An average day for Rosalie Rodriguez can involve organizing a craft activity for 3-year-olds while compiling book recommendations for a picky teen.
A parent in a hurry might request a hard-to-find read at the same time a patron in the corner nods off, making Rodriguez wonder whether they’re having a medical emergency she needs to address or if they just closed their eyes for a moment.
“There are all these things happening at the same time, every day,” Rodriguez said.
The children’s and family librarian at the Jefferson County Public Library’s Belmar branch in Lakewood can’t help but laugh when people learn her profession and comment on how lucky she is to just sit behind a desk and read all day.
Walk into one of metro Denver’s public libraries — among the few spaces where anyone can come inside and exist for free — and you’ll find a microcosm of society’s most pressing issues:
Homelessness in Denver is at a peak, evidenced by the dozens of patrons in the city’s Central Library during a recent visit who were toting their possessions in trash bags and suitcases.
Colorado doesn’t have enough mental health professionals, as illustrated by the hundreds of welfare checks a year by Denver police officers and medics across the city’s library branches.
Local food banks are scrambling to keep up with demand, so when a patron at the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library told workers during a recent visit that he was hungry and thirsty, an employee handed the young man a granola bar and bottle of water.
And as Colorado contends with deadly substance-use crises, libraries in Boulder and three Denver suburbs closed temporarily in 2022 and 2023 after meth users contaminated their bathrooms.
If public libraries act as an epicenter for society’s shortfalls, then their librarians are on the front lines of crisis intervention, tending to their communities’ most vulnerable populations while trying to keep their buildings safe and welcoming to all amid rising legislative attacks on intellectual freedoms across the nation.
The Denver Post interviewed longtime and up-and-coming Colorado librarians, as well as the educators who mold them, to learn how librarians are trained to manage a workload that goes far beyond bookkeeping. These librarians said they want to shed the stereotype of pedantic conversation-shushers and highlight the realities of librarianship at a moment when their buildings are more than ever a haven for people who slipped through their communities’ cracks.
“All of the most challenging problems of our time are happening at the library,” said James LaRue, executive director of Garfield County Libraries, which has branches in Glenwood Springs, Carbondale and other locations. “Libraries are heated in the winter and cold in the summer and we have bathrooms and water and we wind up being gathering places for people who are not permitted or allowed in other spaces.
“The future of the librarian is to be an advocate for knowledge and a connector to resources in a society that is sometimes very anti-intellectual,” he said. “This doesn’t always make you friends.”
Friends Aiko Thompson-Nishihara, 16, left, and Maria Holzapfel, right, read together at the Denver Public Library’s Central Library in downtown Denver on Jan. 31, 2024. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
“Librarians are on the firing line”
Elizabeth Wrenn-Estes began her career as a librarian in the 1990s. She worked as a youth services librarian in Douglas County’s Lone Tree Library and has taught youth services library courses at San José State University’s School of Information in California for the past 12 years.
Wrenn-Estes tries to prepare her students for a far different experience than she faced coming up in the industry 30 years ago.
“The job has really changed as society has gone into this period where librarians are on the firing line,” she said.
With online students across the country, Wrenn-Estes hears from budding librarians confronted by right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty or the Proud Boys demanding certain books be pulled from shelves.
In Colorado, attempts to censor library books appear to have been largely unsuccessful, although the requests to restrict access to books and programming — particularly those with LGBTQ- or race-related themes — have been on the rise in recent years.
But it’s not just the book-banning, Wrenn-Estes said.
Librarians are tasked with aiding the homeless and people experiencing mental illness and substance-use problems more than ever before, she said, particularly after the pandemic exacerbated so many societal problems.
While library districts often provide training to their staff around homeless outreach, de-escalation, mental health resources and beyond, at the end of the day, most public librarians are not social workers, yet they are often confronted with scenarios that require those skills.
“It is stressful to work in a library now,” she said. “There is no getting around that. You are in jeopardy for all kinds of trauma as part of your normal day. As scary as it can be, you need to know that your job does include that.”
People work at computer stations in the community technology center at the Denver Public Library’s Central Library in downtown Denver on Jan. 31, 2024. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
When a lack of resources boils over
The Denver Public Library’s downtown Central Library and 27 branch libraries offer more than 2 million books and other materials while providing research services, a slew of programming and a computer network.
The libraries — like many across the state and country — feature spaces to record podcasts, utilize 3-D printers, and check out tools and mobile internet hotspots. Certain locations even offer bicycle repair kits, sewing machines, indoor air quality monitors, and museum and state park passes.
In addition to these services, the Denver Public Library was among the first library districts in the nation to hire in-house social workers in 2015, said Rachel Fewell, director of the Central Library.
The library now has a team of about 10 social workers and community resource specialists to help patrons access food, jobs and housing, among other needs.
Sometimes, those needs reach a breaking point and boil over into incidents inside the library: Suicide attempts. Drug overdoses. Medical emergencies. Overexposure to cold or heat. Theft. Outbursts. Physical aggression.
Those are among the types of calls the Denver police and fire departments respond to at the city’s library branches.
The Central Library, Denver’s largest branch, is under construction and restricted to first-floor access. It’s the scene of far more emergency incidents than any of the other branches, according to a Denver Post analysis of police and fire records.
Between 2019 and January 2024, Denver police responded to nearly 2,900 calls for service across all Denver library locations despite pandemic closures. The Central Library, located in the heart of downtown Denver, accounted for 30% of those calls, which included checking on a suicidal person, theft, assault, overdoses and welfare checks, according to Denver Police Department data.
