Whose library is it, anyway? In an era when fewer people are reading, the bitter debate over downsizing at the Providence Public Library reflects strong feelings about a community institution BY BRIAN C. JONES

PATRICIA RAUB is a frequent visitor to the Providence Public Library, the undisputed "best and biggest" of Rhode Island’s community libraries, due in part to its extensive and unique collections of books, magazines, video, art, musical scores, and government documents.

Raub, who teaches American studies at Providence College and the University of Massachusetts, dispatches students to explore such rarities as the library’s extensive run of old Life magazines. She even owes material for her 1994 book, Yesterday’s Stories: Popular Women’s Novels of the Twenties and Thirties (Greenwood Press), to a trove of early 20th Century bestsellers she unearthed in the library’s stacks. But lately, Raub has been visiting the downtown library on a different mission. She organized the first in a series of protest rallies to the Central Library, drawing about 200 people in early July.

A second rally, on July 28, featured an invasion of the library itself. About 100 picketers, carrying placards such as "Money for books, not crooks" and "Honk if you love your library," filed past a bemused security guard who told them, "The library closes in 15 minutes." The group then snaked around the circulation and information desks, silent except for the deliberate shuffling of their feet in a dance-stepping rhythm.

The rallies are only part of a wider protest movement triggered by deteriorating finances and major cutbacks at the Central Library. On July 16, administrators cut 21 jobs, including seven of 14 reference librarians. They also reduced the downtown building’s hours from 61 to 48 a week, scheduling evening hours only on Mondays. Later, the library leaders announced the layoff of six janitors and one maintenance worker, whose jobs are to be outsourced to a private contractor.

Protesters fear the changes — eliminating 10 percent of the system’s 200 employees — will cripple one of the most dynamic functions of the library, its reference services. They worry patrons, including academics, middle and high school students, and business researchers, will face slower service, and worse, that people with regular working hours will find it harder to use the library. In the long term, they fear a "dumbing down" of the library because of a lack of attention to its intellectual core.

The community uprising, which began even before the cutbacks were implemented, has been varied and furious.

Sheri Griffin, a freelance writer who learned of the downtown changes while taking her toddler daughter to the Fox Point branch, collected more than 2000 signatures on a petition, demanding the library hold off on changes until a public meeting could be held. Thirty-three former Providence Public Library workers signed a letter chiding the administration for "misrepresenting" library finances.

Meanwhile, the Providence City Council unanimously passed a resolution accusing the library of operating with a "top-heavy" administration and requiring officials to report spending plans to the council four times a year. State library officials posted on a Web site details of their differences with the library about state financing of the library reference operations. Employees and others launched a "Providence Public Library Defense" Web site (www.provlibdefense.org), along with an e-mail network to exchange information and protest tactics. The controversy remains a cause célèbre in Providence’s creative community, and Mayor David N. Cicilline dropped in at a recent benefit for the embattled library employees at the Decatur Lounge.

The dispute has taken some nasty turns. Claiming an anti-labor "animus" and insincere bargaining, the janitors’ union filed charges that the administration violated federal labor laws. The abruptness of departures, in which laid off employees weren’t told of their exit schedule until the day before they lost their jobs, shocked some employees. Further, as they were offered severance benefits, ex-workers were asked to sign a pledge not to "make disparaging remarks or demeaning comments of any kind" about their former employer — a move that seems at odds with libraries’ traditional free-speech principles.

Library employees were especially upset that top administrators’ salaries have risen sharply in recent years, even as the same officials complained about continuing financial strains on the library.

That a protest of this scope and intensity would erupt over access to a downtown library seems unusual enough. It’s all the more exceptional coming after the National Endowment for the Arts recently found that more Americans are reading less than ever. Thus, in its own curious way, the controversy is a compliment to the Providence library, proof that it has become so deeply embedded in the city’s — and the state’s — culture that a motivated core of citizens believe it’s worth fighting over. As Molly Booker, a data analyst active in the protests, puts it, "I live in Warwick, but I go to the Providence library frequently, because they have far better resources than other libraries."

Some critics feel, however, that their passion hasn’t been reciprocated, beginning with the administration’s refusal to hold the public meeting sought by the petitioners or to respond directly to rally backers. "I’ve never spoken with anybody at the library, which seems to be the pattern: they aren’t reaching out to anybody," says rally organizer Raub. Meanwhile, the sponsors of a would-be "friends of the library" group report being told that administrators don’t want them to establish a group now because antagonism against library officials is so strong. (See "Friends in need," below.)

Some critics think they are getting the cold shoulder because of the library’s unique structure. Despite its name, the Providence Public Library isn’t "public" in the legal sense, but a private, tax-exempt nonprofit organization. About $5.3 million of its $8.2 million operating budget nonetheless comes from city and state taxpayers.

Elizabeth G. Johnson, information services librarian at the Cranston Public Library, is among the former Providence staffers who organized a July protest letter. On one hand, Johnson says, the Providence library’s position is that "we are a private institution," so public input isn’t sought. But when it comes to money shortfalls, she says, "They say to people: ‘Contact City Hall.’ "

Anne T. Parent, state government’s chief of library services, agrees that the structure creates apparent contradictions. "To my mind, that public-private aspect is fundamentally a problem: that Providence is a public library when it comes to accepting [much] of its funding from municipal, state, and federal sources," Parent says. "But it is a private library when it comes to making decisions, and having a board of trustees not open to the public when making decisions."