In November 2016, voters of Douglas County, Ore., defeated a modest $70-per-household tax increase that would have supported the county’s 11 libraries. Six months later, all 11 libraries shut their doors with no plan or mechanism for reopening. Roseburg Public Library, about 180 miles due south of Portland, was the last to close, on May 31, 2017.
With 25,000 residents, Roseburg is Douglas County’s largest city. Roseburg residents had approved the tax levy and were upset by the loss of their library and the prospect of becoming part of yet another American “book desert.”
Book deserts are a big problem for vast stretches of America’s rural communities. Broadly speaking, book deserts emerge in areas where there are few if any libraries or bookstores. Remedies such as Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library help, advocates say, but such programs usually target a select audience: kids up to age five get free books mailed to their homes. And push-in solutions like this are usually meant to fortify existing libraries or public schools, not take their place.
In a nation where so many rural communities are struggling to pay the bills, the emergence of book deserts represents a major obstacle to progress, including in Oregon. While many think of Oregon as politically progressive, this is true only in the cities clustered around the Willamette Valley. In fact, much of Oregon’s population outside the I-5 corridor leans libertarian, and are often wary of taxes. Oregon’s population is also scattered across immense terrain where having a nearby library building or a bookstore is frequently out of the question.
That’s why the successful solution devised by Roseburg city manager Lance Colley, with help from the superintendent of the Douglas County Educational Services Department (ESD), Michael Lasher, is a beacon of hope to the millions of people who might suddenly find themselves living in counties without public library access. Roseburg leaders took their own voters’ county levy approval as a mandate to reopen their local library, and got to work on their behalf.
“Our library is 30,000 square feet,” says Colley. “You can’t rely on volunteer labor to run that.” He notes that “seven or eight” other Douglas County libraries operate today exclusively on volunteer labor, for limited hours. At least two Douglas County libraries have been lights-out since 2017. Nearby Josephine County, directly south of Roseburg, defunded all of its libraries in 2007, and for a decade its libraries were staffed by 360 volunteers. It wasn’t until 2018, with donations by 2,000 people and three efforts to provide stable funding via taxes, that the Josephine Community Library reopened. Roseburg faced a similar struggle if a solution wasn’t found quickly.
So Colley turned to Lasher with an idea. ESD was in need of administrative space, and ESD and the library together could cofund a renovation that would make the library reopening a possibility, this time not as part of the county system but as a city-funded institution. But even with the ESD on board, the city still needed to fund 66% of the library’s budget. So Colley got busy reaching out to local philanthropists and won several five-figure Oregon state grants, pulling in an astonishing $750,000 in five months.
“Roseburg is one of the most philanthropic communities anywhere in Oregon,” Colley notes, “led by the Ford Family Foundation [a private nonprofit headquartered in Roseburg], which was very supportive of the project. Kenneth Ford and FFF were instrumental in building the library 20-plus years ago.” CHI Mercy Health, the Cow Creek Tribe of Umpqua Indians, the Collins Foundation, and the Bruce Family Foundation also stepped up.
To outfit the library, Colley secured another grant, and a local wholesaler supplied all the furniture. Colley credits library consultant Penny Hummel with particular expertise. And director Kris Wiley was brought in from Minnesota six months before the reopening to prepare the new library to serve its patrons.
Less than a year after raising the funds, in January 2019, the Roseburg Public Library celebrated a grand opening—this time as a city library. The entire Roseburg community and librarians from across the state who’d helped Colley revive the former county library came to celebrate.
Wiley says most of the heavy lifting was done by the time she arrived, leaving her to focus on the details. Of course, tending to the details was no minor feat given that pandemic lockdowns forced residents out of their new library just 15 months after its grand reopening.
Under Wiley’s stewardship, the library dug into digital lending during the pandemic, creating a guide for using OverDrive’s Libby app which helped users tap into the Oregon Digital Library Consortium’s 66,000 e-books, magazines, and audiobooks available for access.
Like many libraries, Roseburg hosted virtual events, classes, and weekly livestreamed storytimes in English and Spanish. Librarians also took to curbside service to distribute 500 grab-and-go craft bags and thousands of books, lending in all more than 48,000 items in 2020 and 2021—a whopping 62% of the library’s full collection. In 2020 and 2021, when people were isolated, the Roseburg Public Library tallied almost 132,000 visits.
Douglas County residents outside of Roseburg can still use the Roseburg Public Library by paying a $60 annual fee. But the fee is waived for all young people who live or attend school in the Roseburg school district, including kids who are homeschooled or attend private schools. People enrolled in food assistance programs countywide can also freely use the library for one year, a program funded by donation.
In 2018, Colley told a local reporter he’d been planning to retire after 35 years of public service. He was looking forward to spending more time with his three grandkids, and a fourth was on the way. But when the library closed, he chose to stay on. He simply couldn’t leave his city without a library.
“A small group from one of our elementary schools invited Michael Lasher and me to talk to their class about reopening the library,” Colley recalls. “The students all wrote us notes thanking us for taking this on. That was before we started fund-raising. We heard second, third, and fourth graders all tell us how important it was having a public library that they could walk into and check out books from. One little girl, almost in tears, asked, ‘Will you have encyclopedias? We can’t afford to buy encyclopedias.’ That made a big difference for Michael and me.”
Kathi Inman Berens is associate professor, Publishing and Digital Humanities, at Portland State University in Oregon.
