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Introduction
There are 81 public libraries in Chicago and, at last count - quite some time ago - there were approximately 6450 in the entire State of Illinois. It’s very complicated to precisely determine how many of these libraries - following the COVID-19 pandemic – have reopened and been restaffed and how many are once again fully operational. For funding and job security reasons, among others, the degree of accuracy of the reports made by various branch libraries varies considerably. These are all matters for further inquiry, but the data – although not readily confirmable - will not ultimately be too difficult to assemble and analyze.
While some larger public libraries have returned to pre-pandemic levels of activity, the truth is that even those renewed levels of activity on their best days represent only a very modest fraction of the volume of traffic and use of the facilities which was typical a decade or more ago. (See https://data.cityofchicago.org/Education/Libraries-2022-Visitors-by-Location/ykhx-yxn9.) Worldwide library use has consistently declined for the last 25 years, and the trend is not encouraging.
It’s fairly clear that, while the two years of COVID-19 disruption had a very unfortunate and severely negative impact on every library in terms of access limitations, user traffic, and overall operations, the physical on-site utilization of Illinois’s libraries (and libraries everywhere else in the country) has dramatically plummeted over the last 10 years largely due to the impact of the Internet, the digitization of every form of content, and the ubiquity of the smart phone.
Simply stated, kids (7th grade and older) and young adults don’t care about libraries any longer but, even worse, that indifference and apathy isn’t limited to the younger generations. Most Americans under the age of 40 haven’t visited a library for any reason (other than to carpool their own kids) since they were in high school and report that they have no intention, inclination, or reason to do so any time in the future except in cases where those libraries are being used from time to time as voting locations.
Bricks and mortar libraries today are expensive, inefficient, and terribly under-utilized civic and community resources which are wasting and rapidly depreciating assets and which have become increasingly irrelevant – even as “social” gathering places – for students and readers of any and every age. We still read, but not physical books; we still need the news, but not newspapers; and we no longer need to go anywhere to gain or gather knowledge because it now resides at our fingertips on our phones and in our other digital devices.
If our libraries no longer matter in any material respect to our lives and especially to the upcoming generations, it’s not clear how or why they will continue to survive and be economically viable and justifiable. We need an immediate plan to reimagine and transform these buildings into new, attractive, and important community learning centers for digital media creation and vocational/adult education (lifelong learning) if we want to keep them alive. This is the primary goal of the Libraries Live program.