Who Chooses the books? An interview with RPL Librarian Sarah Stumpf

Ever wonder how Rockford Public Library decides which books make it to the shelves — and how that affects you as a reader? In this episode, I talk with Adult Collections librarian Sarah Stumpf about the behind-the-scenes process of building the collection, from community requests to hidden gems. Along the way, you’ll pick up library lingo like ‘circ,’ ‘weeding,’ and discover how Sarah’s passion ensures the Rockford community is reflected, celebrated, and cared for through every book on the shelf.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

So I sort of tend to surf the seasonal trends, the publishing industry trends, community trends, sometimes things that would surprise people. My biggest thing I've learned in this job, Rockford, you don't care about hockey. You don't. You don't want a nonfiction about hockey. You don't want a biography of a hockey player. You don't want a hockey romance. You people don't care about hockey. And you would think that they would because we have a minor release hockey. Every time I was like, ah, let's get some hockey. It's like two years later. No circs, one cirque, two circs.

SPEAKER_05 0:48

Welcome to the Rockford Public Library Podcast. I'm Laura Griffin, your host, and I often talk about how RPL is more than books. From our databases, event spaces, and that cool slide on the first floor of the main library. However, today we're going to talk about books, the actual physical items that you flip through with your hands. We have librarian Sarah Stumpf, Adult Collections Manager. That's a mouthful. That's technically not my title. But I'll go with it.

SPEAKER_04 1:20

I I would love to be a manager of something. Please be me a manager wage.

SPEAKER_05 1:25

And she is going to take us into the process of how a book takes space on our library shelves. So whether you're a weekly visitor who knows exactly where the new arrivals are, or you haven't stepped inside the library since you were in grade school, this episode is for you. So let's get started. Welcome, Sarah. Thanks, Lara. Thanks for having me on. So, Sarah, what first drew you to become a librarian? And how did you end up in Rockford as a librarian?

SPEAKER_04 1:56

What first drew me to being a librarian was I was in college and I had originally gone for a history degree and I really was intending to work in museums. That was the dream when I was, you know, in high school and early college. And I had just enough experience with museums to realize I don't actually want to do this. I love history in the sense that I love stories. I love learning, but I don't actually love putting dusty items in cases with little tiny plaques. Um and I worked, uh, I grew up in the Green Bay area. I worked at a living history museum called Heritage Hill up there, which means full historical reenactings, you know. I I sewed an entire 1836 dress with mutton chop sleeves one summer on a porch while, you know, explaining to people about how people made scones and did um grotesque surgeries in a hospital ward in the 1830s on the frontier of Green Bay. I loved that. But you can't make a living doing that. The number of living history museums in America is very small, and almost none of them are year-round except for Colonial Williamsburg. And that's, you know, a function of whether you just even Heritage Hill only does the reenactors from May through August, from, you know, just before they start in May, and then they would go through, you know, memorial Memorial Day and Labor Day. So I knew I wanted to do something different, and I had no idea what that was, but I was like, well, we're gonna finish this undergrad degree and maybe I'll figure it out. And I had a roommate at the time, and he said, you know, I've been thinking about going to library school, and I was like, it was like that screeching, like stop noise, like in a current library school is a thing you can go to. I can go to libraries. What where is this library school? How do I go to the library school? Um, I was a kid that read a lot. Uh I loved books. I love like I said, I love stories. I realized that later in college. I didn't so much love history. I don't love artifacts or memorizing dates of battles or warships or any of that. I loved the story of it.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Right.

SPEAKER_04 4:00

And so I was like, well, once I figured out you could go to library school, I was like, well, that's where I'm going. I'm gonna go to library school. Um, so I got my um undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin and Madison, um, a history and women's studies degree with a minor in LGBT studies. I then went to Bloomington, Indiana, um, because that was it was late in the year and I had to make choices, and this was the program that would take me. Um so I m site unseen, packed up and moved to a town in Indiana I'd never been to, okay. Um, and got my master's degree in library science um in 2007 in Bloomington, Indiana. And then I was looking for jobs in the Midwest. I knew I didn't want to be in a really small town. Honestly, I was looking for the human rights protections that Illinois had at the time, and I believed they were more likely to have than Indiana or Wisconsin. So I was just looking for anywhere in Illinois. I ended up at a library district, uh, the White Oak Library District that serves Crest Hill, Lockport, and Romeoville. And those people were great, and that library was great, but I I wanted to be closer to my family in Wisconsin, but like not so close. They could show up without calling first.

SPEAKER_05 5:14

Um I think that's what everybody wants.

SPEAKER_04 5:17

Yeah, I was I was honestly, I was a little bored. I had done turn teen services for what ended up being six and a half years, and I loved the teens. But it was like I'd done everything I could do with that job. Um, there was nowhere to move up to, you know, Romeoville is not an exciting place to live. And so I started looking in northern suburbs, and you know, that led me to look in Rockford when I saw this job was posted. And I, again, knew nothing about Rockford, sight unseen, interviewed for and accepted a job in a town I'd never set a foot in. Um, because I was looking at Rockford and I like cities. And Rockford seems to be, you know, the best of both worlds in that sense. It's a city, so you get the city things, you get arts and culture and good restaurants and you know, touring music acts, you know, one of the a roller derby team. I got involved in roller derby because I was like, this is so awesome. You guys have a roller derby team. There's cool events and things every weekend here, but it's not like so big a city that there's a ton of traffic, and I don't know, the crime thing. People would talk about the crime, like, oh God, you're gonna move to Rockford and it's full of crime. And I was like, it's really okay. I've never experienced it. Well, and I I I'm a librarian, so I did a deep research drive and I looked at maps where they would put little dots for where all the crime was and what kind of crime it was. And I don't want to minimize this in any way, but the biggest crime in Rockford is domestic violence. And I was like, okay, as long as I'm like not, you know, in a relationship that becomes violent, like like I'm not at risk for walking down the street and getting DV'd, you know? Right. This is not expensive.

