Has anyone sent up the jessamyn signal yet?

Everything you typed sounds quite reasonable to this bleeding heart liberal, but that doesn't mean there isn't another way.

I can't begin to pretend that I can put myself in a homeless person's position and understand this, but my *guess* is that most of the homeless who use the library would prefer to do their reading/research/etc in the library rather than at a shelter (or on the streets). Many homeless guard their few possessions very closely. They may not even want to risk losing a library item, especially if they are concerned that doing so would mean fines or exclude them being able to use the library in the future.

That was the policy of the library I worked at too, except that they couldn't use the address of the homeless shelter because that's very temporary housing around here. And it is definitely coming from practicality. The number of people, in no way limited to the homeless, who don't return library materials is pretty high, and everything that doesn't come back cuts everyone else's access (including the homeless' access) to that item.

What my library did as a compromise when a card wasn't possible was to direct people with kids to the ongoing booksale shelves -- they could take any kids books they wanted for free, and I don't think anybody would have said anything if a grownup book got added to that.

It's one of those ongoing discussions in the profession, and different people (and different kinds of libraries and library systems) can reasonably disagree both about priorities and about how to provide the best access to the largest possible number of people.

In my own public library system, the no-permanent-physical-address thing also causes problems for, among others, people who live in rural areas with unreliable or insecure mail service, visiting students and artists and workers, people who are staying in the area while family members are in hospital or hospice care, people who are in rehab or battered women shelters, etc., etc.

Like a lot of things in libraryland, the patron-level interaction has a lot of wiggle room and space for individual decisions and whatnot. I've signed up plenty of people for cards without permanent addresses--I try to impress upon the staff here that we're here to serve the public, and encourage them to use their best judgment when it comes to things like waiving fines, giving out free replacement cards, signing up kids without a parent present and, yeah, issues related to addresses.

The public library exists to serve the public, and that means everybody. And yeah, we're going to lose some items, but I'd rather we lost a book than lost a patron.

Box, that's awesome. I never thought about those examples like long term hospital/rehab patients and families. A good library would be an amazing resource in those situations. Thank you for fighting for the public.

As someone who spends an enormous amount of time at various libraries in an area with a high homeless population, I have had a lot of opportunity to observe patterns of how library staff interact with homeless people. And I am consistently impressed at how, at least in the Bay Area, they seem to always treat even the most obviously mentally ill, dirty, or disorganized homeless folks with total respect. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I haven't seen them.

The libraries have been cut so badly here, the actual library buildings get almost no maintenance or upkeep since janitorial budgets were slashed long ago, and lately the libraries are extra crowded, I guess because people are broke and the library is free. Sometimes I think my local librarians are tougher than Navy Seals. They are my freaking heroes! LIBRARIANS, I SALUTE YOU!!

I totally love libraries and librarians. Totally.

but . . . I am having trouble seeing why an address is necessary to get a library card. I'd be happy to fund cost to replace books myself if it meant people without addresses could take out the books they want.

I know I'm a little schmoopy, but I recently read The Help and one of the parts of the book that really touched my soul was early on, when it discussed the fact that African Americans weren't allowed to take books out of the library. Don't want that to happen to any adult in America again.

I'm sure that an address is needed to make sure that it's only the taxpayers of the district that are borrowing materials or using specific resources. It's unfortunate that people without any address at all are left out (and I'm glad to hear of librarians making exceptions) but I think the address rule is sometimes needed.

on the other hand, it feels like a sort of classist discrimination.

It is. box has sort of summed up my feelings too. In short, anything that the public library charges people to do is, at some level, discriminating against poor people. Some librarians have made a point to address this by creating the Services to the Poor policy. Like all ALA policies, it's a suggetion. Also, there are some "reality check" aspects of any policy where a policy has to balance the library's mission and also the library's bottom line.

So, sometimes libraries argue they should require a physical address because

- the taxpayer thing [which is actually compelling in some places - depending where you are, out-of-towners may have to pay a fee to use the library and requiring an address helps you determine who pays a fee, the argument being that if people live in another town they can use the library there. it's fraught with pitfalls but it's consistent]
- the risk thing. Without a physical address or a way to contact people, you're less likely to see your books again. But whatever, this is true for lots of other classes of material and patron. It doesn't hold a lot of merit.
- the general transient thing. Similar to the above but just generally that not having a home means not being really a "citizen" according to some people.

There are other issues like women in shelters, people in prisons [where they have a local address, but ....] and kids who don't live with their parents.

Most librarians I know, literally most, find ways to get library cards to people with no fixed address. That said, it's an open topic of debate along with dealing with mentally ill patrons, patrons with "offensive" actions or odors and/or patrons with a shit ton of stuff. So, a lot of this is muddled through on a case by case basis and some forward thinking systems have made policies that enable the homeless to get cards and some backwards places have put policies in place that forbid this. Often it's one or two staffers who can make all the difference.