Lee Karlinsey and

Roberts Public

Editors’ Note:

This is the story of a library in a small community in Idaho. Every library in Idaho faces a constant struggle to stretch diminishing funds to cover increasing costs. Perhaps the story of the Roberts Library will provide other Idaho librarians with new ideas, enthusiasm, and hope for the future.

Each library has its own interesting story to tell, and we’d like to take the opportunity to tell some of them. What are your library’s particular challenges? What solutions have you come up with that might be helpful or inspiring to others? Have you had much luck seeking grants? Do you actively solicit support, gifts, or donations from your community? What do you think the future has in store for your community and your library?

Please contact us at austkris@isu.edu or hitcleon@isu.edu so that we can share your story with other librarians in Idaho in a future issue of the Idaho Librarian.

Fifteen miles north of Idaho Falls, just off Interstate 15, is the town of Roberts. It is a farming community, situated on the level, potato-lands of the upper Snake River Plain, with a population of about 620. The town does little to call attention to itself. The tallest structure is a grain elevator and the surrounding houses are low and scattered, hidden among trees. The most remarkable thing about the town, at least from the perspective of the casual visitor, is the presence of a restaurant called B.J.’s Bayou, which serves Cajun food in what was once the town’s hotel. A small alligator dozes beside a little pool in the front window of the restaurant, and one can order fresh-boiled crawfish and gumbo, and feel pleasantly strange at consuming such food in the windy, desert highlands of southeastern Idaho.

Roberts has seen better days. Previously named “Market Lake,” it was once on an important route for settlers and trade passing to the West, and was a stage and rail stop between the mines in the North (Bannack, Virginia City, etc.) and Fort Hall and Salt Lake City. In the past it had more people, and several stores, and substantial downtown buildings, but the proximity of Idaho Falls caused the stores to fail, and the Teton Dam flood of 1976 destroyed many of the buildings. Today, Roberts is largely a residential community. Some who live there work at the INEEL (Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory) site, and in Idaho Falls; most are connected to the farming economy. Over half of the population is Hispanic.

B. J.’s Bayou may be the most exotic thing in Roberts, but it is not, arguably, the most surprising or useful amenity that the town can boast of. For Roberts, small as it is, has a public library.

There are twenty-two libraries in Idaho that serve populations of less than one thousand citizens, according to the Idaho State Library’s statistics for 2001. Roberts is, in some ways, typical of its peers, and in other ways, unusual. It is typical in that it has less than one full-time staff member, is open only a relatively few hours a week, and struggles with a meager budget. It is atypical in that, as of last summer, it is the only library in that category which has a librarian with an M.L.S. degree. Lee Karlinsey, the only employee of the Roberts library, went through the Emporia State University distance education program and received her degree in August of 2002.

The library at Roberts is small, but was once much smaller. In 1992, when Ms. Karlinsey first offered to act as the public librarian for Roberts (temporarily, of course), the library was essentially the back room of the diminutive City Hall. It occupied about 150 square feet, and Lee remembers that when three or four children were in the library, it was so crowded that she would have to take a walk outside to give everyone breathing room.

Naturally enough, she dreamed of a bigger library. But she did more than dream. In 1993 she began to plan for a bigger and better facility. The city had some seed money for planning, and Lee had the energy and initiative to seek out grant funding. Part of her strategy was to solicit pledges for labor from every sub-contractor and civic club in the area. Those pledges translated into “in kind” monies that served as matching funds on the grant applications. Eventually, with the help of the State Library, especially Marj Hooper and Frank Nelson, she was able to gather grants from the CHC Corporation, and LSCA (when it was still called that). The city, too, wished to expand its facilities, and the new library was again to be joined to the City Hall. But Lee had to do all of the planning for the library, which took about a year to complete. Another three years was occupied in the actual construction.

