Public Libraries in the Lives of People Experiencing Homelessness

I was interviewed by Julian Morrow on the ABC National Sunday Extra program on Sunday 25 February about the role of public libraries in rural and regional communities. It was great to be able to share some of my stories about the wonderful work being done by our public libraries and the challenges that they are facing. I was able to bring some of my DECRA findings into the conversation. You can listen to the broadcast here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sundayextra/libraries/103505534

I was involved in an article published by the ABC News team on Saturday February 17 titled “Librarians helping more Australians with complex needs as social support services move online”. It has been great to have the opportunity to highlight the wonderful work being done in our public libraries as they support their communities, particularly when people are trying to engage with other service providers like Centerlink and banks, and are being pushed to the libraries to manage their forms and accounts. I was pleased to be able to call attention to the fact that libraries are picking up the work of other service providers, and are often doing this for people experiencing true disadvantage and really challenging lives. What we are not seeing yet are appropriate levels of funding from local councils to support library staff in these roles, or to employ additional staff who have the skills and time to work with community members with high social needs. Library staff are wonderful at knowing when something is not right with a visitor, but they don’t aways have the skills and professional networks that someone like a social worker or a community worker, or even a community health nurse might. Some urban libraries are starting to employ people with these qualifications, but often only on short-term contracts, or through external funding sources where there are no guarantees of continuing funding. These new workers are making big impacts on vulnerable visitors to the library, but also on the wellbeing of other library staff who have an extra layer of support and resources available to them. I would like to see local councils recognising the social role that libraries are playing, and guaranteeing ongoing funding so libraries can hire community or social workers, and provide better support for library staff who are often at the front line of our social problems.

You can read the ABC News article here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-17/libraries-community-support-hubs-for-social-support-services/103441200

The image above was taken out the front of the Darwin Casuarina library. I visited there in August this year and spent the week with the wonderful staff who keep this and the other Darwin library branches operating and meeting the needs of their visitors so well. This was an interesting place to visit because they have a position that is filled by a Community Worker who is able to create and maintain partnerships between the library and vulnerable communities in Darwin. The person who was in this position at the time was doing an amazing job of organising community events that brought all sorts of people into the library, but was also the first point of call for staff when any issues developed due to anti-social behaviour in the library. I watched him de-escalate a volatile and violent situation between two people in the library one afternoon and was reminded of the effect these issues have on library staff, even when only observing them.

One great example of an activity organised by the library was part of a Homelessness LinkUp event:

In late 2022, I sent an online survey to all public library staff to explore their experiences of working with people experiencing homelessness when they visit our libraries. I have written the results of this survey up into a scholarly article that I hope will be published soon, but in the meantime, I present some of the results in this presentation that was part of the School of Information and Communication Studies Research Seminar Series. This presentation can be watched here: https://youtu.be/WbH_B8-TXcw

The first of my six case studies is underway this week with a trip to Bathurst, NSW. Bathurst is one of my two regional case studies – the other will be Darwin, later in the year. I am being assisted greatly by my colleague Professor Sharynne McLeod whose blog you can read here: https://speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/ I am also receiving a great deal of help from the Bathurst Uniting Social Services (BUSS) who run multiple services for people experiencing many forms of disadvantage. While I am here, I am speaking with people who are experiencing homelessness or insecure housing about their experiences and attitudes towards using their public library. I am also speaking with the fabulous people who are running BUSS, and library workers, and I am running a short survey of library users about how they feel about sharing library spaces with people they think may be experiencing homelessness.

I started work yesterday by testing my survey with a small group of users. I asked the five ladies who came to knit together in the library to do my survey. They were lovely and all said they would, although one started it and gave up quickly because she had spent the two days before cooking and then selling 500 scones! But the others worked through it and it operated well and the data was sending through to the collection point well. I was interested to hear them start to talk about homelessness together after they had each answered the survey. I didn’t hear what they were saying, but they were engaged in the topic.

This morning I started my first interviews with the clients of the Bathurst methodone clinic. This clinic runs from the Bathurst Base Hospital and is also attended by BUSS who cook breakfast for the people who are coming to dose. I interviewed five people and asked them questions about their past and current use of public libraries, their reasons for using or not using them, their experiences when they did use them and what they would like to see a public library provide for them. None of the men and women I spoke to are current users of the Bathurst library. There were many reasons for this, including “I can’t read so why would I go to a library?”, “A library isn’t a place for people like me”, “I can’t go to a library looking like I do, people would stare and make me really uncomfortable”, “The library is too far from my home and I can’t afford a car, so I can’t get there”, “I don’t need to know anything, so why would I go there”, and “I have spent most of my life in jail, so I don’t know how to be curious about anything anymore.”

