Librarian vs. Barbarian

David Scherer Water

The AI tide is rising. Humanity is surging in high-speed motorboats through fog-shrouded shoals. No one has a map. The currents shift by the minute, and lethal dangers lurk just beneath the surface. If only there were millions of cartographers and lighthouse keepers dedicated to helping us navigate information. 

Oh, wait.

Libraries.

Olympia is part of the Timberland Regional Library (TRL). Spanning five counties across 7,000 square miles, it is one of the largest library systems in the country, serving millions of in-person and digital visits each year across 29 locations.

On Nov. 5, 1968, voters in Grays Harbor, Lewis, Mason, Pacific and Thurston brought TRL into existence. Over the next nearly 60 years, the network was largely a cross-county success. But in recent times, like many public institutions, TRL has not escaped broader culture war tensions and a national trend toward idiocracy. Two seats on TRL’s seven-member Board of Trustees have remained vacant for over a year. The delay in filling these vacancies is widely understood to reflect an ideological impasse between counties with sharply different views of the very mission of a public library.

Two well-attended special meetings of the Board of Trustees in February swung from heartbreaking to tense to explosive.

While library panic is national, the panic at TRL has been especially dire. For years, expenses have outpaced income. Much of that imbalance traces back to the 2001 "1% property tax cap" — an Eyman-era ghost still haunting our local budgets. Even as digital licensing and electricity costs soar, the library’s revenue remains tethered to a formula concocted during the dial-up era. 

The math is simple — and brutal. State law limits the library's base property tax revenue growth to 1% per year, while inflation — the library’s primary predator — regularly runs double or triple that rate. We've been watching a slow-motion collision between 1968 ambitions and a 2001 straitjacket. In 2008 — a year of soaring national rhetoric about hope and change — a measure to increase library funding failed by more than 9 percentage points.

Many believe that if funding were put before voters again, it would fail. That may be true. But precisely at moments like this, voters define the kind of community they want to be. The TRL model may appear strained, but the pressures bearing down on it are not going away. Smaller, more nimble systems may drown in the new AI waters. A large regional library may not be the liability some believe it is. In fact, scale could prove to be its advantage — if we are willing to fund it.

The TRL Board of Trustees opened the Feb. 25 meeting by making it clear that there would be significant budget reductions, including staff layoffs. Each trustee spoke individually about their deep remorse and how they had no other choice. 

While the trustees framed the coming layoffs in the language of grief and inevitability, the public responded with suspicion, disbelief, and rage. They cited executive pay raises, prior assurances of financial stability, and a decade of warnings that seemed to go unheeded.

Why is this really happening?

Libraries are the cradle of progress. As societies grow more civilized, libraries don't just grow; they are the very source of the growth. And as societies collapse, libraries feel it first. A library is a canary in the coal mine. This is as true today in Thurston County as it was 2,000 years ago in Alexandria. 

Since the dawn of civilization, the librarian has always represented the furthest point from the barbarian. In recent decades, every technological or social shift has employed new justifications to support the same accusations: libraries are obsolete, mismanaged, or about to be replaced.

A lack of financial oxygen, coupled with suffocating public demands, has taken a toll on library administrators. That's not an excuse for incompetence; it's the reality of getting what we pay for. This is why some advocate breaking up TRL. 

Breaking the system into five libraries promises local control and clearer budgets, but at the cost of duplicated administration, fragmented collections, and the loss of specialized services.

Unstaffed branches offer extended access and fiscal relief in far-flung communities, yet raise serious concerns about safety, equity, digital agency, and the quiet erosion of the library as a human “third place.” 

These kinds of creative solutions are fascinating to debate. But they are being debated while the underlying problem — a state-imposed 1% revenue cap — remains.

Conclusion

As the AI tide threatens to wash away the very concept of objective truth, we need a human hand on the tiller. A larger regional library will be better suited to face that challenge. Unstaffed libraries might have worked in the last century, but the next chapter of history will concern a struggle between the human and the machine. In that struggle, we don't need fewer librarians — we need more referees. 

To anyone who doesn't use the library and wonders why it's even needed: you might benefit from a visit. Libraries are an antidote to ignorance — especially the quiet kind that spreads when access to trusted information disappears. Despite how isolated you might feel (or be), we all live — like it or not — integrated with other people. Our collective intelligence has a direct impact on everyone's quality of life.

TRL is far more than a place to check out a book. It provides high-speed digital on-ramps for the disconnected, climate-controlled sanctuaries for the vulnerable and — most crucially, it remains the only public space in our society where you are treated as a citizen with a mind to be cultivated, rather than a consumer with a pocket to be picked. On any given day, you’ll find kids doing homework, job seekers filling out applications, seniors getting tech help — and a place evolving in purpose as the world evolves around it.

If this is the moment when we recall the current TRL administrators and oust the current Board of Trustees, let’s give their replacements the fiscal resources to make a better library. 

It's in our best interest to shore up the library now — before we need it even more. Please join me in renewing our long-overdue commitment to our librarian referees. 

You can boo the umpire, but the game just doesn't work without one. 

David Scherer Water is a former employee of the Washington State Library and the Mamaroneck Public Library. Discover more of his work here.