In 2004, DC was still awaiting the gentrification boom during which most of this book takes place. Mayor Anthony Williams had shepherded the city out of the austerity budgets imposed by the congressionally appointed Financial Control Board. Bond ratings had improved. Developers were planning. Williams spent much of the year negotiating his signature achievement: a gleaming new baseball stadium that would anchor redevelopment of the Southwest waterfront, for which the city eventually paid over $670 million, $135 million up front.
Most of the city was not seeing that sort of investment. There was much talk of radically downsizing agencies like the DC Public Library (DCPL) system. DCPL had been dealt a very public black eye in March 2004 when a computer virus took down every PC in the system for the entire month. Today, library officials talk about that as a wakeup call for the system, when they realized just how high the stakes were. Ultimately, the system crash was a symptom of austerity. In 1975, 620 full-time employees worked at twenty DCPL branches, but by 2004, only 431 worked in twenty-seven branches—nearly half as many full-time employees per branches. The library was, like most municipal services, understaffed and underfunded, its budget a much lower proportion of the municipal budget than in peer cities. This was borne of the budget cuts Williams insisted on as part of the plan to get financial control of the city back from Congress—an outsized manifestation of the majority-Black city versus majority-White state government conflicts that appear all over the United States. A Washington Post story about the computer outage said that DC libraries regularly opened late or closed early because of short staffing: “We’ve made do with very little for a long time without complaining,” a librarian said. “The libraries are just crying out for help” (Fernandez 2004).
Another story later in the year explored the sorry state of library buildings—leaks, broken windows, overflowing garbage—that was caused, librarians said, by a mix of deferred maintenance and homeless Washingtonians seeking refuge.1 One librarian at the Mt. Pleasant branch described her working conditions as “third world,” saying, “There’s just so much stuff that needs to be done and so little resources to do it with” (Murphy 2004). In response, Williams commissioned a Task Force on the Future of the District of Columbia Public Library System. Its 2005 report found that years of deferring maintenance and upgrades to technology and facilities had hobbled the system. It concluded, “The District of Columbia Public Library must be transformed if it is to be the successful, relevant institution needed and deserved by District residents. The transformation requires a new service dynamic as well as a new infrastructure of technology and facilities” (Williams 2005, 10). The library system, then, was short on political and financial support and overwhelmed by a homelessness crisis it was unequipped to handle. The month-long internet outage was the most visible sign of these tensions. It provoked a broad restructuring not just of the library’s operations or facilities but of its identity. The new library would be based on new technologies and new service models. It would take a decade for this new library to appear.
In the spring of 2015, I walked into the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the central branch of the DCPL system, for a meeting. Library police sat a desk inside the big glass doors facing G Street. A mural celebrating Dr. King’s activism stood above the main foyer, overlooking a central help desk and a circulation desk against the opposite wall. Elevators and staircases took you up to offices, meeting rooms, the children’s section, and more specialized collections. To the right of the main foyer was the Popular Services collection. To the left was the main computer lab, called the Digital Commons. Another help desk greeted you upon entering the Digital Commons, and from there you could either proceed on into the rows or computers and desks or turn right into the glass-walled presentation and coworking space called the Dream Lab.
I entered the Dream Lab, joining Dave, the mid-thirties White man at the head of MLK’s digital programming, and Claire, a mid-forties Black woman and upper-level administrator at MLK. Most of the audience was made up of the Friends of the Library charity group. The Friends are middle- and upper-class White retirees who lobby the library on policy changes, fundraise, and run literacy classes and book drives. Dave delivered a presentation on the library’s long-planned renovation. Our backs were to the glass cubicles separating the Dream Lab’s presentation and coworking space from the Digital Commons, the 150 seats of which were full, as usual, and dominated by the city’s homeless population—mostly older Black patrons, more men than women, who walked over to MLK every day if they weren’t dropped off out front by the shelter shuttles that also did pick-up runs in the evening.
Dave, eyes gleaming, asked if we’d like a tour of the new Fab Lab makerspace upstairs—a reclaimed meeting room intended as a preview of the fruits the renovation would bear. So we walked past the help desk where a librarian monitored the whirring 3-D printer, through the main foyer where a mural of Dr. King overlooked members of DC Tech setting up hundreds of chairs for their monthly demo series, up two floors on the elevator, past one of the video visitation rooms for DC Jail, around the corner from the Black studies collection, back into the cavernous stairwell that had been a gay cruising spot in the 1980s, through some locked double doors, and into a sunny meeting room with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the Morton’s the Steakhouse next door.
Dave regaled us his vision for a new kind of library. It was hard not to get caught up in his enthusiasm for the 3-D printers, the laser cutters, the CNC fabrication machine, and the scattered laptops. He pitched the maker skills the Fab Lab would teach as a new literacy for the information economy, something that could help defeat the STEM gap and provide the creative, technical workers he said we were so desperately short on. Consumers would learn to maintain their devices and save the environment. Skilled technologists would have a new space to inspire underprivileged communities. One Friend pitched it as a poetry lab to upgrade the arts for the twenty-first century. Dave said they were “testing for tomorrow,” a tomorrow where people could say, “I learned to code at the library, I got a job because of the course I took at the library.” Dave described this lab—and the others that would soon emerge—as “wild extensions” of the Dream Lab downstairs. This meant not just a new suite of tools, but new modes of librarianship, new ways of understanding library patrons, and, fundamentally, a new library. It was exactly what the task force on DCPL’s future had called for a decade prior.
There was so much hope in the Fab Lab. Much of it recycled from three-year-old promises about the power of Digital Commons on the ground floor, where most patrons spent most of their time. That space was a massive upgrade from the fourteen Dells that had previously made up the main computer lab of the central library branch of the nation’s capital. There was so much pressure placed on the Fab Lab and the technologies and librarians inside it—even though, from its opening until MLK closed for renovations in 2017, the room was mostly used by library visitors rather than the homeless patrons that were there all day every day. The access doctrine flourished in the library. The new labs promised a brighter future for those with the right tools and skills. But the organizational restructuring the access doctrine prompted did not help everyone in the library flourish.
These upgrades project a reassuring vision of the future in a city where a post-2008 flood of new tech workers was accompanied by housing and jobs crises. Between 2000 and 2015, DC’s affordable housing stock decreased by 50 percent (Rivers 2015), and between 2011 and 2014 there was a 12 percent increase in total homelessness and a 29 percent increase in the number of homeless families (HUD 2014). In that time, MLK served an important role as a safe space for homeless Washingtonians with nowhere else to go during the day. But the library was poorly equipped to handle this role. It did not have the necessary resources to support those in crisis—whether single-occupancy restrooms for folks who needed a space to groom, or dedicated spaces to sleep, or the necessary training to aid folks with serious and persistent mental illness. Moreover, creating these resources would not attract the sort of support the library needed to secure its own future.
Whereas DC startups represented the “right” side of the digital divide, Gore’s “information haves,” the public library served the “information have-nots.” At InCrowd, we saw how startups and the people within them embraced the radical uncertainty of their sector and learned to pivot—both as a large-scale matter of shifting corporate strategies and a day-to-day matter of shifting tasks. That is the ideal type of organization and work style within the access doctrine. Institutions like MLK, or public libraries more generally, hope to teach their patrons to survive the information economy in this style. But to do so, the library must transform itself—literally, in MLK’s case. The library changed to help information economy stragglers change in turn. This process enrolled a host of materials at a variety of scales: from boxy black Dell OptiPlex 755 PCs and shiny new MakerBots, to a historic public space in the middle of the DowntownDC Business Improvement District, to a city government desperate to project an urban identity independent of the federal government, to the mass of patrons living through the day-to-day reality of racialized poverty.
