John Szabo (Image Source: U. of Michigan School of Information)
The sparrows fled the courtyard. It was quiet amid the classics. John Szabo stepped out of the elevator and walked through the sunlit atrium of the Central Library. He passed a slumbering homeless man and, with the efficiency of a spy, disappeared into stacks of bound archives, hundreds of thousands of relevant and obscure pages — including the 1991 “Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan.”
A tall man with sparks of gray in his goatee, Szabo, the city librarian, oversees 72 branches, a $241.8 million budget, 17,000 restaurant menus, 64 ukuleles, a Shakespeare volume from 1685, and lockers of puppets for a children’s theater. He stopped at a shelf holding years of “Family Handyman” magazines. Founded in 1951 for those who grout tile and hang cabinets, the periodical was no match for Prince Harry’s memoir or a Stephen King novel.
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Librarians can tell you about the turn of a page or the mystery of sentence. But they are on the front lines of a world they seldom imagined. They can track down a wayward book one moment and console someone with schizophrenia the next. They havepanic buttonsat their desks, undergo stress management, and thumb through “A Trauma-Informed Framework for Supporting Patrons,” a guide on how to deal with drug abuse, adult-self neglect, child abuse, panhandling, stealing, threatening behavior and “persons with strong personal odor.”
“We say yes to a lot of things,” Szabo said. “It’s about how we define what the library is. I love the fact that people can see the library as part of a solution to a community issue. But how much social work is enough? How much public health programming is enough? How far do we go with adult education?”
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The library is in talks to acquire Angel City Press, an independent publisher founded in 1992. The move, said Szabo, is a “natural extension of our mission to amplify the voice of authors, celebrate their work and preserve their stories … that explore all that is quintessentially Los Angeles.”
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.