When I asked them what they liked about using the BUSS services, they told me they like having a chance to socialise with people who understand them, don’t judge them, and are having the same sort of experiences. When I suggested they could all meet at the library to do that, when BUSS is closed, they said they wouldn’t be welcome because they would be too noisy and the library is a quiet place where you can’t talk. I wish they could have seen and heard the knitting ladies! This perception that the library is a quiet place of learning and reading is a real barrier for the people I spoke with, and I can see why they think that. I spent some time in the library this afternoon and it is very quiet. There were a few kids having a great time and they were making some noise, but there were no groups talking and everyone else was working as individuals studying or working on their computers. It does not feel like a place for groups or for conversations. Unless you are reading, or looking for something to read, or working/studying, there is little reason to visit. It does not feel like a social space – it feels like a place for individuals engaged in a small range of activities.

Tomorrow I will be conducting interviews with library staff and also some more BUSS clients who attend a lunch after drug and alcohol program.

One of the nice things that happened today when talking to one of the men at the methodone clinic was that he said “I had kind of forgotten about the library. I reckon I might head down there later and see if they will let me read a newspaper”. I didn’t see him there, but I hope he makes it!

This is a great article in the Journal of Children and Poverty, by Vikki C. Terrile who works at the Queens Library, Jamaica, New York, USA. She writes about how libraries can support families experiencing homelessness, and how they can work with other service providers to provide this support. She makes the excellent point that the inclusion of social workers in libraries makes the assumption that the work a library can do for this community is based on correction of their homelessness – that “the presence of social workers [in libraries] … assumes that the most pressing library-related needs of people who are homeless are corrective”. She goes on to suggest that perhaps it isn’t the library’s job to make people experiencing homelessness correct their housing situation. Maybe by adding in social work services to a library’s offerings, that library is perpetuating the impression that a person experiencing homelessness has in some way failed and needs correcting. She writes: “Libraries [are] developing programs and services to make people who are experiencing homelessness more like everyone else”.

This is an interesting perspective to think about. Should libraries provide services and programs specifically for people experiencing homelessness to help them with their housing situation? Or should they leave that work to the specialist housing services that are set up to do just that? Should libraries instead focus on making ALL their services, spaces, and programs welcoming and accessible to people experiencing homelessness along with everyone else so libraries’ relationships with this community isn’t about housing at all, but is instead about community, connection, belonging, recognition of abilites rather than deficits? Maybe libraries should be taking both approaches?

I am looking forward to talking to people who are experiencing homelessness or insecure housing about what they want from their libraries so we can learn from their ideas and perspective.

Here is the citation for Terrile’s article if you would like to read it:
Vikki C. Terrile (2016) Public library support of families experiencing homelessness, Journal of Children and Poverty, 22:2, 133-146, DOI: 10.1080/10796126.2016.1209166

Library staff were asked their opinion of why they believed people experiencing homelessness were visiting their library. They were asked to indicate reasons for visits from a list of supplied options. These options were taken from existing studies where library staff had mentioned the reasons they believed people experiencing homelessness were coming into public libraries. Most of these studies are from the United States, so I wanted to test those opinions against the opinions of Australia public library staff. Here is what I found:

The seven most common reasons for visits in the opinion of library staff were:

1. to get out of the weather;
2. to use the bathrooms;
3. to be in a safe place;
4. to plug in and charge a device;
5. to fill in time;
6. to use the computers;
7. to access the free Wi-Fi.

Each of these reasons were selected by more than 85% of respondents.

The least common reasons identified by library staff for why they think people experiencing homelessness visit libraries were:

1. to attend library programs;
2. to study or do homework;
3. to mix with people not experiencing homelessness.

Having studied this data, I then wanted to find out how accurate this thinking was, compared with what people experiencing homelessness actually say are their reasons for visiting public libraries. So far I have only found one study where people experiencing homelessness were asked why they visit public libraries. It is a New Zealand study, and this is its citation, and a link to the abstract:

Adams, C., & Krtalić, M. (2022). I feel at home: Perspectives of homeless library customers on public library services and social inclusion. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 54(4), 779-790.

The abstract doesn’t reflect all the reasons the participants mentioned, but what the article tells us is that people experiencing homelessness are coming to public libraries for a wider variety of reasons that the staff who completed my survey think. Adams and Krtalic found that although members of the homeless community visit libraries to access Wi-Fi and to use the computers, they are also coming to libraries to:

1. read books and magazines,
2. to watch videos,
3. to play video games,
4. to study
5. to attend events,
6. to just relax
7. to purchase drinks from the café.

Half of the participants in the New Zealand study had library cards and used them to borrow resources from their library.

The differences are interesting! In a future stage of my research I will be talking to people who are experiencing homelessness. For those who are using public libraries, I will be asking them in what way they are using the libraries they visit. This will give us some Australian data to add to what we already know from New Zealand.

This post is about a question I asked Australian library workers in a national survey about public libraries working with people experiencing homelessness. The question I asked was: “Have you ever felt unsafe at work because of the behaviour of a library user you think may be experiencing homelessness?”