This chapter explores the first of two institutions that take the access doctrine as their mission. Libraries and, as the next chapter explores, charter schools that embrace the access doctrine begin a process of bootstrapping: a series of stark organizational reforms that reorient the institution around the idea that poverty can be overcome with the right tools and the right skills. This changes the sort of care the institution provides. At MLK, this process focused on a new culture of digital professionalism. Librarians were reimagined as knowledge workers, rather than helping professionals. They were tasked with training patrons who were reimagined as potential knowledge workers. The physical space was redesigned to support this process.
The language, work styles, and organizational cultures of startups are the ideal organizational type for the library—but libraries can never be startups. Their resource base is different; their mission is different. Beyond those structural limits, there is the fact that patrons and librarians themselves resist these changes, building their own libraries in the corners of a computer lab or between the stacks. Such resistance persists, but it cannot ultimately stop the library being remade around an ideal of digital professionalism because that process simplifies the library’s complex and competing set of priorities in the present and guarantees political legitimacy and material resources for the future.
Most librarians, and of course patrons, understood how complex the problem of homelessness was. Most wanted to do what they could to solve the problem or at least assuage its pain. But the solutions they could pursue were constrained by the access doctrine. For the library to maintain this hope in “using the technology to improve their lives,” as librarian Grant put it, it must necessarily regulate or eliminate competing uses for the library space. To investigate this process, I first explore how the library’s bootstrapping reorganizes its space around digital professionalism, and then how patrons adapt to this process and produce other versions of the space to meet their own needs.
The library’s bootstrapping process generated a conflict over what the library was for. Everyone agreed that the library was a critical digital resource, but the nature and purpose of that resource were contested. Were the Digital Commons2 and connected spaces refuges, some of the last remaining public spaces in the city where anyone could rest for the day without purchasing anything? Or were they training centers, spaces that could provide the skills and tools that would help people move out of the library and into the jobs of the future? To resolve this conflict, the library and librarians dictated the correct way to use the space and the technologies in it: not just the desktop computers, but the new 3-D printers; the Memory Lab personal archiving suite; the phones, tablets, and laptops people bring with them; the desks and walls; the music or drugs that found their way in; people’s clothes, bags, and, of course, books. To make the right space, everything needed to be put in its place.
The work of present-day reorganization was determined by a future vision for long-overdue renovation to the central branch. Finalized in 2014, at a projected cost of $208 million, this vision was repeatedly articulated at the highest levels of DCPL and local government. The mayor’s office and new Chief Librarian Richard Reyes-Gavilan worked hard to advertise the work architectural firms Mecanoo Architecten and Martinez + Johnson3 would do. Their renovation would double down on recent digital upgrades. It would also move MLK’s cubicles and stairways from a closed, transactional space, wherein librarians provided patrons with items, to an open, transformational space that would offer learning and training opportunities to the whole city. In day-to-day operations, professionalizing the library space meant promoting the use of information technology that, at least in appearance, offered skills-training opportunities. Disruptions to that process had to be regulated or eliminated.
What did that regulation look like? As April, a librarian in her mid-twenties, patrolled her branch with colleagues, she gave out imaginary stickers to patrons they thought were using the space appropriately (“gold star if you manage to use the library appropriately …”), inappropriately (“special snowflake if you really think the rules don’t apply to you …”), or just wrong (“paint bucket for ‘You’re as dumb as paint.’ You’re teachable, you’re just dumb”). They walked the stacks and the computer lab, giving out stickers whenever they saw patrons engaged in self-talk, fighting with each other, eating, watching porn, touching themselves or a partner, or bedding down for a nap on a strip of cardboard in the reference section.
April had a master’s degree in library and information science. She was a middle-class White woman who had moved to DC for a secure but stressful job. She could tell you how to verify Google results, do basic HTML, and find your nearest polling station at election time. She loved open access and President Obama. She and her coworkers understood themselves as helpers. That professional identity was necessarily shaped by their relationships with the people they were tasked with helping, who lacked those skills and whose comparative lack of freedom in the city was marked by race and class. April served patrons who were poor or working-class, who had only a high school diploma (if that), who were much younger or much older, who were Black and Latinx, who were priced out of DC housing, who were living with mental illness, who mistook socialsecurity.com for socialsecurity.gov.
These were April’s patrons, or customers as she and most newer librarians called them. And while she ostensibly served them, her sticker system showed there was a power imbalance in that dynamic; help largely proceeded on the helpers’ terms. Indeed, Shawn, the “computer man” from the introduction, explicitly compared librarians’ labor to that of the social workers he had met in different social service agencies: sitting down to chat with regulars, acting as a reference for jobs, actively looking for opportunities to help. They were helping professionals, but there is a line between librarian and patron, just like there is between student and teacher, nurse and patient, social worker and client.
Like the public school or the clinic, American libraries provide care, but on terms of self-improvement. This has been true since at least the founding of the American Library Association in 1893. Most of the librarians I encountered described their profession in classed and gendered terms as a pink-collar one. April called them “mavens of knowledge” (Fox and Olson 2013). It is a long tradition. White middle-class women in the progressive era worked as readers’ advisors, teaching immigrant patrons to move away from entertainment materials and toward Anglo-American classics, inculcating sufficient literacy to enter formal job and housing markets (Garrison 1979; Luyt 2001; Wiegand 1986). This outreach took on renewed importance when, as chapter 1 showed, the neoliberal revolution gutted the welfare state and positioned the networked opportunities of the internet as a substitute. The new regulatory regime introduced by the Clinton administration gave the United States some of the slowest, most expensive internet in the developed world and made community access centers like schools and libraries the only places to get it for free.
Libraries, of course, do much more than digital professionalization. On any given day, the library might be assisting with health insurance enrollments, providing story time or book clubs for multiple ages and languages, offering yoga classes or film screenings, presenting an exhibit on the history of punk music in DC, or helping patrons file their tax returns. Different DCPL branches take on different tasks that fit their neighborhoods. Many branches were recently redesigned themselves, some with new glass facades designed by architects at the Freelon Group—who lost out on the MLK contract. The transparent buildings were meant to better connect the space to the community. Branch librarians told me they were proud of these gorgeous new angular buildings. Still, many preferred the old cement blocks with clear sight lines down each row of books. Staffing shortages meant a few people were responsible for a lot of space at any one time.
The long-planned renovation of MLK loomed over my time in the library, shaping the work of librarians like April and Grant and the routines of patrons like Shawn and Mia. Every librarian said it was overdue, calling the interior of the building dark, uninviting, and difficult to navigate. Even though they were nervous about their ability to control the outcome, they evangelized the renovation. It became part of their job—to the point that that many wore “Ask me about the renovation!” buttons during the public comment period.
As in startups, this culture grew thicker the higher you went in the org chart. Executive Director Reyes-Gavilan was recruited to lead DCPL, and at this moment that meant completing the renovation in a way that would emphasize MLK’s centrality not just to the branch system, but to the changing city. In 2015, I attended a forum at the Hamilton gastropub where he spoke about the renovation with police, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission that oversaw development in the area around MLK,4 and local business owners. These were the neighborhood power brokers, and any big change in the neighborhood had to be responsive to their needs.
