Louder and louder, the clatter of keyboards along the ever-expanding information superhighway gives rise to a glum question: “Are books dead?”
“Absolutely not,” retorts Mary Dempsey, a trim, athletic woman who has been a Loop attorney, a Springfield lobbyist, a Hillside librarian and, since January, the city’s library commissioner, a job that draws on all her skills.
To check the vital signs of books-and of the Chicago Public Library, which has millions of them-Dempsey suggests that one need only look around.
So one did, on a recent afternoon at the Harold Washington Library Center, meandering through the great open reading rooms, dropping in on a language lab, checking out a new copying center, debriefing the public information telephone operators, reading foreign newspapers and making small talk with students, writers, immigrants, job-seekers, street philosophers and intense persons caught up in the nuances of their own litigious frenzy.
The Chicago Public Library, as its many users know, is a sprawling system that has 82 neighborhood outlets and, until recently, a central branch that wandered through a succession of temporary shelters, dragging an aging collection of books from place to ever-drearier place. Now, three years after its new downtown habitat came on stream, the system has considerably more energy, particularly since Dempsey became stackmeister seven months ago.
“She is mission-oriented and quite capable of taking the library into the 21st Century,” says Kang Moy Chiu, a computer technologist from Rogers Park who heads a group of bookish watchdogs known as the Chicago Public Library Advocates. Adds Cindy Pritzker, president of the library’s board of directors: “Mary’s a great combination. She’s a librarian and a lawyer. She’s firm. She doesn’t get rattled. She knows people. And she’s from here.”
Where Dempsey is mostly “from” these days is her 10th-floor office, atop the Harold Washington Library Center, a command post just under one of the eight huge owl figures that guard the roof of a repository for 1.6 million books, plus 7 million recordings, microforms, documents, pictures, newspapers and magazines. She’s up there by 8 a.m., seldom leaves before 6:30 p.m. and spends many evenings driving out to meetings in branch libraries.
“We’re not just a place for books,” Dempsey said, agreeing to show a visitor around the downtown domain although, as a somewhat shy person, she seemed embarrassed at the attention. “Take pictures of the staff,” she urged during a tour that turned up some distinctly un-library-like activities, among them tap-dancing (on a theater stage) and the wailing of a trumpet in one of the building’s six music practice rooms.
“We are,” she said, “a community center in 82 neighborhoods. A meeting place. A source of job information. A storybook room. We help with parenting skills. We are a research center for students. For professionals needing quick answers. For businesses. For lawyers.”
Libraries serve some of the same functions as schools and churches but, as Dempsey noted, “we’re open longer and we’re not intimidating. We don’t care where you come from. We don’t ask why you’re here. We don’t charge you. We just ask that you be courteous.”
Critics of the downtown facility have suggested longer hours, including some on Sunday, faster scanning machines at the checkout counters, better inventory control, a speedup in book purchasing procedures and a rethinking of the echoing, largely unused top-floor Winter Garden.
But there is considerable evidence that the building is a hit with the public. Attendance runs about 7,000 visitors a day, considerably more than the nearby Shedd Aquarium (4,900) or Field Museum of Natural History (4,000).
Questions, questions
Nor is there any shortage of questions for librarians.
“We get people asking, `What is the date of Chicago’s biggest snowfall?’ ” said Roberta Webb, head of general information services. “Or `Can I freeze peanut butter?’ Or `How far is it from Chicago to Miami?’ Or `Who hit the most home runs?’ ” Telephone operators at six stations handle 35,000 requests a month, consulting almanacs, telephone directories and the Guinness Book of World Records, the last for bar-bet questions, mostly about sports, phoned in with loud music playing in the background.
For more complex queries, staff members do 150 searches a month, often using esoteric sources, such as a data base that handles only questions relating to cold regions or another that deals only in coffee. (For a look at how questions are answered at the New York Public Library, read Janet Cawley’s story that starts on Page 1 of Tempo.)
“A woman’s sister’s cat has kidney disease. She wants background information,” said Marcia Dellenbach, head of on-line services for business, science and technology, when asked about typical questions. “Or a job hunter lands an interview and wants to know a lot about that company. Or a person enrolls in a Ph.D. program and his friends want to search his subject as a going-away gift.”
Last spring, added David Rouse, head of the business, science and technology section, “we were inundated with Bulls fans looking for some form of `four-peat’ they could copyright.” Nearby, the library’s language laboratory, the largest in the country, offers learn-it-yourself videotapes and cassettes in 80 languages, as well as 300 Russian movies, though librarian Gudrun Priemer demurred when asked which language was most obscure. “No one likes to hear their language called obscure,” she said.
On the mezzanine, at the Thomas Hughes Children’s Library, named for a London author who organized book donations for Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871, circulation is up 50 percent since the move from the Cultural Center. Any Chicago child who can print his or her name legibly can get a card.
