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MICHAEL DUNNE: There is, or at least should be, no place more tranquil and conducive for learning and discovery than one's own public library. Racks and racks of books, computers and helpful staff ready to point anyone in the right direction. But lately, public libraries have become battlegrounds for divisive and angry fights. Each day, thousands of books are challenged for alleged inappropriate material, often brought by people who haven't even read the books they want banned. Today on the show, you'll hear from the director of the Eugene Public Library and hear how she and her staff manage through the challenges of these censorship battles, as well as fighting for funding, as the Eugene library is subject to cuts in the city's latest budget. Angela Ocana, the director of the Eugene Public Library, thanks so much for coming in and talking with us.
ANGELA OCANA: Thank you for having me today.
MICHAEL DUNNE: So how are things going in general at the library?
ANGELA OCANA: Oh, what a complicated Bally wick you just asked me! I think times for public libraries across the nation are really stressful. You know, since the pandemic, we've seen an increase in book challenges, in all these things that keep coming up that put library staff who are doing more with way little resources, in a state of stress.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Take us through what that looks like. I mean, does someone come up to the front desk and say, I don't like this book and you shouldn't have it. And how does the staff respond?
ANGELA OCANA: It is somebody coming by the desk waving a book in front of your face, saying, I can't believe you have this. This is disgusting. You're immoral. Throw the book down and then walk out before you really get through the process of conversation, okay? And then the other part of it is folks who are really coming from a place where they want to engage in discussion and conversation. I saw this book. It doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem like this is something you should have in the children's area or the teen area, or I can't believe you just carry this book at all. And those are the folks, because they're not storming out, that we get to engage in a conversation of why we purchase this book, why we think it fits in the area, and also as a space for us as we review that material, to really look at. Did we make the right decision? Because libraries aren't perfect, I'm not perfect, it allows us this nice middle space to evaluate, and that's where I think we can be successful, is when somebody wants to engage in meaningful conversation, is there
MICHAEL DUNNE: Can you expand that more formally in terms of, have you had like public meetings where you've discussed books in a forum of which you can have that kind of dialog?
ANGELA OCANA: There are, and it depends on every library. Every library has a different collection development policy in a way that they react to books that are being challenged, and a challenged book is just something where we're saying, hey, let's review this. Let's talk about it. For the Eugene Public Library, that is a series of steps that engage in conversation. So, you may start with the supervisor of a work group. Then they are tasked to making sure that they've read the material, they understand why we've purchased it, and then they convey that back to the person, and then it goes up another level. And then a section manager, or myself, we're reading the book and engaging in dialog. And then that goes through a process where, on the back end, we're having meetings, discussing, is this book viable within our collection? But there isn't something that you've seen in other libraries, or maybe more akin to educational boards, where they're doing it in a public forum, where they're publicly debating, they're calling out merits, they're sometimes being racist or transphobic in those discussions. So, the way the Eugene Public Library handles it is more on the back end in these discussions of merit that we have, okay, maybe even pulling towards the front of the process.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Maybe you could give us, I know we talked about this off mic, inside baseball, about how you assign books to certain areas. And I imagine one of the biggest challenges is the children versus adult section.
ANGELA OCANA: Yeah, definitely. That's, I think, the exciting part of librarianship, and that's why we have librarians at the Eugene Public Library. Part of that is really vetting and ensuring that we're putting the right materials in the right place. Publishers help with that. One of my favorites is Kirkus. I love Kirkus. They're a little snarky, they're a little bold, but they're going to help guide where that material would go. And I say the areas that cause the most consternation is usually when youth and adults have a very fine line, or, sorry, youth and young adult teen materials. What is great for a 12-year-old versus a 16-year-old? That's a bit of a gap, sure. And so, there are some books that lean on that level, and it's the same for teen books and adult when you get close to that edge, what makes a book appropriate for 16-year-olds? That's not something we would put there because it's for 20-year-olds. Yeah? And that's a very fine line that we walk, when we look at how we place a book somewhere,
MICHAEL DUNNE: I could imagine that the job of librarian has always been a bit of a challenge. But I'm thinking, in the last, you know, couple of decades with social media, that can really gin up a lot of opposition. Have you had to expand your selection process due to social media?