Reyes-Gavilan was blunt: “It was outdated the day it opened. It has been an unloved structure for a long time. But it has always had potential.” That potential was the focus whenever he showed off architectural renderings: a new library with expanded labs, space for startups, a rooftop garden, and what appeared to be a TED Talk in the central foyer. So though there was certainly much more going on at the library than digital professionalization, those were the activities that connected most directly to its bright future. And that’s why it became more of a focus over time.
This dynamic is not unique to DCPL. Stevenson (2011) shows that US and Canadian libraries were a key site of welfare state investment in the 1950s and 1960s, and libraries’ description of their public service mission emphasized a well-credentialed workforce ready to help with anything. In the 1990s, that began to shift as customers and information technology became the focus of library discourse, rather than librarians, partly as an attempt to justify the library mission in the face of broad cuts to welfare state services. Libraries and library schools began to describe librarianship as yet another information economy profession whose product mainly consisted of serving customers through information technology. The work of care becomes the work of technology provision and skills training.
MLK’s librarians were thus of a class with the digital professionals, government officials, and business owners filling those rooms to hear about the library’s future in the Dream Lab, before Dave showed us a preview of that future in the Fab Lab. In contrast, the crowd sitting on the other side of those glass walls in the Digital Commons were the lifeblood of the library’s present, but not necessarily included in its future. They were largely Black, where the future-planners were largely White. They weren’t wearing suits, and though smartphones were common, they were rarely the new iPhones you saw more frequently in the Dream Lab or other meeting spaces. Not that they were deviceless. Shawn was not unusual among my homeless informants for having two phones—a federally subsidized TracFone for calls and a Sprint smartphone he bought himself for email, texts, music, and social media. Tablets were common, laptops less so.
Librarians certainly tried to include patrons in the planning process, but there were limits. Obscure architectural and bureaucratic language made collaboration difficult. Each meeting referenced a longer narrative of prior meetings. And they were usually held in the early evening, when office workers had just left their jobs, but homeless patrons were often seeking out church dinners or shelter buses.
The institution bootstrapped to save itself and serve its patrons, but that process was not equally responsive to everyone and thus patrons who were not already digital professionals were less able to shape the library’s future. As far as the planning process was imagined, one group was there to help and another there to be helped. And while the day-to-day work of the library was far more complicated than that, this way of planning the future began to structure that work. The access doctrine framed the library as a community access center, where patrons could find—through new tools or skills—new opportunities for competition. Although at the end of the day, most patrons I met came to MLK not for a specific digital opportunity but simply because they had nowhere else to spend their day.
The library’s future depended on its ability to bootstrap and become a professional space that trained future digital professionals. Patrons, occasionally with staff support, still carved out different kinds of public space within MLK. But the library overpowered those efforts as the renovation neared. It had to. Reshaping the library’s space and operations around digital professionalism proved MLK’s value to the funders, politicians, and community power brokers who could make the renovation happen. It was the library’s way of showing outsiders that it was an essential piece of DC’s information economy, an institution that could help “information have-nots” cross the digital divide.
Inside the organization, however, patrons had many needs—homelessness, illness, joblessness—that the library faced because of its role as one of the last public spaces in the city, needs it wasn’t equipped to meet. In the long term, the access doctrine likely worsened this overload by contributing to a general political project of defunding the welfare state while adding digital resource provisioning to the library’s long list of duties. But in terms of daily operations, the access doctrine refined and focused librarians’ jobs, reducing the complex problem of urban poverty to a much more basic binary: a digital divide that could be crossed with the right tools and skills.
Personal computing was thus the terrain on which the fight for MLK’s identity was fought, where the bootstrapping process unfolded. There are many things one can do with a PC, and many things one can do at the library. At MLK, personal computing was bent toward the professional norms of digital professionalism. These values were at times explicit and other times less so, embedded in library infrastructure, lessons taught about personal computing, and the selection criteria for new librarians. This helped the library and librarians on the ground manage the overwhelming, often competing demands placed on the institution: at once research space, community center, media repository, day shelter, local archive, meeting place, training facility, government point of service, and much, much more. Organizing the library as a space for digital professionals provided a way to manage these diverse needs, and this held great appeal for stressed librarians trying to keep the place running or worried patrons trying to find a place in it.
Nowhere was this more visible than in the simple process of managing demand for the library’s computers, the system by which MLK quite literally arranged and prioritized the many people claiming a piece of its most public space: the gray rows of the Digital Commons computer lab. In the Digital Commons, patrons had a fair amount of freedom to do as they chose with the available desktop PCs, let alone the tables at the back ready for their own phones, tablets, and laptops. There, librarians were less able to control patrons’ computing as compared to the instructional rooms on the upper floors. The three or four librarians on duty in the Digital Commons could not possibly keep an eye on everyone’s screen, even if they were assisted by the armed representatives of the DC Public Library Police, although the division of labor between the two sets of public employees largely dictated that police worried more about behavior and less about library materials. Some regulation was necessarily delegated to the library’s digital infrastructure, such as the Pharos queue system and the PCs’ internet filters.5
Patrons used their library cards to sign up for sessions at a central terminal by the printer. They were then directed to a queue displayed on a pair of large, wall-mounted screens to wait to be assigned to one of the seventy-four desktop machines of the Digital Commons. Patrons could not log into a computer to which they were not assigned.6
In 2012, Elena, a mid-twenties librarian who supervised the three-hour waits for the fourteen computers in the old Popular Services computer lab, told me that even triple the number of computers would not be enough to meet patron demand. She was right, especially so during DC’s sweltering summers. Then, unlike winter, there was no right-to-shelter ordinance for the homeless. Patron Mia told me that her shelter let her hang out all day during hypothermia season, but not during the summer. As the mercury rose, the wait for a PC could extend to over an hour. Severe weather, hot or cold, meant more crowds and longer waits. I entered the library as it opened on a two-hour delay in February 2014, a day after a foot of snow hit, and a fifteen-person line immediately formed at the sign-up desk and didn’t subside for three hours. Within forty-five minutes after opening, every seat was filled.
The queue for computers in the Digital Commons indexed the strain placed on MLK. That strain fell on the computer lab both because that’s what patrons wanted and because there was no other space to accommodate that many people in the building during the normal course of a day. When demand was high, librarians were quite strict about keeping the queue moving. Elena had no sympathy for those who signed up but missed their alert for a cigarette break or something else: “You know how this works. You know the rules. You missed your turn. Too bad.” Pharos also allowed librarians to monitor every session’s activity from a central terminal and choose to end or extend the seventy-minute session. Patrons watching porn repeatedly might find a pop-up screen saying, “Please don’t do that,” a privilege librarian Rachel frequently exercised against patrons whom she felt were using the internet, and by extension the library, incorrectly. A later upgrade to EnvisionWare software added a behavior code to which patrons had to agree before logging on. Patrons chafed at this surveillance, part of a wider network that includes a dozen cameras in the computer lab alone, positioned above Wi-Fi access points, and constant patrols by librarians and police.
Mia was quick to complain about this surveillance network, especially Segway-riding police patrols, but was largely resigned to it. The library after all is only one of the government offices that those in the shelter system regularly visit, all of which demand consent to regular surveillance (Eubanks 2006). Having a librarian note your internet activity is unexceptional when you also have your diet and sleep schedule policed at the group house, your sexual activities and social life critiqued by clinicians, and your daily purchases scrutinized when applying for food stamps or housing assistance. “The system is designed to break you down physically and mentally,” Mia said. “When you’ve been in this situation for a while you realize very early on that your life is very public.”
