious to get that new library open, and it'll open, I think, in 2028. That'll be tremendous. We've got that. We have a new library in Millersville, which is in the works with the Y of Central Maryland. That's something that you put into the budget this year. It's a very unique way of getting a library built, but it'll be part of a Y.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, the YMCA came to us and said they wanted support for their effort to build in Millersville and they had some major donors, and it seemed like a good thing to have a YMCA, and all the things that they offer there and the area that they would serve. But we had been looking for a location, and they had additional land and the idea of doing our building and we pay for our building. But it's connected and there are some real benefits to it. Financially for us it's turning out to be less than it would cost elsewhere and we get to call it the Yberry.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Well, no, we don't you don't like that, we're not calling it the Yberry.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Chris Trum, our budget officer, came up with that. He was so proud of it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:He said but Skip doesn't like calling it the Y-Berry.
Skip Auld:No, we'll call it the. We'll have a name for it. It'll be called the Great Y and Library somehow. But the other thing is, we have funding in there to look for a library in Mountain Road. So we have been looking at that for the last couple of years.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So we're hoping to get that. Right. That's been a little storefront, right.
Skip Auld:It was in a storefront. We had a terrible situation and we moved to a different one. That has been very successful, but we want to get a permanent new library there.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So growing, improving. You mentioned the kindergarten readiness. I will just say how thrilled I am that you've grown that work and getting out there, because we all know that the success of kids depends in large part how they do in the very beginning and what y'all are doing to get people ready for kindergarten. Because, statistics show that the vast majority of kids going into kindergarten are not what the state considers kindergarten ready. Right.
Skip Auld:Absolutely, and you have helped us get about an additional dozen staff members, three new vehicles. I mentioned the outreach and that is all happening and we very much work closely with the schools private and public schools and, yeah, we're trying to help them be ready on that first day of school.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So for everybody out there that uses libraries, which is practically everybody, how many library cards do we have out there on the streets?
Skip Auld:It's in the range of a quarter of a million library cards. So we serve 600,000 people and we've got 200,000 to 300,000 people with cards. Well, actually that's the number that have used their card in the last year. We've probably got almost everybody in the county. If you are listening to this and you don't have a library card, today is your day. You need to just go get it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:If you are listening to this and you don't have a library card. Today is your day. You need to just go get it. You just go into a library and say I want a card, and they just produce it for you, right?
Skip Auld:Yeah, actually, if you live anywhere in Maryland, you can get an Anne Arundel library card.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Awesome.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Well, thank you for everything that you do. Please thank all of your team for everything that they do.
Skip Auld:We have a great staff and I will share that with them. Thank you. You're listening to the Pittman and Friends podcast. If you like what you hear, please hit the subscribe button, share with a friend and join us for the next episode.
