About Our Library

When my husband and I moved to the Key Peninsula, getting a new Pierce County library card felt like a homecoming.”

My grandmother was a voracious reader, and she took me along on her weekly trips to pick up a new stack of mystery novels from the Sumner library. I remember how proud I was to get my first library card, and how hard it was to narrow down my stack of early reader books to the 10 my grandma allowed me to check out each week. I loved the thrill of checking out a new book, and the librarian would say, “Oh, this is a good one.”

Every library has its own kind of magic. My first job after college was an AmeriCorps posting in Nebraska. The director was a character; he was a seed saver in Big Ag country and had proudly framed his cease-and-desist letters from Monsanto behind his desk. He hosted a seed swap and a best-tasting-tomato contest and managed to make the library feel like a colorful oasis in the monotony of corn fields.

When I moved back to Washington and started nonprofit work in Seattle, I couldn’t afford internet at my tiny apartment. That wasn’t a problem, though, as I was only blocks away from the downtown library. A favorite activity in those early days of living in a new city was taking the escalator up to the top of the book spiral and slowly wandering back down through the stacks. One day on my ride up, I passed the research desk where a librarian, on the phone with a patron, was patiently explaining what “sous vide” meant. Who needs AI when librarians already exist?

When my husband and I moved to the Key Peninsula, getting a new Pierce County library card felt like a homecoming. We arrived in the middle of Covid, so for months, I picked up my library holds outside and waited until I could go in and browse. As the world opened back up and my family grew with the addition of our daughter, the library became one of our favorite places. Before we made any friends here, I knew I could go to the library and chat with a familiar face across the desk. We started attending story time, and I watched my daughter fall in love with the library and the people who work there.

My love of libraries runs deep, which is why I was dismayed to learn of the changes Pierce County Library leadership had planned for our own in Key Center. Specialist positions would largely be eliminated, and most staff would work not just in their home branch but in two other locations as well. Friends cried when I told them about what was happening, and library staff members were breaking down in tears in meetings too; everyone was upset and confused about why these changes were necessary.

Some friends and I arranged to meet with the executive director of PCLS, Gretchen Caserotti, and Deputy Director Connie Behe to express our concerns and hear for ourselves what the justification was for these changes. I had asked for a town hall, but a meeting over coffee was the only thing on offer.

We learned that the changes to the specialist positions were financially motivated; the decision to start rotating staff to multiple branches, however, was not.

Instead, the rotations are part of a new service model that Caserotti and Behe said would bring PCLS in line with other library systems’ “best practices.” Behe spoke at length about the supposed benefits of this new model: better exchange of ideas among staff, streamlining of operations across branches, librarians being out of the library and in the community more.

But at the end of our conversation, I remained unconvinced that rotating staff was necessary to accomplish these goals. I was taken aback at Caserotti’s willingness to blame her staff for how these changes have upset the community, and Behe’s lack of research into them. They had no examples of how librarians would actually go “out in the community.”

I take issue with the idea that the library building is somehow not already part of the community. And if staff from Key Center are being sent to Steilacoom so the librarian there can leave the building, how are we ensuring equity across branches so that Key Center also benefits from these offerings and is not just sacrificing our connections with the library staff we know and trust?

Caserotti said that staff rotation didn’t need to be permanent if it turned out it wasn’t accomplishing their goals. How will the work of meeting them be measured? Caserotti responded that she currently has no plans in place to do so.

Neither Caserotti nor Behe had bad intentions, but they weren’t able to predict the response to these changes, and they have no plan in place to explain them. Our community values and appreciates our library staff, and, surprisingly, their leadership didn’t think we would notice when they were all suddenly gone.

My grandmother died unexpectedly when she was 62, and I was 19. A few years after her passing, I stopped into the Sumner branch on her birthday, just to thumb through the mystery section for her. One of the librarians recognized me and told me how much she had loved chatting with my grandmother over the years, and how special it was to see her bring my sister and me in each week. That recognition and moment of connection meant so much to me, and is what becomes lost when we treat the people who work at our libraries as interchangeable.

Madeleine Spencer is a farmer tending community, food, and family in Longbranch.