ANGELA OCANA: Oh well, there's this huge petition on Facebook that says this book shouldn't be in our library. Yeah, over the last couple of years, 2024, has been the lowest number of challenges for libraries, and that's still in the 800 range. It's collected statistics nationally. That's still higher than pre-pandemic. But just a year or two ago, we were talking about 1,100 - 1,200 materials across the nation being challenged, and so there is public pressure, because what you're seeing is groups going and challenging massive amounts of books. This is very prevalent in schools where school boards and parents and teachers are in constant strife over the past four years of what books actually belong in a school library. And it harkens to the idea that this book is not okay for my kid, which means it's not okay for your kid either. And so, we're seeing that messaging, when you talk about social media, it's, you know, it could be a parent or somebody else who has no kids but just deems it inappropriate making a case for it without actually going into the merits. And I see that a lot. When we pull out just a single sentence from a book, you know that the definition of what is obscene material is to take the whole work in context, and when we pull out a single word or a single sentence out of an entire book that's trying to discuss a narrative through line and develop characters, and we take that out of context, which social media is all about things sometimes out of context, indeed, brief little snippets. Sure, you then, especially if you're not going to do your research and actually read that book, you then create a narrative in your head that, oh, I can't believe you have this book, because there's this bad word in it, yes, also it has 50,000 other words that are really great, and even the bad word is trying to get you to an emotional resonance with that book.
MICHAEL DUNNE: When you get together with other librarians, especially in more red areas, what are they telling you? What do you hear from them?
ANGELA OCANA: Yeah, I was really lucky as somebody who's a part of the American Library Association. A few years ago, I chaired the Intellectual Freedom Roundtable, which talks about issues of intellectual freedom. So, I use that time to really connect with librarians across the state in the work that I do at conferences, and there is a divide. But, you know, I think it's a misnomer to think that Eugene doesn't have folks that want to have banned books. We had our highest number of challenges a year and a half ago in a year. But I would say that in red states specifically, I've had to hear about the kind of emotional abuse that has happened, and you get that from people in positions of power who cannot use that to help dissuade something. So, when you have a group that comes in who is the overwhelming majority in your library, there is pressure to then remove books, even though you believe, as the librarian, it's correct. You know, June is coming up, that's Pride Month. I was talking to a librarian who said that when I come into work, I sit under my desk for a little while, and I cry. And then I have to get to the voicemails of everybody telling me that I'm a pedophile. And I think about whilst I don't experience that for sure here in Eugene, a few years ago, there was a book called George. It's now renamed to Melissa's story. That deals with an at birth, born male identifying person who is going through these feelings of like, I don't know that this is who I am. And it became a Battle of the Books entry here, and everybody loves it. And what happened when this book made the list was people started rising up. It became the number one challenge book in the nation, in part because it was from Oregon, and in part because it was part of the Obama process that so many people were angered. People walked into our library and said, Hey, where is this book?
MICHAEL DUNNE: Have there been occurrences for you or for the other librarians there, where maybe somebody did challenge a book, and then you had a conversation, and they saw your point of view, and perhaps maybe even change their mind and said, Oh, I didn't, sort of, I didn't grasp it that way, but you sort of helped me to understand?
