The only-partly-fictional Large City Library

The Large City Library is a 150-year-old institution whose mission is to serve as a gateway to knowledge for city residents and visitors.

The Library is open six days a week for a total of 57 hours. Its collection includes over 200,000 books as well as CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, microfilm, online databases, and periodicals. Annual circulation has recently hovered around 250,000, almost a third of which was children’s materials. The LCL offers cultural and educational programming for children, teens, families, and adults. It also provides classes in computer and internet use, adult literacy, and English as a second language.

The LCL is located in a historic building that recently underwent substantial renovations and is now fully handicapped-accessible. It has a small parking lot. It can be reached using the city’s bus system and is within walking distance of the city’s main high school and the downtown retail district.

The Library’s director oversees nine librarians and thirty to forty staff members. The staff includes hourly employees as well as volunteers whose numbers and hours fluctuate based on the academic calendar.

The director reports to a nine-member Board of Trustees. She must also work with the City Council, the body responsible for determining the LCL’s annual budget; an active Friends of the Library group; and (to a lesser extent) the directors of eight neighboring library systems with whom the LCL has reciprocal borrowing agreements.

Large City is an economically and ethnically diverse city of more than 100,000 residents. As of the 2000 census, sixty percent of its population was European American, fifteen percent African American, fifteen percent Asian American, five percent of more than one race, and five percent of other races. Almost twenty percent of city residents of any race reported themselves to be Hispanic or Latino. Both the Hispanic and Asian American populations have increased significantly in recent decades, the latter because of immigration from Southeast Asia.

Large City is home to a state university campus (10,000 students, many of them commuters). While many residents work in manufacturing or in wholesale/retail trades, a substantial portion of the city’s labor force is employed in the fields of education, health, and social services. In recent years the city has also seen substantial growth in its tourism industry. The average income is relatively high, but so is the average cost of housing. Both of those numbers vary significantly across neighborhoods.

With the recent economic downturn, the LCL, like many other public libraries, has seen rises in all of its usage statistics, including number of in-person visits, number of items circulated, and attendance at library programs. At the same time, it is danger of seeing its budget reduced significantly in the coming fiscal year.