Librarians did not only restrict unprofessional technology use in the Digital Commons. They also actively encouraged professional uses. Patrons working on a job application or filing for unemployment insurance with the municipal government could raise their hand, have a librarian walk over and check in, request extra time, and usually have an additional session tacked on. These distinctions between correct and incorrect computer use did not appear in the library’s posted rules for computer use, besides the boilerplate notice that inappropriate materials will be filtered, but every librarian I spoke with admitted to acting on them, and every patron I spoke with admitted to having the “rules” explained to them at one point or another.
These moments of professionalization were more explicit in the complex hierarchy of PC classes across MLK. Classes for beginners (e.g., introductions to email, Microsoft Word, or PC basics) took place during the day, in a third-floor classroom with about forty PCs, away from the bustle of the Dream Lab and Digital Commons on the ground floor. Attendees were mostly older Black men and women without their own laptops. They were trying to reenter the labor market, upgrade from their current low-level position in the service economy, or learn the skills necessary to communicate with friends and family—often abroad—or manage interactions with social services.
Classes for more skilled students ranged from Adobe Creative Suite to Python to mapping sessions with Mapbox. Mapbox was a startup the library granted free workspace to in the early days of the Dream Lab in exchange for teaching classes. In June 2015, it raised $52.55 million in Series B investment. It was a regular talking point of library administrators, a clear success for the Dream Lab in general and its outreach efforts with tech startups in particular. Classes like Mapbox’s, labeled intermediate or advanced, mostly took place at night in the Dream Lab. Those students were required to bring their own laptops. That crowd was younger, Whiter—a larger relative proportion of White patrons compared to those present earlier in the day—and dressed in the clothes they just left the office wearing.
There were several sessions of Intro to PC Basics upstairs every week. Many were taught by Betsy, a middle-aged Black librarian who encouraged her students to repeat these foundational lessons until they felt confident, gently ribbing them all the while. “This is for folks who have no clue and that might be you!” Her class emphasized beginner skills, like how to right- and left-click or create folders, but also concepts: the different names for a flash drive or hard drive, the logic of file trees or deletion, the “proper language of the industry” that prevented embarrassment at a job interview. She often referenced the civil service exam—even though there was no longer a single exam and most students were not applying to those jobs still requiring one.
Independent, PC-based office work was not only a story that drove Betsy’s classes. It was a model built into her exercises and instructions: reciting the technical terms for different pieces of hardware to get students past “whatchamacallit,” the typing motions that Betsy differentiated from those used on typewriters in the old civil service exams, the confidence to not request help but to close a program and reset the computer if the anticipated caption does not pop up. Students might apply these skills to a variety of domains, but for the library, the arc of personal computing bends toward professionalization. After questions on demographics, skills, and the instructor, the DCPL postclass survey that all students were asked to complete included ten items in response to the question, “How will this class impact your life?” Four, including the first three, explicitly addressed professionalization: job performance, creating professional documents, job search, and online business presence and marketing.
This professionalizing mission emerged in part from intraorganizational pressures that come from leaders or from staff’s management of competing, everyday priorities. Those leaders were often responding, as Reyes-Gavilan showed, to a larger set of incentives that shaped the whole organizational field of librarianship: the funding and legitimacy offered by philanthropies and local governments. Other changes in the librarian profession pushed librarians further down the organizational hierarchy to adopt a professionalizing mission not necessarily because of a specific incentive but because a clear set of best practices provided useful guidance in an environment of extreme uncertainty. A focus on digital professionalism emerged from both credentialing organizations that regulated the profession and local organizational changes that fit the profession to MLK’s specific needs.
The master of library science degree (MLS, or sometimes the MLIS with the addition of information) is a prerequisite credential for promotion or administrative duties. In recent decades, librarians have begun receiving that degree not from traditional library schools but their successors: information schools (Olson and Grudin 2009). In interviews, veteran librarians often regretted this transformation, explaining that an older public service culture had been replaced with a more professional, technical one.
Becca, a librarian in her late thirties who “can’t imagine doing anything else,” was training for her MLS in 2000 at the University of Maryland when the College of Library and Information Services changed its name to the College of Information Studies. She read the shift as the tragic downfall of the profession, an embrace of technical over service values: “Man there was a stink like you would not believe. You’re going to eliminate “libraries” first of all and then you’re going from Service to Science.7 Leaving the people out, that face-to-face. Nothing wrong with theory, I love theory, but people are somehow getting kicked out. … There was a big, big stink about the person-to-person service versus the cold, electronic seemingly end-all approach that looked at face-to-face as kind of antiquated. No!” Becca’s own career arc provided ample evidence of the pressures placed on the profession. At one point, state budget cuts closed the medical library at which she was working. She was forced to reapply for her old job as a new part-time position and rebuild the print collection in a digital format. Credentialed right when the information school (iSchool) movement really took off, she was the most junior librarian I interviewed who consistently called her patrons patrons rather than customers.
Contrary to Becca’s description, this was not a total loss of a public service culture but a sign of how the access doctrine pushed that culture to understand service as skills training and technology provision. The shift is encouraged from above by state institutions and major grant-making bodies, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Pitching to external funders became a matter of survival for twenty-first-century libraries that found their traditional funding streams—largely local taxes—gutted during the recession (Kernochan 2016; Schatteman and Bingle 2015).8 Between 2004 and 2016, total revenues for US libraries fell 21 percent. The steepest drop came after the recession, and most state library networks did not recover (IMLS 2017). In DC, that meant cuts to service hours and staffing in the immediate wake of the 2008 crash that took years to restore, even as new branches were opening.
Victims of welfare state retrenchment, public libraries adopted a new mission that legitimated their existence in an economy defined by uncertainty and positioned them to help their patrons survive the same. Stevenson and Domsy (2016) found that a similar discursive shift in how Canadian libraries explained their mission prompted major technological and staffing shifts: technical services staff shrank as collections shrank or arrived shelf-ready; greater automation of reference and circulation functions meant reference librarians were often replaced by paraprofessionals without job-specific training.
Librarians embraced the access doctrine not just because of the overall environment of fiscal austerity or because of changes in their credentialing institutions, but because their bootstrapping libraries changed their hiring criteria. Hiring the right kind of librarians was a way of enforcing the right way to use the library. Eugene, a mid-twenties librarian, explained to me that the Digital Commons’ technology suite was incomplete without librarians to match. The Adobe Creative Suites, the 3-D printer and Espresso Book Machine, the Dream Lab’s glass conference rooms loaned out to local startups: these all required a group of librarians who were younger, hipper, Whiter, and more digitally literate than the branch’s veterans. Few held an MLS. Previous chief librarian Ginnie Cooper’s administration had laid off a group of long-tenured, Black MLK veterans before they could collect their pensions—a case their union was still pursuing—and replaced them with ten majority-White members of what Eugene called “the hipster contingent”: “It really looked like ‘We’re going to hire young, hip people.’ I’m the library’s idea of ‘hip’ which is sad. And that was to staff Digital Commons. Similar things have also been happening out at branches. … I think the people who really would have had a lot of problems with that, you know starting from point one and just fighting it all the way, they’ve been gotten rid of.”