ANGELA OCANA: Yes, there was a book. It happened sometime, I want to say in 2020, 2021, during the pandemic, somebody was volunteering. They were a white presenting person, and they wanted to have a conversation about why we had a book that used the N word. It was a teen book. It was about a white girl that falls in love with a black girl. Okay, and so it has LGBT, queer connotations. It has racism. It's in the 1950s setting, and the authors even come out and said, You know, I think I wanted to tell a queer story, but I didn't. I don't come from a black background, so I don't know that I was the best to tell this story, but I was trying to tell a queer story, and so the woman who brought the challenge forward, hadn't actually read the book. We had donated a large number of books during the pandemic. We weren't having events, and so she just flipped through, saw the N word and got really upset, and through the conversation that we had back and forth over zoom at the time, but was one of trying to explain why we had purchased this book, why we had donated it, and that the interracial queer relationship in the story was something that we thought was very fitting for queer kids, especially queer kids who maybe don't understand how holding somebody's hand in the 1950s was going to get you in so much trouble.
MICHAEL DUNNE: You know, obviously there's so much of our unhoused population has been growing and growing and growing. And obviously the library is a place where a lot of people congregate, those who are housed and those who are unhoused.
ANGELA OCANA: That's such a great question. We are in the process of finalizing this year's library advisory board, and someone was talking about how they bring their kid to the library, because it's all walks of life in a building together. Yeah, and I love that about libraries. You know, when you talk about the last bastions of democracy, and what I've been calling this audacious idea of libraries where you can come and be in a place for free. That means you're going to get folks from all over every walk of life are going to come within this same building. And the first step we do is we really take a trauma informed approach about how we handle every patron interaction. We're here to support you. We're here to find out what you need, if that's a place to sit and plug in, if that's a place to find your homework books on dogs, whatever it is, there's also that, and then we have to balance it with this very hardline stance about following the rules in the library. You know, we ask kids not to run in the library. We ask adults not to engage in behaviors that are detrimental to other folks and so staff have really had to balance what you would think about as like a fun, wonderful place with, Hey, we have rules to keep everybody safe, and we're very strict about how we enforce those rules, but I'd like to think that we come at it with compassion and care, and a thing that we say a lot is, You know, maybe today is not a good day, maybe today is not a good day, but maybe tomorrow we're going to try again tomorrow. Sometimes we're like, this week's not a good week, but I want you to come back, because the goal is, no matter what somebody's going on in the moment, which is the biggest thing that could be happening to them in that moment, sure doesn't mean you can't come back tomorrow. You can try again. We have that conversation in our families. We have that conversation in public buildings. You know, we want to be a welcoming space for everybody, but we also need folks to know that we're here to create a safe environment, up, down and sideways.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I know a difficult subject is the city budget, and I know that there are challenges for a lot of different services. I just kind of wanted to get, get your read on where things stand and kind of what your hope is.
ANGELA OCANA: Yeah, we are going through it right now. You can tune in and watch those episodes on YouTube. There's many ways to engage in that process. There are folks who are on the budget committee along with councilors that make those decisions, and the city's in a really rough spot when you have to close an $11.5 million gap. It means across the board; you're looking at how to close that. And so, it's not great, but it's also something that I'm seeing across the state, when you have an imbalanced set of tax structures that don't allow for enough revenue, you know, we have friends in Salem who are also going through a really tough time. Their proposal is to go down to only 20 operational hours. And that just guts a community. You know, I'm biased, if you know, but I really believe the reason that people move to Eugene is the same reason I moved here, which is a robust library, a thriving recreation, a love of the arts, and I think that people want to see that reflected in their community. But I also understand the realities of where the budget is right now. If some of the cuts come to fruition and stuff, what do you think you'll be able to do?
MICHAEL DUNNE: Have you had discussions about how you can best, given the structure of cuts, how you can best serve the community?