The new library, all 3,277 sq. feet of it, cost about $500,000, and opened its doors in 1998. It has a large main room with stacks and a circulation/reference desk, an office for the director, a workroom and a storage room. The initial library collection was funded by a Steele-Reese Foundation grant of $50,000. There are eight computers available for patrons, thanks in part to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s U. S. Library Program. One of the computers (it’s called “Junior”) is reserved for younger children, and is not connected to the Internet; another has a sign on top that says “Español.” All of the software on this computer is presented in Spanish.

One corner of the main room is a children’s reading area; another, under development, is for junior high students. The rest of the room is occupied with the adult book collection and seating. The library is open 12 hours a week, and that’s the total time for which Ms. Karlinsey is paid. The city provides about $12,000 a year to keep the library going and about $2,000 of that is available for capital expenditures, including books and computers.

With only $2,000 a year, at most, to spend for new book purchases, the collection, especially reference materials, is beginning to age. Internet access helps to compensate, up to a point, but the fact remains that keeping the collection current is beyond the budget’s abilities. Further grant writing is one option. Shopping for books at discount houses and used bookstores is another. And, of course, there are donations. Ms. Karlinsey has had to become a skillful acquirer of books with which other libraries, and community members, are willing to part.

It’s self-evident that in a one-librarian library, one person does all the work. But for those of us in larger libraries, who have the luxury of specializing in acquisitions, or cataloging, or reference, or computer systems, it’s worthwhile stopping to consider what it would be like to have to perform all the tasks that keep a library functioning. What it means for Lee Karlinsey, among other things, is that, though she has a workroom and an office, most of her work gets done at the circulation/reference desk. Books are unpacked there and pile up on the floor around her chair waiting to be cataloged. Inevitably, if there is only one person to perform both public services and technical services tasks, technical services jobs will tend to get done in public. She also carries a mobile phone because otherwise she would have to constantly run from the public areas, where she’s helping patrons, back to the phone at the desk. Finally, though computers are welcome as vitally important library resources, they must be kept running, and that can involve considerable time and expertise, both of which Ms. Karlinsey has had to provide, in the absence of anyone else to do so.

We in larger libraries should also remind ourselves that we take for granted being able to talk with other librarians on a daily basis. In the small library, the librarian is often quite isolated from the larger library community, and, at the same time, completely overwhelmed by the daily grind of routine library tasks. It can be difficult to keep up morale when one is unable to “talk shop” with sympathetic and understanding colleagues.

Whatever the problems faced by its librarian, a small library can make a big difference in a small town. In Roberts, as in a great many small towns, the teenagers have to be bussed elsewhere to schools. They have to take the bus back to Roberts as soon as school is over for the day, and consequently their school library is of limited use to them. The city library, almost by default, is their primary resource for homework research and help. Of the thirty or forty people who visit the library on an average evening, most are teenagers or children.

Ms. Karlinsey has made a special effort to serve the Spanish-speaking population of her town. She has built a collection of children’s books in Spanish so that mothers can bring their children to the library and read to them. The adult, Spanish-speaking population of Roberts could also make good use of reference works in their native language – books on law and medicine, for example – but the budget doesn’t permit such purchases. Lee says that the only realistic solution is a special grant.

Ms. Karlinsey’s ambitions for her library are boundless. She campaigned, with the aid of the State Library, to create a taxing district. Unfortunately, despite her success in meeting the legal requirements for a vote to be taken, it never occurred. The story of this campaign will be taken up in a future issue of the Idaho Librarian. There are many projects which she would like to undertake, among them offering more instructional services, in computer use, and in English as a second language. Projects such as these would be easier to accomplish with an increased budget and more hours to work with, but librarians like Lee Karlinsey seldom have had the luxury of taking the easy path. Knowing how important the library is to the people of her community, she continues to seek creative solutions, working closely with the State Library, partnering with other libraries and community groups, and coming up with unique ways of working around difficult problems. “Thinking outside of the box” is a way of life for Lee, and the Roberts community has benefited from her flexible thinking, unflagging energy, and visionary approach to librarianship.

The Editors