Their t-shirts, jeans, dyed hair, and informal service style—pulling up a chair to chat up regulars, organizing basement hackathons with new library-approved drones—often made me do a double-take on evenings when I arrived at MLK after spending the day at InCrowd’s office. The two sets of employees were indistinguishable at first glance. This enthusiastic startup aesthetic was essential to producing the Digital Commons space. Deliberately or not, the “hipster contingent”—cool, young, skilled White people in t-shirts and jeans—very much embodied the hope linking personal computing with social mobility. They were the access doctrine made flesh. The library pivoted to them, and their job was to help patrons pivot in turn. Their labor was not only the technical work of helping to set up resumes or recover email passwords, but the work of projecting that hope, of performing the future of the public library.
The library applied tremendous energy and resources—best symbolized by the hiring of the hipster contingent and the $208 million renovation budget—to become a hopeful, professionalizing space. Reyes-Gavilan evangelized this shift from the top down, and it only gained momentum as the renovation drew closer. The Dutch architecture firm that designed the new MLK even produced a documentary about the renovation that linked King’s political values with the design philosophy of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Dutch modernist whose famous black metal facade made the building an historic site—which also made renovations more difficult to plan and approve. The trailer shows architects pushing past “scary” interior doors and lifting rusted blinds out of their way as they discuss how they’re going to bring people, instead of books, into the light. Their conversations carry on as the camera pans through librarians’ cubicles and, again and again, the rows of computer users in the Digital Commons.
This story leads to a particular, professionalizing way of using the library and its digital resources. It is individualized through long rows of PCs or desks with plugs. It is transparent with glass cubicles and open air. It is surveilled to orient patrons toward the habits and methods of office work. But the institution’s production of space is always, to greater or lesser degrees, resisted by the people within. Many homeless patrons, with whom I spent the majority of my time in MLK, recognized that the institution and the people working in it could never wholly commit to the neoliberal access doctrine, in part because they still valued the older, liberal ideal of the library as a space of public service.
There was thus an ongoing debate among the majority-White professionals over what the library of the future owed to the library of the past. Patrons picked up on this, strategically using different librarians’ sympathies for different positions or, in other cases, the very indeterminacy of the debate to claim space in the library for their own purposes. Patrons may not have been among the stakeholders shaping the bootstrapping process—it was supposed to serve them, but they could not offer the organization resources or legitimacy—but it was a contentious process. And as it unfolded, patrons could take advantage of it in order to adapt the bootstrapping library to their needs or to build alternative spaces of their own—libraries within the library. That the new, professionalizing library did not fit some patrons’ needs did not stop patrons or sympathetic librarians from using the symbols and technologies associated with whiteness and professionalism to secure aid, comfort, and community (Brock 2020).9
Adapting to the Bootstrapping Library
Patrons knew which librarians were best able to help them with particular tasks, such as filling out forms for food stamps, affordable housing, and the like. Patrons knew this and picked particular librarians with good reputations for particular tasks. These adaptations to the library space relied on an intimate understanding of an important and unresolved ideological tension within most librarians, an uneasy gap between two ideal libraries: a professionalizing space full of future entrepreneurs and a public space full of citizens to be served. This was easiest to see when pornography came up. Most patrons acknowledged that watching pornography was “doing the library wrong”—most of it was filtered, after all—but knew that they could get away with it anyway with a little work: choosing the right site that the filter had yet to catch, switching between windows so librarians patrolling the rows didn’t catch them. It was a very rare day that I did not spot several screens of hardcore pornography in Digital Commons’ open rows of PCs.
As Rachel, an early-thirties librarian, explained, she and her peers wanted to preserve the professionalism of the community access center. Watching porn at the office, of course, is generally frowned upon. But they also wanted to preserve the library as a public space, what they understood as their profession’s historical legacy. Rachel couched the issue of internet porn in a series of contingencies: “If you look at a nudie picture and you do it in a way that other people don’t have to see it, it doesn’t bother me. … If they don’t have access to a computer in another spot and it’s an outlet, it doesn’t really bother me.” Her branch’s lab was not laid out in MLK’s neat rows, so she could turn a blind eye when patrons opened porn on more isolated computers.
Elena echoed her, telling me internet porn was “morally awkward and professionally awkward … an unclear gray area.” This conflict between what they had to do and what they wanted to do extended to other areas, but porn was the first example of doing the library wrong that everyone I spoke with jumped to, just as job applications were the go-to example of “doing the library right.” Despite this consistent rhetorical positioning of porn as a negative example of how to use the library, it was clear that porn was a positive example of the sort of service librarians believed they should provide: giving people the space and the materials they could not get elsewhere. Librarians felt conflicted about porn because this particular digital resource exposed the conflict between two distinct but overlapping institutional cultures: a public service library that welcomed all comers and a bootstrapping library that trained digital professionals.
But librarians were not the only municipal employees enforcing the rules of the space. There was also the custodial staff and a heavy police presence—especially at MLK, where five or six officers were on duty at a time. Members of a dedicated library police force separate from the Metropolitan Police Department, they roamed the Digital Commons, hands on holstered pistols, walkie-talkies the loudest thing in a quiet room. They had a desk at the entrance and a control room upstairs to review the surveillance camera network. They were allowed to touch patrons, where librarians were not. Police tended to enforce norms for sleeping, drugs, fights, phones, theft, or exposure, rather than personal computing proper—unless a librarian called them in to act as the stern right hand, enforcing the liberal left hand’s rules.10 Adapting to the police required less negotiation and more stealth.
Any day Mia and the friends she called the crew were not at a day program for a clinic or a visit with social services (which was often; being poor and “in the system” is time-consuming and expensive), they were at the library. But they only began their regular routine at MLK in late 2013. The crew had moved from branch to branch, fleeing police who hassled them, Shawn especially, for sleeping at computer desks or speaking too loudly on the phone. A year later, Shawn and his girlfriend Ebony were still frightened when an officer they recognized from the Northwest One branch visited MLK. At the smaller branches with only a dozen or so PCs, it is easier to spot patrons using the library incorrectly. MLK’s greater size allowed for greater anonymity. But Mia was still frequently tapped by police when she looked like she was dozing off, when in fact her astigmatism forced her to lean in close to her laptop screen.
Despite this general animosity, Mia and Ebony, like many homeless patrons, also strategically leveraged their relationships with individual police officers. Food was forbidden in the Digital Commons, but Mia was diabetic and needed regular snacks. So she waited to eat until specific police officers were on patrol and hid the food when unfriendly ones were roaming the lab. She was strategic but undaunted: “The ones that are assholes better stay the hell away from me. I know that. They know I’ll chew them out in a quick heartbeat.” In the fall of 2014, Mia supported Ebony in seeking help from the police after her assault by a group of teenage girls in the bathroom. The police brought the two of them back into their surveillance room, a rare look behind the scenes, and asked for descriptions as they scanned the library for the assailants.
Beyond adapting to library personnel, patrons also learned to adapt to organizational infrastructure, developing a slew of strategies to manage the login system and the queue. “You only get two [computer sessions] a day,” Mia said. She went on, explaining how she adapted to these limits: “If you’re diligently looking for work, trying to update your resume, looking for different training programs, looking for housing … if you’re in my situation and you’re trying to do all of those things in a day, an hour and ten minutes [per session] is not enough. After your two, that’s it. You got to scramble around and be like ‘Hey are you using your other reservation? Can I use your library card?’ Or ask a family member to make a library card even though they never go to the library. For a while, I was using my uncle’s library card because he never goes. He has it but just never uses it. I was going to ask my grandma to make one as well because she’s a movie person.” It was a great deal of work to actually carry out these adaptations—whether that was work that patrons did ahead of time, like Mia did, or work that happened in the moment, as a session was running down. Ebony, before she was gifted a used laptop by an older friend from her church, would email whatever she was working on to herself before her session ended, run back and grab Mia’s library card, and book a new session as quickly as possible.