SPEAKER_05 6:58

That is so interesting.

SPEAKER_04 6:59

So and the other thing that was really hot in 2017 when I was moving here was stealing things out of cars. What I learned was lock your car doors, people. Um then people will stop stealing your stuff out of your car. Those were the two commonest crimes. And there were air definitely hot spot areas in Rockford where things were worse. Um, but I was like, well, as long as I avoid those areas, it's a city, people, you're gonna get crime, you know. Um I don't know what else to say about it. So I just moved to your site unseen, and I've been here nine and a half years. It'll be 10 years in January. Um, that I moved here for a collection job buying books for the Rockford Public Library. I started buying children's NYA books, and then about two and a half years ago, I moved to adult um and AV more than the kids stuff.

SPEAKER_05 7:44

So what does that mean like when you as far as your role here when you buy books? So yeah, what does that look like?

SPEAKER_04 7:54

And what that looks like is I get a budget, um, thank you, taxpayer dollars. Uh I enjoy my job is spending other people's money. And so I take that really seriously, which is that my job is to buy books, movies, um, CDs, things like that that the whole community is going to enjoy or that are going to serve the parts of the community that need that service. And so I start, you know, the beginning of the year with a budget and I carve it up into pieces, and then we have vendors that work with libraries. Like people sometimes think, oh, do you just buy books off of Amazon? And the answer is no. Um, I buy books that come from companies that work with libraries that make sure you get those nice plasticky covers and the stickers and the, you know, everything is put together and all of that it comes in the box. Like I open the box, that stuff's all done. I'm not the one putting stickers on books usually, um, unless there's like a mistake I need to fix or, you know, something gets damaged. Um, I'm opening up the box and taking out something that within about 20 minutes I can have on the shelf that you can come and check it out. So if you're on the hold list for a James Patterson, literally we are just waiting for the box to come. As soon as we open it, you'll have it that afternoon. Um but I look at these sites and we look at lists of what is selling really well, bestsellers, what has reviews from book publications, library journal, um, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, our magazines that provide reviews of books. I don't read everything that we have in this library. I I think most people would know that, but sometimes people do ask me, like, have you read all these books? And I'm like, How much time do you think I have? Um also I don't get paid to read at this job. I if anyone knows a job, by the way, where you get paid to sit and read for 40 hours a week, please I would be willing to jump ship from RPL for this mythical I do nothing but read job.

unknown 9:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:51

But though that's not a job. That's not a thing that exists. What exists is me reading book reviews and me learning about our community and some of that statistical, knowing what is our percentage of certain ethnic groups or languages, or you know, what is our poverty, you know, income-based, you know, and each branch and location serves different people. The mobile library serves a lot of nursing homes and senior living communities. They need more large print than the Montague branch does. Um, so getting to know the community and getting to know what we need, and then reading a review of a random book and being like, does this, do I think this is gonna hit? Sometimes you just know it's gonna hit. Like, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about James Patterson books, Danielle Steele books, uh Louise Penny, Clive Cussler, Ken Follett. Like I could just name them all. Like they put out a book, it could be the worst book James Patterson ever wrote, and we're still gonna buy like eight or nine copies of it because the demand is there, the interest is there. I know people will want it. But then you get these things where it's not by famous authors, it's not a popular series, it's not something, you know, maybe it's their first book and no one's ever heard of this person before. And I have to ask myself, do I think this would go here? Do you I think this is gonna hit here? I don't have, you know, all my jokes about spending other people's money aside. I don't have a never-ending pot of money. I only have so much money.

SPEAKER_05 11:19

So, like, what are the genres that you're in charge of and how does that how does that split up your budget?

SPEAKER_04 11:29

Um So the short answer is if it's for adults, it's mine. Like I the joke I usually say is, you know, it's like the Lion King, like you stand, everything the light touches is my kingdom, is the adult book collection, is the adult movie collection, CDs, audiobooks, uh fiction, nonfiction, everything the light touches is my kingdom. What is that shadowy place over there? That is the children's department, and we do not go there. Um I'm not in charge of that. I was in a pre in my previous position, so I can speak about it a little, but it's not something I currently work on. Um I look at what genres are popular. So, for example, here, urban fiction is incredibly popular here.

SPEAKER_05 12:08

What is urban fiction?