This is what the results looked like for that question:

Of the 383 people who answered the question, 175 answered that they had felt unsafe at work, while 208 said they had not had this experience. I decided to have a look at where the people who said they have had the experience of feeling unsafe are working. This what I found:

This table is saying that 55.4% of library workers in capital cities have felt unsafe at work because of the behaviour of someone they think may be experiencing homelessness. People working in libraries in non-capital cities, regional cities, regional towns and small towns have all had similar experiences to each other with around 38% of these library workers reporting feeling unsafe at some time. The library workers who have reported fewer experiences of feeling unsafe are in our rural or remote towns with only 1 such person (16%) experiencing feeling unsafe. Taken together, 45.7% of library workers who responded to this question have felt unsafe at work.

Then I started wondering how the States and Territories compare. This is the answer:

What this is saying is that respondents from NSW are less likely to have had experiences with people they think may be experiencing homelessness that have made them feel unsafe than respondents from any other state or territory. For all the other states and territories except South Australia, the results are pretty similar. The South Australian responses indicate that library workers in South Australia are more likely to have these experiences than any other state or territory – by a significant amount with 68.9% or respondents in SA having felt unsafe at work.

This is something that I will be investigating further as I talk to library staff in more depth about their experiences of working with people they think may be experiencing homelessness. I want to know what behaviours made them feel unsafe and in what situations these experiences occurred. Perhaps we need to look at how we train library staff to work with challenging behaviours? NSW is doing something interesting with their training of library staff and perhaps the results from this question are indicating that their training is having a positive effect. But even in NSW, 30.8% of respondents are having experiences that make them feel unsafe. It is not OK for library workers anywhere to feel unsafe at work. This is something I will be keeping in mind as I continue my research.

This is a tricky post to write. In my survey of public library staff in Australia, I asked the following question: “Have you ever felt that a person you think may be experiencing homelessness has had a negative influence on other library users?”

I asked this question because in research papers I was reading at the time, the authors were reporting that library staff often worried that this was happening, and that one of the challenges with being welcoming of all people into libraries was the possible outcome that a person who comes in may effect the experiences of other visitors in a negative way. I didn’t like asking that question because I didn’t want to stigmatise the very people I am trying to help – those experiencing homelessness – by making assumptions about their influence on others. But it turns out it was a good question to ask if I wanted to really understand the experiences of Australian public library workers as they go about their work each day. Here are the results from the question. It was answered by 382 people, and 48 people chose to skip the question.

265 library workers who answered this question have felt that a person they believe to be experiencing homelessness has had a negative influence on other library users. That is 69.37% of respondents. Only 30.63% of respondents have never felt this has occured in their library.

I was surprised at this result, as I didn’t expect this to be a common experience at all. The results of this question have brought up more questions for me to ask, and has uncovered a problem that we need to solve – how do we include one sector of our community without having a negative influence over others? Is it possible to welcome all people into our libraries, or are there some people we just can’t accept in case we upset another group? Is it right for us to judge who is welcome and who isn’t? In some of the research I was reading, library users who were not experiencing homelessness were reluctant to go to their libraries because of people who were there that made them feel unsafe, or were unpleasant to be around. We don’t want that for any of our users.

The answer to this dilemma might be easier to uncover as I progress further into my research. I will be surveying library users at six libraries in areas with insufficient housing and a visible homelessness issue, and I will also be interviewing library staff at these locations. Maybe I will learn something from these next steps to help us work out how we can welcome the people who can benefit from what public libraries have to offer, without having a negative influence over anyone else.

I would love to read your thoughts about this, so please leave a comment if you have something to add.

In a national survey of Australian public library workers I asked the question: “Does your library charge fines for late or unreturned items?” This is a significant question because it is possible and perhaps likely that people experiencing homelessness and/or poverty could be avoiding using public libraries in case they get charged fines they can’t afford to pay back.

I thought this practice had largely disappeared as a way to remove a barrier libraries have placed between people and library resources in the past. It turns out that this is not the case in many of our libraries at the moment. Here are the results to the question:

What this is telling us is that of the 393 people who answered this question, 235 of them work in libraries that do not fine people for late or unreturned books, while 153 people work in libraries that do charge fines. Five people weren’t sure what their library did about this.

This made me wonder where are these libraries are that are still charging fines? This is what the data is telling us about where the libraries that are still charging fines are located:

So, the green colour indicates States/Territories where more people have said there are no fines charged in their library than those who do charge. The red indicates States/Territories where more people have said their library charges fines than those who don’t. The Australian Capital Territory, the Northern Territory and South Australia have more respondents saying their libraries charge fines than those who say their libraries don’t. But more respondents in Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria say their library doesn’t charge fines than those who say their libraries do charge fines. New South Wales and Western Australia were about half and half. This could mean that people experiencing homelessness and/or poverty are less likely to use their public library in the ACT, NT and SA than in the other states to avoid getting library fines.

What do you think? Should all libraries remove their fines for late or unreturned books as a way of reducing barriers to library use? Or are there good reasons for maintaining the practice of fining our library users? Are you surprised that so many of us work in libraries that are still charging fines?