The Denver Fire Department, which responds to medical emergencies, sent personnel out on 739 calls across Denver’s libraries from 2019 to January 2024, with almost 45% of those at the Central Library.
Still, such emergencies account for an extremely small percentage of the Denver Public Library’s visitors. The library itself recorded 1,098 incidents across all branches between October 2022 and February 2024, but those only accounted for about .04% of the 2.6 million visitors during that time, according to library data.
During a recent visit, it was hard to find an open seat in the Central Library’s computer room.
One woman printed tax documents. Another filled out job applications. People charged their phones. Several played computer games while others watched movies. One woman bounced up and down and shouted while a library worker asked her to lower her voice.
“We can do the basic needs of ‘you’re freezing, come on in, warm up,’” Fewell said. “But you can’t live here.”
When a woman approached a library worker asking for help using her cellphone, the employee sat down with her and showed her different phone features. When a patron fell asleep in a chair, a library employee gently nudged them awake and asked if they were OK.
Nobody was combative that afternoon, but Denver Public Library employees started extensive de-escalation training last year through the Crisis Prevention Institute, which provides workplace de-escalation to institutions like schools and jails.
“If somebody comes in screaming or upset, this training is designed to help our staff move people out of the way so they’re safe and address the customer respectfully but with clear boundaries in place,” Fewell said. “It’s about understanding what we have power over and what we don’t, and how to help people understand how their actions are impacting everybody in the library.”
Quinton Feast, left, a digital navigator for the library, helps Luis Romano research on a computer in the community technology center at the Denver Public Library’s Central Library in downtown Denver on Jan. 31, 2024. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
“The library is for absolutely everyone”
Managing a community’s trauma on top of more stereotypical library duties can be taxing, said Clarice Ambler, community resource coordinator at the Jefferson County Public Library.
“Sometimes folks will be like, ‘How do you possibly have trauma? You’re reading books,’” said Rodriguez, the children’s and family librarian at the Belmar branch.
Ambler’s position is fairly new. The library district previously had social-work positions that provided case management services to customers, but Ambler connects patrons to existing organizations and nonprofits.
“It’s a more sustainable program while protecting staff capacity,” Ambler said. “Librarians are information brokers. They are not social workers. That’s a completely different set of skills and different set of expectations. We’re trying to meet those needs without burning out our staff.”
Ambler spends her workdays at different library locations across Jefferson County. She brings in nonprofit organizations like Hunger Free Colorado to help customers with access to food and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits. Ambler curates resource lists to provide patrons with good, updated information to reach the help they need.
“I just wish people really understood that the library is for absolutely everyone,” Ambler said. “Homelessness exists and we at the library are not going to turn someone away because they look homeless. We are going to always welcome people into our space even though sometimes it might not look the prettiest. That’s not what’s most important to us. That people have equitable access to information and resources is most important.”
Krystyna Matusiak, chair of the University of Denver’s Library and Information Science program, agreed that librarianship has evolved to emphasize services over materials.
In an ever-changing industry, Matusiak said DU’s library master’s program is always responding to the realities of the job.
“We are seeing a surge of challenges to intellectual freedom, and the concern in library and information science programs is how do we prepare our graduates to deal with that in practice,” Matusiak said.
This spring, DU will offer a course on intellectual freedom challenges. In the winter, they’ll have a class on engaging disabled and neurodivergent communities. Next year, the program will feature a course on serving immigrants and refugees.
“Libraries aren’t just storehouses for old books anymore,” said Ashley Brown, program manager of DU’s online library program. “We’re about connecting people to resources.”
Mary Stansbury, who recently retired after 15 years as director of DU’s Library and Information Science program, wondered whether it was time to better prepare incoming librarians for the job and its vast technological and societal developments by making librarianship a degree program that begins at the bachelor’s level rather than the graduate level.
“There are generational differences I’m seeing in people entering the profession now from those entering 25 years ago,” Stansbury said. “The younger generation of librarians are so much more attuned to issues of privilege and equity, and I think that awareness of and commitment to try to understand those issues is rubbing some of those in the field who aren’t in that generation in an uncomfortable way.”
Librarians can be forewarned, educated, trained and supported, but when their buildings are bursting with a visual representation of their communities’ hardships, what is the solution?
The root of the issue, said Fewell, director of the Denver Public Library’s Central Library, is a nation that is not appropriately supporting its vulnerable people.
Enhancing the child tax credit and truly providing for families and children struggling with poverty, Fewell said, would be a start in tackling some of the systemic problems.
Children’s librarian Carrie Wolfson, right, sits and reads with Jupiter Janssen, 3, center and her grandmother Carolyne, left, in the Children’s library at the Denver Public Library’s Central Library in downtown Denver on Jan. 31, 2024. Carolyne brings her granddaughter to the library at least once a week. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
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“Everything is rooted in poverty and capitalism,” Fewell said. “If we still have all that, we’re continuing down this road… We’re also very optimistic at the library and want people to come in. We want to do our best to match them with the services that do exist. The scary and sad part is that those resources are pulled so thin.”
Rodriguez may be on the front lines, but she is still living out her dream job in Jefferson County’s library system.
Most of the skills she’s learned to best serve her patrons didn’t come from a classroom, she said. They came from being on the job and interacting with all walks of life with compassion and humanity.
From putting on storytimes for children to helping new mothers who are lonely and searching for support, Rodriguez said she has found her passion for connecting people with what they need.
“The library is one of those last community spaces that’s open to everyone where you’re not judged and it’s free,” she said. “That’s something we need to protect.”