SPEAKER_04 12:09

Urban fiction is usually black and or Latino characters. I mean, it's not doesn't always have to be, but like 95% of it is. And they are usually dealing with issues that come with things like street life, poverty. This is where you're gonna find your like drugs, prostitution, sexy times. Like it's very popular here. I can tell you when I worked in Lockport, a town that had like, I think less than 3%, you know, of black of a black population, urban fiction was not a thing we carried much of. Like we carried a handful of them. We didn't separate them out, they were not special. But here I have got a whole section of urban fiction. And people want those books. People love those books. Um, thrillers are very popular nationwide. We're right in stat with every other library and every other bookstore, which is that of as far as adult fiction, thrillers are the most popular. That's going to be your James Patterson. Um, that's gonna be a lot, things like Iris Johansson's, Lisa Scotolin. The way I describe a thriller, in a mystery, someone gets shot, and you stand over the body and you go, hmm, someone's been shot. We should figure out who shot them. And in a thriller, someone's been shot, and they're shooting at you, and you're running away from being shot, and you're like, we need to figure out who's trying to shoot us. Um they're just it it tends to be fast-paced. Um, it tends to have either violence or the threat of violence at its core. Um, thrillers are very popular for us. But I can't just stack a library on nothing but urban fiction and thrillers. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's some people out there who would just love that, but what about the people who like historical fiction? What about the people who want a gentle Amish romance? Right. What about the people who want a queer anarchist sci-fi? Those people, I'm I'm looking to represent them too. And while certain things might be weighted more, like I might spend more on urban than another library, more on thriller than I would on sci-fi, it doesn't mean that you just cut at it and say, like, oh, only the most popular thing is thriller, we don't buy anything else. You know. So a lot of it is a balancing act.

SPEAKER_05 14:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 14:25

In nonfiction, food and cookbooks, so popular. Oh my God, people love cookbooks.

SPEAKER_05 14:30

I I can attest, I have like five checked out right now.

SPEAKER_04 14:33

I people love cookbooks. Uh, in the spring, people love the gardening books. Same. In general, people all year round will read history, but it's not like I'm gonna say, oh, I'm gonna stop buying knitting books because they're not as popular as cookbooks, or I'm gonna stop buying um true crime because it's not as popular as the the performing arts biography, you know, the singer, songwriter, actor, actress biographies.

SPEAKER_05 15:02

So is there like a seasonality to it? Like I would think knitting like during the winter would be like high.

SPEAKER_04 15:10

There's just there's this lovely rhythm that once you've been in it long enough, you sort of you just surf it like the tide is that um it starts in the fall, uh, October with your spooky stuff, late mids mid to late September. Everybody wants carbs, soup, uh, a ghost story, a cozy mystery, something where, like, you know, people are in front of a roaring fire, uh, those things that are you know very indoor. And then it moves into the holidays, and then people want their holiday cooking and entertaining, and it doesn't even have to be crit. Sometimes people say like the Christmas books. Yes, a lot of them will say Christmas cookies. It doesn't even have to say, it can be like holiday parties, and that could be anything from Thanksgiving to Kwanzaa to Hanukkah to Christmas. You do you want to have some people over to have some alcohol and sugar in the months of you know, November and December? That's what you want. You want all that holiday cooking and baking stuff. Um, once you get into the winter winter, that's when you tend to get more into the crafty stuff. People want to take up knitting and crochet in January and February. They have lovely, they have lovely high hopes that they're gonna knit something for their person's Valentine's Day. Boy, you better be starting in January because if you're in my library looking for a knitting book because you want to knit something for your partner like a week before Valentine's Day, it's like no, the only thing left is very complicated knitting, like giant sweaters. You're not gonna finish that in a week. Um, and then you get into the spring and then you get into the gardening, the outside. Anything about native plants. I mean, I could buy, I could buy nothing for the home and garden section except native plants, and those would go like gangbusters.

SPEAKER_05 16:51

Aaron Powell Is that like a recent trend or has it always been like with the native plants?

SPEAKER_04 16:56

Aaron Powell I would say the last five years, um, both the interest, but then also the publishing industry. I mean, we had some old books about native plants from like the 90s and 2000s that I was hanging on to for years because they didn't used to make them very often. You'd get like one book about the Midwest native plants every five years. Now I'm probably getting like five a month. Oh, that's so it's like I'm also surfing publishing industry trends. Um romanticy, very big in the publishing industry. Yeah, sprayed edges. Uh if you know, you know. I know. If you if you've seen that book and you're like, the edges are so pretty. Um we're always surfing trends of what the publishing industry is serving up. Uh let's see, spring goes into summer, and then people get interested in road trips outside, more of the like sporty kinds of things until we get kind of into fall again and back to school, and then we're back to ghost stories and soup.

SPEAKER_01 17:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 17:56

And then there are things that are just popular year-round. History never becomes unpopular, memoirs and biographies never become unpopular. People read true crime 365 days a year. Someone's looking for a GED book 365 days a year. Um, people care about poetry a ton in the spring because it's National Poetry Month in April. But they will still read poetry year round. I mean, they will do a lot more business in poetry in April, but it's not like people stop. I mean, the Christmas cookie books do not check out any the native plant books do not, you know, the gardening books don't check out in November. They just don't.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:30

Versus people will want things year-round, even if they want it more other times of the year. Um so I sort of tend to surf the seasonal trends, the publishing industry trends, community trends, sometimes things that would surprise people. My biggest thing I've learned in this job, Rockford, you don't care about hockey. You don't. You don't want a nonfiction about hockey, you don't want a biography of a hockey player, you don't want a hockey romance. You people don't care about hockey. And you think that they would because we have a minor leak hockey. Every time I was like, ah, let's get some hockey. It's like two years later, no circs, one circ, two cirques. You know, it's like, hmm. I guess.

