The Library Map of Vermont Transcript

Back to The Library Map of Vermont episode.

Amanda: This is Before Your Time, presented by the Vermont Historical Society and Vermont Humanities. Every episode, we go inside the stacks at the Vermont Historical Society to look at an object from their permanent collection that tells us something unique about our state. Then we take a closer look at the people, the events, or the ideas that surround each artifact.

The objects that we’re looking at for these episodes are maps. Each one represents a different moment in Vermont, with questions that spiral out and persist to our present day.

The map we’re looking at for this episode covers the whole state – but just one whole sector of the state. It’s titled “The Library Map of Vermont,” and it was created in 1914 under the auspices of the State Free Public Library Commission – what is today the Vermont Department of Libraries.

There’s a lot of information packed into this map. It tracks all 225 libraries across the state, showing where they are and what their status, is as well as 267 state traveling library stations and where they went around the state. There are numbers that layer on information about how much state aid each library received in the previous fiscal year.

So this map tracks both geography and economics: it wants to show where books have gone, and how those books have been supported, whether by state or community aid.

Looking at this map, you start to get a sense of what it really means for a community to have a well-supported library…and what communities lack that. To really understand what that meant in 1914 and what it means today, we talked to some people with deep experience in Vermont libraries.

Jessamyn: My name is Jessamyn West. I’m a library technologist. I live in Randolph, Vermont, and I do a combination of library work, writing work. And I’m the community manager for the Flickr Foundation, which is a big organization that helps cultural heritage organizations save their digital treasures on the Internet.

Amanda: You may have heard of Jessamyn before; she’s pretty famous in certain circles. She’s a longtime activist and advocate for library work, particularly when that work crosses into digital areas. Many years ago, she was the first official employee for the website Metafilter, and in 2022, she became its owner.

Jessamyn: Oh, I like reading. I like helping people perfect fit. But as it turned out, once I got into library school, I found that not only could you help people, but you could sort of help society. I was always really into social justice stuff, and I thought that was going to have to be different from my job. And as it turned out, it could be the same as my job. I was really interested in intellectual freedom service to, you know, accessibility services, a lot of different ways of helping people answer the questions in their lives. And it turned out librarianship was a surprise. Good fit for that.

Amanda: Jessamyn believes deeply in the value of libraries, especially rural libraries, as community centers that are open and available to everyone.

Jessamyn: The message I really try to get across is we’re just taking care of this building for you. We’re hanging on to these books for you. Like, this is your stuff. You paid for it and you just help pay us to take care of your stuff because everybody can’t be everywhere at once. And I think that message, I think the libraries are often like places of more joyful noise, more, more, more kids, more people having conversations, more. You know, we have a knitting group on Monday night and it’s all talking and knitting. Knitting and talking, Right. But if you wanted to go to a quiet place and read a book, you’d need to know a little bit more about when the good times were to do that. And that’s cool, right? I think it’s for everybody, the noisy people, the quiet people, the kids, the grown ups, the people, sort of with discourse, ability issues, the people who want a clean bathroom, the people that want a bathroom that matches their gender, the people that want a place to be warm in the winter or cool in the summer, like it doesn’t matter. Like it can just be a place to sit.

Amanda: When we showed Jessamyn the map that we were looking at for this episode, she recognized it immediately. But it turned out she also has made her own modern version of the map.

Jessamyn: But also I have a map that I made myself because I’m that kind of person. That’s a new version of this map that shows where the libraries are now. And I did it because I used to be on the board of the 251 club. Now should be called the 252 club because Essex and. You know the goal. It’s like a goofy club. Go to visit all the towns. Right? Vermont’s great. Go check out all the towns. And I was like, Well, I’m going to go see all the libraries.

Amanda: A map like this doesn’t just show you where the libraries are, though – it shows you where they aren’t.