Other patrons would work in pairs, hoping the police did not spot them and enforce the one-user-per-computer rule. One partner would sign up for a session where they collaborated on a task, and once the countdown timer appeared onscreen the other would run to the queue to reserve a new machine where they could continue the task. Credential-swapping as a form of mutual aid was of course not limited to the library. Patrons shared other state-issued ID cards—SNAP cards or clinic-issued Metro passes—when and where they felt they would not get caught. They took this practice into the bootstrapping library to make the space work for them.
If the queue indexed the strain placed on the neoliberal library and demonstrated how it managed that strain, queue gaming, porn watching, and police dodging showed that a space of public service, fit for whatever you needed, was still there if you were willing to work for it.
Resisting the Bootstrapping Library
Library leaders called on a complex set of materials—architecture, computing infrastructure, specially selected workers—to bootstrap MLK. Every day, that library of the future was built around, and sometimes over or against, the needs of the present space in downtown DC, where one of the last few public spaces in the city—staffed by highly educated, helping professionals—served marginalized Washingtonians with few other places to go.
It is important to make clear the basic fact that though patrons vastly outnumbered staff, they lacked the organization, resources, or institutional support networks to dictate the library’s design.11 For this reason, and despite being the people putatively served by these reforms, patrons were not fully included as stakeholders in the planning and execution of the bootstrapping process. There was little incentive to include them. Patrons couldn’t offer the credentials that iSchools did or the resources and legitimacy available from the municipal government—and their complex needs challenged the simple framing of the access doctrine.
Beyond what resources patrons did or did not bring into the library, the library itself also limited what patrons could change about the space, through choices made in its architecture, infrastructure, and the scripts for its technologies. The end result was increasingly stark divides built between the library of the future and the people it was supposed to empower. These divides could be quite literal, like the glass walls splitting the Dream Lab coworking spaces from the Digital Commons computer lab.
Still, resistance flourished. Patrons went beyond adapting to the bootstrapping library and created small alternatives to this professionalization of the space. The bootstrapping process could never fully succeed—indeed, as chapter 5 will show, it never can—and so the public space built into the library’s ideological and architectural bones could always support fleeting moments of unprofessional place-making that largely did not engage with MLK’s digital resources. This meant more than individual moments of watching porn that librarians couldn’t decide what to do with; it meant creating collective spaces of play, collaboration, and rest that existed as an alternative to the professionalizing library—even if some were eventually subsumed by it.
First, there were plenty of places to play in the Digital Commons. Most important was a group of tables and chairs with no desktop PCs in the corner of the room, near the queue screens and the glass windows that looked out onto the lines forming outside Catholic Charities for its free meals. For 2013 and much of 2014, this corner was taken up, especially after school let out, by loud card games—mostly Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! Friends, mostly young Black and Latinx men, met there every day and cheered each other on like at any other sporting event. Phones and computers were left to charge under the desks or against the walls, sidelined in favor of the main event.
But that is not “doing the library right.” You wouldn’t cheer on a Yu-Gi-Oh! match in your office. And so Jefferey, a mid-twenties colleague of Eugene’s in the hipster contingent, replete with mohawk and mechanics coveralls, invited a friend of his who lived in a Maryland suburb to drive in on weekends and organize official Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! leagues. The new Battle Subway Pokémon League was an official league of the Pokémon Company International. It was advertised by the library, by players on Facebook, and by flyers showing cartoon monsters fighting in a DC Metro car. Robert, the organizer, brought official tournament jackets and badges to the Dream Lab one Saturday each month, when the startup employees weren’t using the space. Space was also set aside in the foyer on some Thursday afternoons—though school was in session for part of that timeslot. With the raucous play contained to a themed space and time, librarians were free to crack down on gameplay in noisy corners during the week. The library’s professionalism was secured.
Second, patrons built spaces of collaboration that differed from both the didactic, lecture-hall setup of the Digital Commons and the digital, professional collaborations of the Dream Lab, the Fab Lab, and more advanced classes. Collaboration was, of course, part of the plan for the Dream Lab’s glass cubicles. Its largely White technologists were usually the loudest patrons in the room during the week, brainstorming on the cubicle whiteboards and video-chatting distributed work groups while the rest of the Digital Commons typed and whispered and had headphones offered to them by librarians if their music was audible.
Patrons acknowledged this segregation to me, but it hardly impacted their routine. Most walked right past it, to whatever desk they could find. But entrepreneurial collaboration still flourished outside of these approved spaces, though not of the digital, professional sort the library or the city government advertised—that is, what went on at Mapbox. For example, patron Ricky, who worked at a restaurant down the street, would roam the rows selling loose cigarettes. Sales of harder drugs, usually synthetic marijuana (aka K2) or crack cocaine, were frequent and more or less surreptitious depending on the client and seller. Library police were always looking for drug sales, taking a special interest whenever two people huddled together—even couples.
The library changed its own layout to crack down on these entrepreneurial collaborations. The sidewalk out front used to form a cozy corner with an alley separating MLK from the church next door, a secluded spot for sales or a nap along a busy block that got more crowded as lines formed for shelter shuttle pick-ups. This was a point of conflict for a neighborhood increasingly becoming a dining and residential destination and which already hosted a basketball stadium, a movie theater, and department stores among older office buildings. Residents of the ten-story Mather Studios condominium building across the street called a public meeting with the library, DC police, and their city council member in May 2014 to address what the meeting RSVP called “the degrading situation in front of the Library.” That the meeting was prompted by complaints from the condo association, rather than long-standing struggles of library patrons, was again evidence of the uneven responsiveness of the library to different groups of stakeholders.
The report from that meeting gave residents guidance on what was (public urination, blocking private entryways) and was not (general loitering) illegal on DC sidewalks and provided instructions on when and how to alert police. That summer, MLK began leasing that cozy corner space to the Bike and Roll bicycle rental company. The company’s bikes and storage units took over the space and invited more tourists into it. A conference on homelessness, with the Friends of the Library and local service providers—but no homeless individuals—followed soon after, as well as the hiring of a dedicated social worker, to some public fanfare (Sheir 2015).
Other forms of entrepreneurial collaboration in the library drew less attention from police and property owners. Oil men were a constant presence at MLK: Black men, often Muslim, with tiny vials of fragrant oils stored either in belts on their chest, jutting up against long beards, or in light wooden racks that can be carried under one arm. Pairs would meet up in a back row between rush-hour shifts, cataloging their products, planning pitches, poring over maps on their phones, working out sales routes. The library was their planning space, but, unlike the tech workers, they didn’t use the Dream Lab’s glass cubicles. Police mostly left them alone. Jackie, Mia’s mother, drew on her many hours spent watching YouTube crochet tutorials to sell colorful knitted phone sleeves and wallets. Mia modeled the items to friends and directed business her mother’s way.
There was also a robust culture of mutual aid. This included frequent trade in peripherals, as well as advice for speeding up used laptops or finding free software, collaborative efforts to combat a widespread condition of “dependable instability” in patron devices (Gonzales 2016). Friends exchanged for free; others kept themselves in cigarettes or bus passes by offering services like repairs or assistance loading songs onto MP3 players.
Mia acted as a one-woman community exchange from her favored spot in the back row of the Digital Commons, guiding friends to file-sharing services or through particular forms. One freezing day in January 2015, I entered the lab to find her sharing Pokémon tips and tricks with friends before moving to a more serious task: finding housing and figuring out whether her vouchers would continue. She and her friend Raquel, who was in the same boat, divided up the labor.