SPEAKER_05 19:16

So does that play into it? Like, are you thinking, well, let's talk, what's a circulation? What does Circ?

SPEAKER_04 19:21

So that means somebody checked it out. So you get one circ for checking it out, you get a second one if you renew it.

SPEAKER_05 19:26

And so that's part of your thought process. Is someone gonna check it out?

SPEAKER_04 19:30

Is someone gonna check this out? Look, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that I think is cool, but I can't imagine somebody would want. Um also sometimes people ask for weird stuff, and I'm like, but you're the only one who would want that. Um if you want to know about the economics of Azerbaijan, I'm sorry, but I think you're the only person who will check out that book. If you would like to know about forestry habits in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, I think you're the only person that's gonna check out that book. Um if you'd like an urban fiction where, like, you know, some gangs and you know, pimps are gonna get some money on the streets, I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, no, 50 people are gonna check out that book.

SPEAKER_05 20:11

So when you think about like when you see a book, like when you're reading a review and you're like, I think someone in like there will be a few people in Rockford, or like how many numbers, but then like what is the process of getting that book once you see, like, I think I want this is this will work for the library.

SPEAKER_04 20:30

So when we order things, you know, we set them up the way I do the orders. So so like I said, they came out, they come out of the box ready. So I have to give them information about how we want it processed and everything. Um so I put I place those orders, and it's it's like order than anything on the internet. It's like I fill up a cart and then I hit, you know, order and then they send an invoice to the library, so we pay our invoices. So it's not like I'm personally handing somebody cash um or a check or anything. The finance people handle that. Thank you, finance people. I don't want to do that part of this job. Um, but yeah, I put in an order, and it depends how long how long it'll take really depends because we try to order things in advance in an ideal world. I'm ordering your like Danielle Steeles and James Patterson, your big names, three to five months in advance. Sometimes it's more like three, sometimes more like five. It tends to depend on how much money I've got around. And also they used to do more of a lead time. You used to find out six months or a year in advance that a book was going to come out. Now sometimes they only tell you two or three months, oh, there's a new whatever coming out, and you'll be like, oh crap, I had no idea. Um so they their things move on a quicker timeline than they used to. But I put that order in, and then a little tiny stub of a record goes into our library catalog, and that's what you guys see. When you guys are looking at our, you know, our app on our website, you've come in, um, you're browsing, and you find that little thing that says like Oh, you know, new Louise Penny, whatever its its title is, and you know it doesn't come out until November, but there's a little thing there, and you can hit placehold. That's so that you can start making a hold list before the thing even shows up. Placeholds, people, it's the easiest way to get your new items faster. I'm just a I'm just a walking PSA for libraries. Um but uh yeah, so we let that hold list sort of grow until the thing comes, and then we take it out of the box and we make sure that it's received properly so those invoices can get paid. And then we, you know, basically check it into the collection and it goes where it goes. And maybe it has a ton of holds on it, so it's they start flying out for people's holds, or maybe it has no holds, and plenty of things have no holds. That doesn't mean that nobody's gonna like it, it just means nobody was looking for that exact thing. And I always want people to be able to come in and browse and have these sort of joy of discovery moments. I want you to come in and look, whether you're looking at like just the new shelf or a display on a topic, or you're just looking, walking down the regular shelves. I want you to find something that will be like, oh, this is so neat. Oh, I didn't know they had this, I didn't know they made books about this. Um, this is why I buy a lot of video game and movie tie-in cookbooks, because the delight on people's face when they're like, there's a Beetlejuice cookbook, there's a God of War cookbook, um, there's a insert TV show Minecraft movie, you know, whatever cookbook. People love just finding something and discovering that. And I can buy a book that has no holds before and know that it's gonna do really well for us. It's gonna be on the shelves for years and years, and people will keep finding it with that delight. And that's a solid. I don't need everything to have James Patterson numbers. That's not what I'm expecting. Okay. I'm expecting that people will walk in and they'll see just the variety, the breadth, the depth, the thing, the title that makes them go, what? Um one of my favorite titles is Board Gay Werewolf. I want you to walk past the shelf and be like, doesn't that say bored gay werewolf? Um, you know, does that say Wisconsin death trip?

SPEAKER_01 24:18

What the heck is that?

SPEAKER_04 24:19

I want you to have those moments where you are legitimately surprised and intrigued by the things that we have. Um, but it does all start with a basis of I think somebody would like to be intrigued and surprised by this, not like you're gonna be intrigued and surprised by the economics of Azerbaijan. I don't think most people find that delightful.

SPEAKER_05 24:39

I have to say I do love walking past like the new new books and just seeing like shiny. Yeah, it's so it's like no one's opened it yet. And so I get really excited. And so that's like one of my favorite things to do here.

SPEAKER_04 24:55

One of one of my favorite things is when they first come out of the box, the plasticky covers have a certain shine. And once they've gone out once or twice, you know, once they've been in people's houses and you know, just fingerprints, the you know, average scratches, you know. I'm not even talking about that you've spilled some on, I'm just talking about like you put it in and out of a bag, that shininess will go away. But there's just this moment where which comes out of the box and you're like, it's so shiny. I love the opening it and it has that little creak. It has that little creak. Yeah. Um sometimes people talk about the book smell. Yeah. And there definitely is a smell when they're new. And like if you open it and you creak it open, and you just like could huff it. Um because it does. It smells, it smells like the paper and the like printer. And you know, once we've had these a while, they'll start smelling like God only knows, you know, what you had a dog, and so now it's holding a little bit of dog, and this other guy was a smoker. And now, you know.