Jessamyn: But you notice up in the Northeast kingdom. You don’t see it there, right? Except for the teeny tiny super upper corner. And then there’s just a big gap of nothing. Right. And one of the things I talked to the state about was how many of those towns now in, you know, the 2020s had no library service or maybe where they paying to like have library service at an adjacent library. Because one of the things that’s really curious about libraries is like this democratic where for everybody institution in a state like Vermont, where each town pays for its own library, is that towns either without a lot of money or without a lot of gung ho feeling about libraries can decide not to have one.

Amanda: We talk a lot in Vermont about the way that resources are distributed, and what’s paid for at the local level versus the state level. Libraries are a key example of that. A lot of the depend on funding that’s approved from one year to the next.

So what does it mean, exactly, to be a community without a library?

Dan: In spite of the amazing fact that we were able to maintain so many of these services outside of the building, it was a huge loss to the community to have the building closed. So reopening as quickly as we could while, you know, making sure that it’s safe for everyone to be here was was really important to us.

Amanda: You’re listening to Dan Groberg, executive director of the Kellogg Hubbard Library in Montpelier.

And, you know, I have heard so many people say, like, it’s so great to be back. It’s so great to be back in the building. It’s so great to be back in the library, because even though we were maintaining that access to the books and the services and there’s just something about being physically in the space and we have, you know, this beautiful historic space. So it’s sort of an inspiring place to come and to learn and to read. So I think that was part of people’s emotional connection to it. I also think reopening was just sort of the symbolic note of of being able to reopen as part of the community’s recovery was really important and powerful for people.

Amanda: This past July, the Kellogg Hubbard Library, like much of downtown Montpelier, was badly damaged in severe flooding. We also talked to Caroline Picazio, the Library Director at the Kellogg-Hubbard, who says that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the things it forced libraries to learn and adapt to, was kind of like a dress rehearsal for what her library went through this summer.

Caroline: And one of these I keep having to use this term that I kind of really don’t like. But one of the silver linings of the pandemic was that we were able to transition really quickly to offering curbside service and to promote digital services.

And we had our, you know, our Wi-Fi network up and running by the end of the week that the flood occurred because we understood the types of uses that our community would need from us, they would need to be able to print because the coffee shop was gone and they would need to be able to connect to the Internet so that they could file FEMA claims and begin the process of of of, you know, digging out from this catastrophe. And so we thought very hard about what services we needed to offer and how to get those out there and then how to continue operating as a library, particularly in times of stress.

Amanda: Despite any preconceptions you may have about libraries, they’re always thinking about the future, in all sorts of ways.

Dan: I think our first level of thinking has been around how we can make sure this building doesn’t experience the damage as significantly in the future if there were another flooding of that.

So pretty much right away. We decided that we would move as many of the building systems out of the basement as possible. So we’re hopeful that if there were if and when there’s a future event, that it will take three months for us to be able to reopen the building to the public, that it would be a matter of, you know, the immediate cleanup, but that all of our building systems would be, you know, we’d be able to have that electricity back much sooner because our main electrical connection and panels are going to be on the second, first or second floor of the building and all of those systems. So I think that’s sort of the first piece of it.

But that being in the service of serving as the community hub at a time of need, right? So if we’re able to have our building open, you know, amidst sort of this chaotic event, if we can say this is a safe place for you, we’re open, we have air conditioning. We had, you know, in the summer, we have heating in the winter. And I think that it’s going to be very important going forward.

Amanda: The Kellogg-Hubbard has been forced into some new kinds of planning after its multiple crises.

Caroline: I think that we’re going to reach a point where digital collections and offerings and physical collections where they are in really in collaboration with each other. And so I definitely see as broadband increases across Vermont and hopefully Internet connected devices become even more available to people than they already are now.

Amanda: When we look to the past, Caroline sees a lot of parallels to libraries today.

Caroline: I mean, I so I, I loved looking at this map because I love geeking out over anything that’s related to Vermont history. But it was fascinating to me that the makeup of the libraries and the total number of libraries in Vermont really hasn’t changed very much. So there has not been, as we have had like better roads or as technology has developed, we haven’t seen a huge change in the landscape from the way that this map was designed.

Amanda: So, for that matter, does Jessamyn.