Mia had her own laptop and so took on the tasks that would’ve outlasted a session on the library computers: taking notes on DC housing policy and generating a list of shelters and transitional housing facilities for Raquel to call and ask about available beds. Raquel went down the list and reported the results to Mia, who recorded the data. Mia passed the contact sheet, now annotated with available beds, to other friends before turning back to Pokémon. Raquel shifted to calling temp agencies, taking notes on who answered the phone, their general demeanor, and the jobs available so that she could pass the information along to other library regulars. The library was a base for their collaborations, but, desks and Wi-Fi aside, actual library resources played little role in the process.
Beyond play and collaboration, the most important alternative use of the library space, especially for homeless patrons, was as a place to rest. This visible lack of productivity of course violated the professional script of the bootstrapping library, and so was constantly policed. For patrons, the Digital Commons was not only a place to apply to jobs or learn Excel. It was a place to check email between dishwasher shifts. Or a place to stop after a day program ends because most shelters kick residents out during the day. Or a place to sleep during DC’s 100°F summers because neither shelter beds—“there’s no such thing as relaxing at the House of Ruth,” Mia told me—nor the sewer grates above the subway stop next to MLK are quiet, comfortable spaces at night and because many psychiatric medications are strong sedatives. Indeed, ambulance pick-ups from MLK were not uncommon, with patrons collapsing after an unseasonably cold night on the street or, in the case of Mia and Ebony’s friend Josie, after being unable to secure new doses of seizure medication.
As with porn, librarians were conflicted over the issue of sleep. But the new focus on professionalism resolved the question for them: sleep not only was an unproductive use of the library’s computer lab, but it discouraged others from productive activity. And so sleeping patrons were the most visible site of librarian discipline. Librarians patrolled, knocking on the desks of people dozing off with a loud “sir” or “ma’am,” calling library police over if patrons did not respond. Elena explained how she worked through this conflict in her head:
We are not allowed to sleep in the libraries. A library, whatever else it is, is “a place for lifelong learning”—that’s kind of the buzz phrase of the moment. And it is and we want people who want to come in and use our collections to come in and use our collections and our resources and feel comfortable coming and using them.
If all the tables are full of people with their head down asleep it’s not super inviting for people who are there to use our services as more than just a building to sit in for the day. Which is why if you sit there with a book or a newspaper, you’ve kind of indicated you’re interested in using our collections and our services but maybe you’re tired [and so will not be woken up].
Elena could never decide whether library furniture counted as a public resource in the same way the computers and collections did. She quit DC Public Library right as the Digital Commons opened.
Elena’s commitment to policing showed that patrons’ sleep jeopardized the library’s bootstrapping mission. Digital resources like the computer lab were what made MLK “more than just a building to sit in for the day.” And their presence certainly brought people in. After all, when the Pharos system broke down in December 2014 and the computer lab’s Dells were inaccessible, the library was open but empty. Patrons came to those machines to work or look for work, to manage social services, to connect and play, to compete or cooperate, to rest. Where else in the city could they find that sort of comfort and freedom, for free? But those tools and that space had to be used in a way that fit the bootstrapping library. Paradoxically, the library’s openness pushed it further toward this more limited, professional vision. Librarians did not have the training or resources to meet all the needs patrons brought into the Digital Commons. And so they managed this local crisis of care by cracking down on forms of adaptation and resistance. Such discipline was not purely negative, cutting away at unacceptable uses of the space. Rather, in their day-to-day work, libarians’ discipline expressed the acceptable uses of the space, reducing the diverse range of patrons’ needs to a smaller, more tractable set that the institution was equipped to address This discipline was also forward-looking, producing the hope that professionalizing the library would secure a space in the future for the institution, its employees, and its patrons.
The library bootstrapped in order to garner much-needed support from outside the organization and to make the complex social problems facing the organization more tractable for people inside it, remaking its operations, personnel, and space to support digital professionalism. The queue for computers made this strain and their management of it visible. Patrons needed to be, as librarian Grant put it, “using the technology to improve their lives.” But resistance persisted. Patrons who needed something else from the library, and librarians who understood it as a truly public space, pushed back on the professionalization of the space. That resistance was largely overcome, as the issue of sleep made clear. MLK needed to be, as Elena put it, “more than just a building to sit in for the day.”
There was a similar tension at play in the Du Bois charter school, the subject of the next chapter, where the stakes of student success were so high that the school, like InCrowd, operated in permanent beta, constantly reinventing itself in the face of new data. But MLK was literally rebuilt around this hope in a digital, professional future, shedding the old transactional space for a new transformative one. During this three-year $208 million renovation, MLK moved many of its services to other short-term homes. Planning for that process forced library staff to admit that the contemporary computer labs had failed and needed to be taken apart and put back together again. This made clear that bootstrapping does not have an end state; it is a constant process of organizational reform done in the hope of finally finding the right mix of digital tools and skills that will bring the people on the margins of the information economy to its center. As the crackdown on rest spaces showed, preserving this mission, so important to the future of the organization, could mean refusing the needs of those same marginalized people.
Grant, a Black librarian in his late thirties, described this process to me. He wore a suit to work, in contrast to the hipster contingent, and patrolled the Digital Commons with authority. He was resigned to the renovation, maintaining that Martin Luther King Jr.’s name was disgraced by the building. It should have been torn down and rethought a long time ago, he said, and would have been if it were not for its landmark designation. He believed patrons were not being served by the library, or any DC government agency: “Those patrons need help but we’re not in a position to help them at all. As a matter of fact, I feel like a lot of our staff here feel we need to entertain them.”
Looking back through the Dream Lab’s glass walls one afternoon, he walked me through a game he often played—not dissimilar to April’s gold stars and paint buckets. Grant estimated that only four or five of the seventy-five users he walked past to get here were working on job applications or resumes, with the rest playing video games or on social media. “Been doing that all morning. That’s what they were doing yesterday, that’s what they’re going to be doing tomorrow.” He sighed and nodded toward Shawn, watching Dragon Ball Z cartoons on YouTube. They had a long-standing relationship. Grant had gotten Shawn some clothes and money, acted as a reference, and helped Shawn map out library classes that would refine his artistic skills. “When he sees that you’re trying to do something with yourself, like fill out resumes in there or go to school, those librarians, they’ll be there for you,” Shawn said. It was clear to him that Grant cared and that his care went beyond the narrow frame offered by the bootstrapping library.
Shawn looked up to Grant and appreciated the librarian’s commitment to service, but he never took those classes. Life got in the way; being poor in the city is a full-time job filled with endless appointments, queues, and moves. Grant suspected Shawn’s depression didn’t help matters. Ebony had returned to school to get her GED, showing off her report card to her crew in the Digital Commons each quarter. Grant admired her for that, but he was not angry at Shawn for not following Ebony’s example. Firms like InCrowd that were changing DC, after all, produced culture as much as they produced software, and Grant recognized that a homeless Black man with no college and scant work history would have trouble being accepted into that culture—even if he did master Adobe InDesign.
Grant observed a conflict between what the digital resources were meant for—professionalization—and what they were usually used for—rest, play, and collaboration. He taught classes with the 3-D printers or the Espresso Book Machine and felt that “there is innovation happening” in that classroom or the offices next door. But he knew that because of the “stigma associated with this building,” the younger, wealthier, Whiter crowd would “make a beeline straight for what they have to do and they don’t hang out.” The present space was not for them, but the future one might be. This was true even for the Friends of the Library. When they visit, “We’re told to tidy up and keep everyone quiet, so they don’t scare the good White folks. And I think that’s absolutely disgusting. And I resent it.”