SPEAKER_05 25:53

There might be a little piece of sand in there.

SPEAKER_04 25:57

Be very careful when you bring books to the sand to the beach people, because they come back to us and they're full of sand. I hate sand. Um if you bring a hardcover to the beach, the sand gets under the plastic. Please only bring paperbacks to the beach. They cannot get permanently sand.

SPEAKER_05 26:15

And there's your other PSA.

SPEAKER_04 26:16

That's my other PSA. Uh Placeholds, enjoy the shinies, and stop bringing my hardcovers to the beach. Also, uh you know what the most common type of book to get damaged is? This is just a fun fact.

SPEAKER_05 26:31

Yeah, tell me.

SPEAKER_04 26:32

Dog training books.

unknown 26:33

What?

SPEAKER_04 26:34

We get a dog training book in probably once a month that is chewed up by a dog. Bless your hearts. You're trying so hard with that dog. Um you still gotta pay me for that book, but you you still gotta pay for that. But like nobody's mad. We understand this happens all the time. My dog chewed a book once. It wasn't a dog training book, it was a you know, gay comic, but I was like, why are you eating this? Why didn't you do this? Um we understand deeply, profoundly, but yeah, that's the most common piece of damage we get is dog training books getting chewed up.

SPEAKER_05 27:04

So, with our listeners, what if they there's a book that they're dying to have here at the library? How do they make a request to you?

SPEAKER_04 27:14

So there's a couple of different avenues for that. I mean, you can always, if you're in, you can talk to any staff member and they will take down your information and they send it to me. Um, and I'm constantly reviewing requests that other staffers send me. You know, just pay this patron wants this, that, or the other thing. Sometimes it's a topic um and sometimes it's a specific book. And then if I buy it, I will put it on hold for you so that you are the first person on the hold list to get it. Nice. But if you don't want to talk to a human, you can also do it through our online catalog. It has this request option. It'll take you through um to set put in a request and then it'll s we'll look at it and decide is this something we should buy, or can we enter a library loan list from another like library for you? Sometimes people just want things. There is nothing wrong with wanting a book about the economics of Azerbaijan. I'm not gonna buy it for you, but I will like bend over backwards to see if NIU or somebody can send you something. We will get you a book about the economics of Azerbaijan. There's nothing wrong with wanting to read that. It's just just because sometimes people want things that I'm like, no one but you is gonna want that. Or sometimes people want things that are really old, and I'm like, this is out of print, and I can't get this for you. It'll be hundreds of dollars. It'll be hundreds of dollars, and the only copy I can find is from 1974, and it's already gonna be crunchy and like you know, stained and you know, sunbleached and look crappy, and we don't want to buy that. Um so between ILL and you know, sending the request to me, we'll figure out how to get it to you. You can also email it. Um, there's an info at rockfordpubliclibrary.org email address. And when people put in things like, I'm really interested in this book, whatever, you know, they'll those emails will get forwarded to me, and I go through those as well. And we buy a fair amount of requests because most people are requesting things that other people would enjoy, or that, you know, you look at it and you say, This is brand new. I don't, you know, it's worth, yeah, sure, why not? Um there'll always be things that I don't get, either because of economics or because, quite frankly, I am only one human and I can only read so many book reviews, people. There just is only so many hours in a day. And so I will miss things. So tell me what you want, and I'm happy to get it for you if it's a gettable, you know, thing.

SPEAKER_05 29:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 29:39

If it's an easy get, I I be happy. Get the book, you know? Yep.

SPEAKER_05 29:45

So you've been here at the library when it used to be the Carnegie Library, right?

SPEAKER_04 29:51

When it was old Maine. When it was old Maine. I don't know if we're supposed to call it Old Maine, but that's what I that's what I always call it. Um I I moved here and took a look at this library and I was like, what is this? I mean, bless y'all's hearts who grew up and had these beautiful memories of the old Maine library. I understand like sentimentality in your library and your community, and you were a kid and you came to storytime here. But from an outsider looking in, I was like, oh my God, the 60s renovation and then the 80s renovation. And I was like, that had the really skinny windows that someone once told me they called them the prison windows, because when you were coming over the Jefferson Street Bridge, those windows were so small it looked made the building look like a jail. Oh my goodness. Um, there was no natural light anywhere. It was only darkness. Tall, tall shelves and darkness.

SPEAKER_05 30:40

Yeah, and so now you've got this new building, and you were a part of helping bringing books, moving books from heart to hear. Yep. And so I've also heard things people say that where'd all the books go?