Jessamyn: So looking at this map specifically, I see a lot of Traveling libraries, which are so exciting and a thing we don’t really have anymore. I’m not sure if there’s still some traveling collections. I believe there are at the state, but also these spaces where there isn’t anything. And if you look at that map in 2023, there still isn’t anything. And it’s an interesting question.

Now, to be fair, there’s very low population in those areas, but there’s not no population in those areas. But spinning up a library from nothing, having a building that you pay for, that you heat, that you maintain, having staff, even volunteer staff is work. It’s harder, I think, to create a library from nothing in 2023. If it includes a building, then maybe it was to spin up library services in 1914 when it could be a box that you could go in somebody’s house that people could come visit

Amanda: Is a traveling library in 1914 similar to a virtual library today? And are either of those two things a substitute for a real, physical library building in your town?

Caroline: So I think that that libraries as a building are going to stay, are going to remain important where, you know, we talk about the epidemic of loneliness and we talk about isolation. And one of the wonderful things that libraries do over and over again is fight isolation for new parents, bringing their kids into storytime or to a playgroup or for senior citizens coming in for for a program or a lecture book talk. I mean, we have all of these ways that we just bring the community together and we bring the community into a space where they can create knowledge, create ideas and share ideas. And I don’t see any of that going away.

Amanda: Jessamyn points out that even if there are geographic similarities between the map, the levels of access at those libraries might have been really different.

Jessamyn: If I’m being honest, they were only for a certain kind of person at the time in 1914, and this would have been true when the first public library started…But, you know, they they started as these sort of white dudes who had library collections at home. Right. And they get around with their friends and they’d all read erudite books and talk about big ideas and then decide how to sort of run the country or run whatever it was that they ran. And so this is a huge democracy push, democratization, push. It’s not in a fancy person’s house anymore. It’s in a house that belongs to everybody eventually. It’s we believe in the value of this and we support it with our taxes.

Amanda: She also makes an interesting parallel to something we talked about in a previous episode of Before Your Time – rural electrification.

Jessamyn: I mean, I think of it in a weird way, like rural electrification. Part of rural electrification was selling people on the idea that electricity would make their lives easier. And I believe electricity ultimately in the big grand scheme of things, did make people’s lives easier. But it also gave them a regular electric bill that also gave them new stuff to shop for. It also gave them stuff, right? And so when I look at libraries, fewer books that really weren’t for as many people in that they didn’t you wouldn’t see yourself represented in them if you were some kinds of person, right? Marginalized people never saw themselves in books except as marginalized people, often without their own stories.

Amanda: So what about that future? What does a version of this map look like 100 years from now?

Dan: we talked earlier about how libraries are such an important facet of civic identity. You know, it’s almost the same conversation that’s been happening around school consolidation. Right. It’s very emotional and very personal. On the other hand, can every little town afford to have its own library? And, you know, again, it’s you know, maybe that’s an administrative question and not the physical branches, as we’ve seen and in the school consolidation as well. But I think I think it’s a difficult conversation, but perhaps one that will start happening more.

Amanda: Jessamyn thinks that history can show us the way.

Jessamyn: And so I do think like telling the stories of where we used to be in librarianship. Really helps us understand, formulate and plan for where we’re going in librarianship, which is why it’s always super cool to get to talk to people like you about things like this, because I think it’s so important to know where this stuff came from. And, you know, I’m one of those nerds who could talk about this all day, every day, forever. So I’m I’m excited in Vermont that there are a lot of people who are also deeply embedded in the same kind of culture and community.

Amanda: Before Your Time is presented by Vermont Humanities and the Vermont Historical Society. This episode was produced by Amanda Kay Gustin, Ryan Newswanger, and Noel Clark. Thanks to our guests: Jessamyn West, Dan Groberg, and Caroline Picazio. Special thanks for the support of this limited series goes to the Lake Champlain Basin Program and their Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership Corridor of Commerce granting program.

Visit our website, Before Your Time dot org, to find a scan of the map and other images and sources related to this episode. And if you like what you hear, please tell your friends about the podcast. Thanks for listening!