ANGELA OCANA: We're always thinking critically about how we can develop our services more efficiently and to more people. I think that started in the pandemic, to be honest, when you're thinking about critical services and how you give them to folks who need them in times of strife, especially because we have a levy in place, and we've made a lot of promises. And my thing is always promises made, promises kept. So, we have promised the Eugene community that we'd be open 160 hours, that we would do more programming, and we'd have more books available. And so, our team is committed to ensuring that we do that, but we have to think creatively about how we do that. So, by doing that, we've actually been able to add things back. So, we've increased the number of story times this year that we're doing. We've made our sensory story time program more regular, where we've created a new third space on the second floor, which we're really targeting for young adults and adults with developmental disabilities. So, by being more efficient, we're actually trying to find ways to expand services and actually give the community more than that they would expect during hard times.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, there is a phrase that we use a lot, and I'm not even sure if I understand it, and so I wanted to give you the opportunity to kind of teach our audience about what is the Library of Things?
ANGELA OCANA: Do you mean my favorite thing in the whole wide world? When I was growing up libraries were a place that had books. I'm kind of old. They had records, they had VHS, and it was very exciting to show that they had those. And as the idea of libraries kind of grows and grows, there's this core concept of sharing. We're sharing things back and forth. You read a book, then I read that book, and so the library of things is taking that concept of sharing and taking it to the next level. Okay, well, we can share books, but what if we shared things? And things are just a blank slate to fill in whatever you would like. We share an outdoor movie projector. We share a guitar. We share a robot learning system we share. We just added air filter systems where you can check the level of smoke in the area, very important, mildly topical. And so, it allows us to create a sharing economy that's not just books, that is actually everything that you might need. You know, I remember when I was a little kid, my mom was making a cake for my sister, and it was a cookie monster cake. I was very excited. I love cake, and she went out and bought a cake pan . It turned out very bad, but it had sugar, so I didn't care, but that cake pan lived in the back of our cabinet forever. I always thought she'd make another cake. It didn't at some point. Maybe it lived in a garage sale. Maybe it got tossed in the trash. And I think about that with our cake pans that we offer through the library of things is sometimes you need something just once. I just need a stud finder because I'm hanging one picture, and then I don't want to buy another one. And so I think it's also the library of things that gives us this environmental piece that we're all contributing to, not creating more waste, and that we're agreeing to share things. Okay, literally things.
MICHAEL DUNNE: my last question for you, and it’s a raging debate in my own household. So, my wife loves getting the physical books from the library, and you can't see this out there in radio land, but I'm holding up my phone, and so I use the Libby app. And I'm wondering, what’s your preference but also how should the wider audience engage with both?
ANGELA OCANA: You know, when eBooks came out, I was in libraries and it sounded like the Doom tool, yeah, oh my gosh. Books are going to go away. It's going to be terrible. This is going to be like when DVD came out in crush VH, sure. And we've never seen that actually play out. There are so many folks who still love physical books, and I will tell you something strange about my work with teenagers. Throughout my career,
teenagers actually appreciate a physical book. They don't. My daughter does, yes, they don't love an eBook. But you know, if you took the conclusion, you would say, Oh, the youth, those kids today, those kids today. They love them. Fancy eBooks. It's actually not where I see eBooks stepping in because of this ease of comfort, not having to travel. Sure, you can just click a button. I literally downloaded a book this morning on Libby. It's an audio book. I love, love, love listening to audiobooks while I do the dishes. And audio books really are our number one checked out item on Libby across platforms. Audio books are the way that people have gone, and I think that also speaks to CD players that aren't readily available. If you purchase a new car, you're probably not getting a CD player, right. You're plugging in your phone. That's how we're distributing materials. And so audiobooks on E platforms was really the larger thing as compared to physical books. And I see people wanting to have both. I know people who will check out the physical book and the audio book on the E platforms so they can listen and read along at the same time.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Wow, wow. That's next level. That's next level. Angelo. Angelo Ocana, the head of the Eugene Public Library, really appreciate you coming in and talking to us.
ANGELA OCANA: Thank you for having me.
MICHAEL DUNNE: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon On The Record are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Tomorrow, on the show, you'll hear from the Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limon. She's in Oregon spreading her vision of the incredible importance and power of poetry, especially in today's complex world. I'm Michael Dunne, and this has been Oregon on the record. Thanks for listening.