The hope had been that professionalizing the space would empower regular patrons—but those resources and that mission were best embodied by the sort of White professionals who irregularly visited the library. The solution, Grant said, would be to further partition the space: “Certainly, moving forward with the renovation, everyone seems to be pretty clear that this did not work. The crowd they want to have—this crowd, our everyday patrons, are not using the services we hoped they would use. So, if they want to use the computer all day, mess around, that’s fine, it’s just going to be in a different space. And those that want to get serious with technology and support technology, there will be a dedicated space for that.”
What this meant in practice was that during the renovation, some of MLK’s computers, training programs, adult literacy classes, and collections would be distributed across existing branches and temporary Library Express locations to serve the homeless patrons dislocated by MLK’s closure. It would be a different story for the places where “innovation was happening.” The Fab Lab, for example, had special electrical and ventilation needs that couldn’t be served by a branch, so it hit the road as an ambassador from the library’s future. It stopped in the DC government municipal building on the bustling Fourteenth Street NW corridor, and then in a shipping container in the gentrifying NoMa12 neighborhood. The container was sponsored by the NoMa Business Improvement District, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the DC Public Library Foundation, and Uber.
Plans for the new MLK retained some elements of these temporary partitions. There would be no dedicated Dream Lab in the new Digital Commons; glass cubicles would be scattered throughout. The new library would allow for more crowds and noise on that ground floor, and then increasingly, in Grant’s words, “get serious with technology” on higher, quieter floors. The Fab Lab and a new Creative Lab took pride of place in the heart of the rebuilt A Level. Dedicated collaboration and coworking spaces would be moved to the third floor between executive and staff offices. In Mecanoo Architecten and Martinez + Johnson’s winning architectural renderings (2014), the before picture of the Popular Services collection on the first floor showed a dim, frontal shot of three older men at rest, full bags at their side. The after picture showed a collection of young, multiracial families and professionals striding through the bright, open space and around its café. Grant and his colleagues suspected that in practice this meant there would be spaces for daily patrons like Shawn and Mia, and other, separate spaces for more professional visitors. This is the bootstrapping library. It is not just a future transformation of physical space but an active reorganization in the present of people, technology, and ideas. Thus we see that preserving the hope in personal computing to change the future requires partitioning it from today’s messy needs. The homeless patrons watching YouTube or dozing off in the back of the Digital Commons did not fit the hope of the Dream Lab or the Fab Lab upstairs. At the time of this writing, the library was still being built, both by construction workers and by the people who will eventually fill the space. But for now, and, if the renderings are to be believed, in the future, those rest places, collaboration places, and play places that patrons built will be physically segregated from the startup workspaces, the seminar spaces, and the transformative technologies that will form the heart of the new library.
1. The term homeless is contentious. Homeless activists, nonprofits fighting housing deprivation, and critical scholars of housing have offered up a variety of alternatives. Some emphasize both the people involved and the fact that homelessness is a social status rather than a permanent identity (e.g., “people currently experiencing homelessness”). Others shift the focus to the capitalist housing system that creates homelessness in the first place (e.g., houselessness or the unhoused). Homeless was the term most often used by my informants, whether homeless or not. I use it for that reason and because, following Wilse 2015, I am exploring homelessness as a particular category of people constructed as a problem by particular state agencies, nonprofits, and private developers concerned not so much with solving housing insecurity but with managing the problem-people in a way that not only minimizes their disruptions to urban development but that also becomes economically and politically productive for the problem-managers.
2. Library fieldwork focused on MLK, supplemented by special events at and occasional visits to other DCPL branches. Library interviews drew from patrons who visited MLK frequently and from librarians who worked both at the central branch and satellite branches—in part to better understand whether the organizational culture at MLK generalized to the rest of DCPL. Librarians in this chapter is a broad term encompassing all library workers who work with or for patrons and handle informational materials, thus excluding custodial workers or police but collapsing the distinction between entry-level library technicians and those with master’s degrees in library science.
3. Mecanoo is a Dutch firm. Martinez + Johnson were local, and had redesigned DCPL branches in Takoma Park and Georgetown. Over the course of MLK’s renovation, Martinez + Johnson were acquired by a larger, national firm, OTJ Architects, who continued their work.
4. The Advisory Neighborhood Commissions (ANCs) are the smallest unit of local governance in DC. Each ward is divided into between four and six ANCs, and each ANC has a significant say in what development is approved or blocked in their neighborhood. They are thus important power brokers with which even large developers or municipal officials like Reyes-Gavilan must curry favor. In theory, the ANC structure allows for significant community input into local development. In practice, the people speaking for the community are rarely representative of it: typically older, wealthier, Whiter homeowners with the literacy and free time available to provide input to these meetings. Williams (1988) discussed this process as part of her investigation into an earlier wave of DC gentrification. For a more recent review of similar neighborhood governance dynamics in Boston, see Tissot 2015.
5. The 2000 Children’s Internet Protection Act requires all libraries receiving federal funding to install such filters.
6. Patrons who were relatively new to the library and in need of a quick transaction (e.g., tourists printing out a ticket for the nearby Chinatown buses that go up and down the east coast, date-night couples checking the Regal Gallery Place movie theater schedule) would often walk into the Digital Commons, sit down at an empty PC, try to log on, and stand up flustered before being redirected to the sign-up queue. They were inevitably younger and Whiter than regulars.
7. Interestingly, the word science does not appear in the college’s name, although it does of course appear in the MLS—and the iSchool itself, now my employer, grew to include more “scientific” degree programs such as master’s degrees in human computer interaction and information management and a BS in information science. And though the MLS curriculum in general did shift to include more of a research base, Becca does appear to be projecting her fears over the profession’s future onto the college as a whole.
8. In many ways, this is a return to form. As Kernochan (2016) notes, the recent turn to foundation funding echoes the early days of US public libraries and their reliance on Gilded Age industrial magnates—most notably Andrew Carnegie—although this time around the funding must be sought through grant competitions.
9. For further discussion of the default whiteness and default professionalism of digital spaces and creative misuse of them by non-White technologists (amateur or professional), see Brock 2020.
10. These interactions repeat all day long, forming a sort of interpersonal representation of institutional neoliberalism and the intimate relationship it fosters between the carceral state and the welfare state.
11. Patrons is of course a generalization. While I spent most of my library fieldwork time with the homeless community, the Friends of the Library—wealthier, organized, politically astute—could and would make demands of the library’s resources that were often granted: space for events, book sales, a conference. This of course did not happen as frequently as they might wish. At an October 2014 presentation by the National Capital Planning Commission addressing how the planned renovations to MLK would affect Mies van der Rohe’s historic architecture, Caroline, the group’s leader, muttered to me that new DCPL Executive Director Richard Reyes-Gavilan’s shout out to the Friends was “window dressing” because the Friends were never consulted, just “talked at.” Neither Caroline nor Bill—another Friend, passionate about teaching digital literacy—lived near MLK, nor did they regularly frequent its collections outside of meetings and events—a stark difference from other, admittedly better funded, Friends groups associated with specific branches.
12. The name is a recent coinage by the local Business Improvement District for the neighborhood north of Massachusetts Avenue NW, alien to DC natives.