SPEAKER_04 30:55

So can you speak to them? I I will tell you where all the books go went. Um, first of all, we don't have significantly less books than we had at Old Maine or at the Heart Building. What we do have is a different configuration of shelves. So at Old Main, they had these ancient bookshelves that had eight shelves. They were eight shelves high. Well, you didn't use the top two because nobody could reach them. And you didn't use the bottom one because people don't like to bend over that far. It was like really flush to the ground. It was really low. So we were only using five shelves anyway. And then when we moved here, we got bookcases. Instead of being eight and only using five of them, we just got four high bookcases. That's it, people. It's an optical illusion. Um, 90% of it is an optical illusion. Like you're expecting, I don't know, beauty and the beast with the tall books that you need to swing like bell on a ladder to get to. Um we don't have that. We don't have tall shelves anymore. That's really the answer is the shelves got shorter and we took up less or we took up more floor space. Uh the one thing where I will say we do have less of is when I started this, when I started the children's job, and this was in 2016, we had 250 some children's reference books. When I took over this job in adults, and this would have been in 22, we had 750 reference books. I believe we now have a reference book. The things you can't check out. Okay. The things that, you know, the the idea of reference books, it's it's very dated. You know, back before the internet, if you wanted to know what was the top number one single on September 13th, 1956, you needed a book that listed all the songs and where their billboard, you know, chart ratings or something. You wanted to know a fact about the Civil War. You needed to make sure there was a Civil War encyclopedia so you could look at that. Because what if all your books about the Civil War were checked out and you couldn't remember what date the Battle of Appomattox happened at? Um, there were so many books that they needed in a time before the internet. Now, if you have a quick question, if you're like, when was the battle of appomatics? You're gonna Google that and you're gonna have an answer in 30 seconds. You're not writing a dissertation on the battle of appomatics. You're being like, that was a civil war, right? Was that like 1860, 1865? Like, when was you have a quick thought, you have a quick question, you answer it, you move on with the the little, you know, the rectangle that lives in your pocket. But back in the day that wasn't an option. And so we had all these books, and they were full of these kind of like fast fact kind of things. Um, old magazines, uh, because you couldn't get an article. If you now I can find you an article, it was it in people and you know, 2016, I can probably find it for you online. Was it in the Rockford Register Star? We've got a subscription to that. Um you couldn't easily get those types of things, so libraries held on to them, but the world changed and RPL did not change with it. I I will I love it here. I love this library. It was behind the curve, it was a little bit sad um coming in from another library system where you know that we had not kept this kind of a thing, and I had never in my career seen anybody keep this much of this kind of a thing. And I purged a lot of it, and I that's my hill I will die on. We didn't need that stuff, it was not necessary, or it was dated. There was an encyclopedia of endangered animals from like 1989. Uh, number one, I could have used that encyclopedia to write about jaguars when I was in elementary school. And number two, I'm flipping through and I'm like, all these animals are dead. Yeah. Like some of these are, you know, have moved from slightly endangered to critically endangered. Some of these, like, you know, the whole thing about like there are no black-footed ferrets anymore. And I'm like, that's one of the greatest conservation wins of, you know, bringing an animal back from the brink of, you know, extinction. And that's not in this set because this set is too old. We had a Civil War set, and it was a nice encyclopedia of the Civil War that had won some fancy book award in 1992. But the way we talk about the Civil War, the way we think about the Civil War, the way we think about things like slavery, it's changed a lot. No, the date of the Battle of Appomattox didn't change, but the context which you put that in, the way that we see that, the things we didn't know, all that's very different now. And I don't need to keep some crumbly old 40-year-old encyclopedia set that's gonna give people inaccurate information that let's just be honest, they're not even gonna look at anyway, because they want to know if jaguars are still endangered, they're gonna pick up the rectangle computer, supercomputer that lives in their pocket.

SPEAKER_01 35:49

Right.

SPEAKER_04 35:49

They're not gonna call us and say, are Jaguars endangered? And those were calls you used to get in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and you needed these books to answer those kind of questions, but you didn't need them anymore. So, like, you want to be mad at me, be mad at me, like public. I straight purged a thousand books and I sleep really well at night about it, because it was all stuff that was out of date and we didn't need right. So when people say there's less books in here, it's mostly layout, it's mostly shelving. But if you are imagining uh it was the second floor, they called it teletelereference, like it was right by the staircase, it was behind the staircase, looking out over Wyman Street. If you're imagining that section of the library and it was huge, it doesn't exist anymore because we don't need it and we spend that money on other things. Do you like having um ebook versions of your James Patterson book? Would you like to listen to an e-audio book? Do you find more help in the consumer reports database? That's what we spent that money. I don't need to spend thousands of dollars on reference books. No one's ever going to look at or touch. I don't need that eating up space. That space can go to the thrillers or the urban. I mean, I basically tripled the amount of space we had for urban since I started this job because people love urban. Like, do you want that space eaten up by, you know, out-of-date encyclopedias, or do you want it to be the new hot book talk, you know, Quan Mills thing that everybody's laughing at and enjoying, and you want to rush down and get it.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

Right.

SPEAKER_04 37:19

Because even in a new building, we didn't have infinite space. We had to make decisions. And that for me was like, okay, let's that's low-hanging fruit. Right.

SPEAKER_05 37:27

And I mean, that introduces us into the term weeding. Yep. Uh weed these books like tell us more about weeding.