Now, besides books, they can use computers. Recently, Chicago Mercantile Exchange traders Keith Velcich and Rick Paicive persuaded Apple Computers to lend four computers to the library, then hired Silvester Bernhardt, a computer whiz and viola student at DePaul University, to run them.
To calm kids down, before teaching keyboards, Bernhardt has them listen to five minutes of Mozart or Vivaldi. “It works,” he reported.
Other outside funding came this summer for a reading game, “The Great Summer Book Trek,” with reading forts, awash in mosquito netting and jungle sounds, set up in almost every branch.
These days, library backers are pushing City Hall to increase the system’s book budget to $8 million a year, up from the present bare-bones $3 million. In addition, the Chicago Library Foundation has raised $14 million of a goal of $20 million to supplement the collection and install more computers.
The foundation also has raised $400,000 for an adopt-a-library program in which companies pledge $50,000 to support a library branch for a two-year period.
“The Harold Washington library was built as a world-class library. It should be run like a world-class library,” said Pritzker, also head of the foundation.
Libraries near to her heart
Dempsey, quite naturally, agrees. For her, at 41, the $106,000-a-year job of library commissioner, overseeing a budget of $67 million and a staff of 1,500, is, in a sense, coming full circle.
“In my childhood, reading was a great form of escape,” said Dempsey, who was raised in Hillside, the third of five children. “I grew up beside an expressway, with railroad tracks nearby, but sitting on my back porch I could be in the Rocky Mountains or Europe.”
The local library, which she first visited at age 5, was in a modest storefront, next to a pizza joint. Her parents, who led her to books, were avid readers “and still are,” she said.
Later, she went to work at the library, then one of the few neighborhood sources of after-school jobs for girls. She was a page, shelved books and led story hours.
In 1975, after graduating from St. Mary’s College in Minnesota, she found that, through a program funded by the Illinois secretary of state’s office, she could get a scholarship to graduate library school in return for a pledge to work for two years at any Illinois library. Dempsey took it, then put in her two years as her hometown’s first professional librarian.
The Hillside collection, she found, was “decent,” but had few art reference books and little to interest high school and college students. She filled those holes, then, to build usership, contacted schools and urged teachers to tie in library facilities with class projects.
Library staff members were encouraged to call regular patrons when books they knew they’d like came in. For adults, she added lectures. One big hit: a talk on how to assess financial services.
In 1977, she moved to Kirkland & Ellis, a law firm then hiring librarians to help with a number of anti-trust cases. “You’re just as smart as everybody else here. Why don’t you go to law school?” she was told not long after she got there by a senior partner, Walter Kuhlmey. So she did, and graduated from DePaul University Law School in 1982.
Later, she worked at another Loop firm, Reuben & Proctor, and as in-house counsel at Michael Reese Hospital, handling everything from real estate matters to middle-of-the-night calls on whether to order transfusions for patients whose religious beliefs opposed them.
Biographies, balance sheets
It was at Michael Reese in the mid-1980s that she met Philip Corboy, now 70, the city’s best-known personal-injury lawyer. He consulted her for information for a presentation on patient confidentiality he was to make at a legal conference. The friendship ripened. They were married in 1992, well after she had moved to Sidley & Austin, a multinational law firm and former employer of Gery Chico, who left to become Mayor Richard Daley’s chief of staff.
It was Chico who put forth her name for the library spot.
“Phil was very understanding,” Dempsey said. Even though it meant long hours and a certain amount of public scrutiny, “he said, `Look, you can do wonderful things for people. Take it.’ I do see it as coming full circle, back to my original choice of a career, as a librarian.” Right now, she added, “Phil is as busy as I am. He’s still trying suits, writing, speaking, traveling. We try to take off a couple of evenings a week-and Sundays.”
Dempsey still reads, which these days means “P.D. James, a biography of Michael Collins, a hero of the Irish revolution, and a lot of balance sheets.”
She’s working on making the main library more user-friendly, through a new gift shop, a used-book store called Second Hand Prose and a restaurant, to open soon near the Winter Garden. She’s proud of Blue Skies for Library Kids, the library’s basket of special projects for children, ranging from puppet theater to tutoring, which have won three national awards.
“I’m looking for more money-for staff, for computers, for CD-ROMS, for interactive encyclopedias, for on-line library services and for books,” she said. Although some futurists predict that electronic retrieval will overwhelm the world of print, perhaps within 25 years, Dempsey doubts it.
“There is still something so wonderful about holding a book in your hand,” she said. “Yes, you can carry your laptop on the `L,’ but it’s easier to carry a paperback. There is complete absorption in reading a book. I don’t think you get that same romance of words with a computer.
“We will always be a repository for books. People still clamor for books.”
