By Raw Fisherfrom Marc Fisher's Blog
Tuesday, June 5, 2007

The following is reprinted from Marc Fisher's blog, Raw Fisher, which appears every day on the Web and every Tuesday in this spot.

Ginnie Cooper, the energetic and optimistic new chief of the District's sadly neglected public library system, says she knew exactly what she was getting into.

"I could work 80 hours a week for 100 years and still have things left to be done," she says of the sorry state of a library system that suffers from startlingly low book circulation, dilapidated buildings, a thin collection, insufficient support from the District government and a lack of popular consensus over how to fix the system.

Depending on whether you share Cooper's optimism or prefer to focus on the system's deep troubles, you could frame the library story in one of two ways:

The positive spin would emphasize the fact that Cooper has already opened two of the long-promised interim branch libraries to replace the four branches that were shut down more than two years ago. ("In hindsight," Cooper says, "I don't think there's a person who doesn't think it was a mistake" to close those branches before the city was ready to build permanent replacements.) The other two interim branches, Shaw and Benning Road, are set to open this month. Already, the Anacostia interim branch is a big success, with 431 people getting new library cards in the first three weeks of its existence -- almost double the number of new cards issued at any other branch that month.

The other side of the coin features the unresolved future of the main Martin Luther King Jr. Library, as both Mayor Adrian Fenty and the new council seem to have abandoned ex-mayor Tony Williams's plan to make a new central library the focal point of redevelopment at the old Convention Center site. And replacements for the four shuttered libraries are still stuck in the planning stage, thanks in part to an unresolved debate over the role public-private partnerships should play in new libraries.

Cooper professes to be largely agnostic on that crucial question, and the D.C. library trustees last month approved a new policy that's neither here nor there. "While the Board of Library Trustees acknowledges the potential value of mixed-use projects, at this time DCPL will not solicit mixed-use projects," the policy reads. "However, it will evaluate unsolicited proposals from other city agencies as well as private developers. . . . " Weaselly enough for you?

With guidance like that from her bosses, Cooper can only muddle through, and, luckily, she seems committed to doing just that. She -- unlike our former mayor -- has actually bought a house here. But it can be rough going: "It's hard to recruit people to this library because it doesn't have a good national reputation," she says. She cannot pay for potential employees to visit the city or for them to move here.

Cooper wants the new branches to show Washingtonians how dramatically libraries have changed in the decades since the District was in the library-building business. New branches are likely to include reading areas where you can sip a drink and talk, extensive computer services and light, airy architecture. With no new central library in the cards, Cooper is trying to make the King Library usable. She's replaced the ceiling lights in the dank, gloomy lobby and repaired elevators that hadn't been working in five or more years.

The D.C. libraries are about to get some national attention, as the American Library Association holds its convention in Washington in late June. As part of that gathering, the trade magazine Library Journal will donate an interior makeover of the 85-year-old Southeast Branch, which will get new furniture, renovated bathrooms, shelving, a new ceiling, and books and computers, too.

Cooper says she is "mostly having fun. I don't think it's a done deal yet that we're on our way. But I hope so." And then she added, "I want this to be the library the District deserves," and her voice caught on her passion as she said those words. A librarian who gets choked up about how libraries can transform lives is precisely what this city needs.