SPEAKER_04 37:38

Okay. Nobody gets into libraries because they're like, I hate books and love throwing them out. Um, but it it's sometimes people say things to me, you know, a man was like, Do you just enjoy getting rid of these things? And I'm like, no, what what job do you think I have? I love this. I love bringing things in. But let's just be honest, not everything's gonna hit. And not, even if it does hit, it's not gonna stay forever. We do have classics, obviously. You know, we got a copy of Dracula. We've got Hamlet. Would you like to read, you know, The Old Man in the Sea? We're never not gonna have a Tale of Two Cities, but not every book is a classic. Sometimes they're just cool for a while and then they've lived their life. I buy nine copies of every James Patterson book. We don't have shelf space to keep nine copies of every James Patterson book. We'd have to rename ourselves the James Patterson Public Library, serving the community of Rockford. Um over time, things will become less interesting. Over time, information will become outdated. I and you will say, do we need this many copies? Probably not. Has it is this information still the best and brightest? Nah, not really. Um, one of the things I did before we moved into this building when we were still back at the heart interim library is I took a real hard look at the medical section, at the health section. We had some very old health books, and I just didn't think it was like responsible to be giving people diabetes advice from like 1998. Right. Our understandings of these diseases have changed a lot. Things like heart disease, diabetes, um, Alzheimer's prevention. I I did, I got rid of a lot of that and I replaced it. That's the thing that people don't understand about weeding. I don't just like throw out books and then be like, ha ha ha, I've made an empty shelf and twirl my little mustache. I say, okay, I have taken out 15 books about diabetes this year. What 15 new books about diabetes, about diabetic cooking, about exercise for diabetes, about preventing diabetes, what new diabetes things are out there that I can replace it with? We are constantly, you know, in that circle of life. We are a book is being born, it is growing in popularity, its popularity is waning, and it will probably die.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 39:56

And so where we are in that cycle, um, it just depends. It just depends on the book. And I look at a lot of factors when I'm weeding. I do look at numbers, you know, I get reports, I look at what hasn't circulated in two years, three years, five years, maybe a year and a half. Um East keeps it a tighter ship. We can hold more things here than they can at East. East, if it's not going, it's gone. Whereas here I can hold on to some things that I'm like, oh, this is a this, this maybe this book isn't the classic book or isn't the big book, but like this author has had a lot of big hits, so let's hold on to, you know, a copy or two of this. We can hold that here in a way that they can't at East. And so I do look at data, but it's never a hundred percent data driven. It's always saying, really, this author? This isn't this this didn't go out. And then sometimes you get over to look at it on the shelf after you look at it on the report and you instantly know why it didn't go out. It looks gross. Um, it's it's musty, it's crusty, some somebody's kid blorped on it or chewed on it or spilled something on it. Um, that was another thing when I first got here. I think that people here held on to things past a point when they should have. Um, I remember picking up paperbacks early in my tenure when I was working, you know, on the youth side. It was like a copy of Pretty Little Liars, and the the cover just disintegrated my hands. It was like like it had been folded and then refolded. Like I'm doing origami people with like your cover of Pretty Little Liars in 2016. And it it chunks came off in my hand. And I said, we can't, we cannot be giving people chunky, dirty junk. No one wants to come to the library because they really hope that it leaves like pieces of paper in their house. So we got rid of things. I can buy you another pretty little liars. This is not like a rare book, and this is there's nothing special about a random paperback of pretty little liars. I can get you another one. I could get you another one today. So sometimes I'll go on that weed list and I'll be like surprised that some popular author or some popular title is on there, and then I'll instantly know because it's musty and crusty why nobody picked that book. People, people say don't judge a book by its cover, which is a great saying if what you're talking about is people, you shouldn't judge people by their outsides. But human nature is that we judge books by cover a lot. And if this cover is dated and sort of gross looking, no. It's sometimes it's sometimes that's the sign. It has gone through its life cycle, it's time to go. And when we weed things, we're not just filling up dumpsters and like again twirling our little black mustaches. They have another life cycle they go into. They go into the friends, and the friends sell those books for money, and that money is what helps us have bells and whistles around here. Um, who paid for the PlayStation 5 in the teen zone? It wasn't you taxpayers. We did not spend your taxpayer money on video games. The friends sold used books, and then they gave us the money. Like, you want to have snacks at your, you know, program in the summer for kids when they're out of school. The friends are paying for those snacks. It's not your taxpayer dollars, you know, your video games, your maybe we want to do some elaborate arts and craft thing, or we need to, you know, something like that. Or we're gonna try something new and we don't really know if it's gonna work real well. And the friends are willing to say, yeah, we'll take a flyer, we'll give you the first thousand, see what happens. Um so they go into the used book market and they get passed around in the community. The friends sell them. They end up, you know, you sell them on Amazon, you sell them to your friend. You gave, you loved this book and you found it at the friend's book sale, and you let your other friend borrow it. You know, it goes into the that ecosystem. And the net positive on that, I see that like there's still plenty of books in the community. They're in those little free libraries out in front of, you know, people's houses and you know, schools and things. Like that. They end up in at the Goodwill store and you buy it for a dollar or whatever it is, or you know, over at you know one of the used bookstores in town. They're still in the community, even if they're not in the library. And some things just don't sell. I mean, nobody wanted to buy that encyclopedia of endangered animals full of power. Yeah, if you've ever been to a goodwill or a salvation army, boy, people want to get rid of outdated encyclopedias. You know, sometimes their next home is maybe we cut them up for crafts. Maybe we did a, you know, an Earth Day Craft where you made a collage and we cut out all the pictures of endangered animals from volume eight of this encyclopedia we couldn't get rid of. Maybe it went to the recycler, you know. Maybe the the, I don't know, paper towel you're using was once a Civil War encyclopedia. Things have a life and they go on to new lives in different places. And I'm constantly bringing in new books. Um we're bringing in about 20,000 new books a year. Oh, wow. I can't, I can't hold on to everything no matter how much you love it.

SPEAKER_05 45:07

Right. Um that note, like, why is it important for the community to understand how the library chooses and buys books?

SPEAKER_04 45:17

I think it's important for the community to understand that a lot of thought and care goes into these things. Um, you know, I remember we had the opening day here at the New Maine Library, and it was it was so much fun, and there were all these people, and they were like, Whoa, oh my god, look at this terrace, and you know, I'll look at this. But I do remember one lady who just walked over to some section of books and she was upset and she was like, This is a disaster. Uh it nobody cares about this. And I was like, I I didn't say this to her because uh it would be rude, but I was like, lady, do you know how many hours I put into that section? Do you know how many hours I spent? You know, we genreified all of our nonfiction. I spent hours in the basement at heart putting stickers on things. I looked at all those books, I looked at their stats, I looked at who they were about or who they were for. I've spent so a lot of time and energy and thought went into that. It's doesn't, if it's not what you want, or if it doesn't meet an expectation, it's not because nobody cared. You know, maybe your expectation isn't reasonable, or maybe we can explain to you and you're looking in the wrong place. You know, maybe you're not finding what you want because what you want is actually over there, you know. But I really want the community to understand that nobody's willy-nilly just going around being like, like, let's just get this. Uh, we put a ton of thought and work into what you guys are gonna enjoy. We, you know, we use data, we use our own lived experiences. Sometimes we guess, you know. I mean, sometimes things just don't work out. I mean, I, you know, I buy 20,000 books a year. Every now and then there'll be a dud, and I'll find it on a list later and be like, nobody wanted that? I thought somebody would have wanted that. That seems so cool. But it is a job, and like any job, you know, people take great pride in the work that they do and in doing something that is bigger than themselves. One of the reasons that I stay in libraries is that I am helping people in all sorts of indirect ways that I never even see. I see a handful of them, maybe if I'm on the reference desk. But when your mother gets diagnosed with breast cancer and you come in looking for books about how to emotionally handle that for you and her, you don't even have to talk to any of us and we're there supporting you. When, you know, your kid is struggling in school and you don't know what to do about, you know, the fact that they're not learning to math good. Um, and we've got a book about that, or about something you can do with your, you know, to help with that situation. We're helping you, even if you never talk to us.

SPEAKER_01 48:06

I want that.

SPEAKER_04 48:08

And so it, you know, on a small scale, yeah. I sit in an office and I read book reviews, I unpack boxes, I sometimes put stickers on things. That's my job. In a big picture sense, I like to think that I'm helping making your life a little better. Maybe it's because it's something you need. Maybe it's just to have a good time. Girl, enjoy that book about, you know, pimps and hoes. I really I don't have a good afternoon with a good book. Maybe it's not war and peace. Maybe it's a mystery you that's all full of bird puns. I really love these Donna Andrews mysteries. They're all the titles are bird puns, and then they have birds on them. My favorite is it's got two toucans on it, and the title is Toucan Keep a Secret. Like, there's another one that's about dogs. It's about, and the the Christmas one is Dachshunds, and it says Dochshund through the snow, but like dashing because dashing through the snow. Come in and have a nice afternoon and read a goofy book about a dog at Christmas time. I mean, I don't know what you got going on in your life. You probably have stress, you probably got bills, you probably got family issues, you know, everybody's got something. Can I make your day a little bit nicer by giving your kid an elephant and piggy book that fills them with joy and helps them learn early literacy skills? I do this job for the big picture, for the bigger idea. I want you to discover something. I want you to feel supported. I want you to look and feel seen and validated. Um, I want you to, I want to give you help with the things I can help you with. A book isn't just an object. It's more than just an object. It's a thing that, you know, when I'm buying books, I'm not buying stuff.

SPEAKER_00 49:53

Right.

SPEAKER_04 49:54

I'm buying experiences, emotions, things that will resonate in this community, or at least I hope will. You know, that's the hope. That's why I get up and you know keep going to work every day, other than the fact that, you know, I have bills and need to pay them.

SPEAKER_05 50:09

Thank you, Sarah. It's been so fun to have you here sharing about all of that, how you support the community of Rockford through books and helping even like how Rockford is defined through the library. I uh like urban fiction being our largest genre. And so I'm just grateful that you are here. It's been really fun to have you, and thank you for educating us and taking us through your perspective of the library.

SPEAKER_04 50:42

Oh, absolutely. Um, feel free to uh I'll come back anytime. I I could talk about this all day long. Um I'm lucky to have a job that I love and a job that provides a lot of meaning for me and uh to work in a place with great people, in a great community. Um, I moved here to Rockford nine and a half years ago. I love it here. You guys, it's great here. You're lucky um to live here. And, you know, I have really enjoyed the opportunities that I've gotten here at RPL, and I'm happy to talk about them with anybody, you know. If anybody wants to talk to me some more, come find me at the main library, you know, downtown. You'll probably find me on the second floor pushing one of those reference desk carts around. And uh then you can tell me what you can tell me why the section is a disappointment in person. Uh but or you can ask me anything that you want to ask me. Awesome.

SPEAKER_05 51:36

Thank you so much. Oh, sure. So just a reminder: this isn't just a library, it's your library, and every book tells a Rockford story.

SPEAKER_03 51:47

Thank you.