In 1997, the six public libraries in Terrebonne Parish, La., home to more than 100,000 people, provided patrons with just two computers connected to the Internet. The next year, with help from the foundation, they added 28 more. A branch library in Terrebonne Parish was selected to be one of Louisiana’s five regional computer-training centers, and the librarians there have conducted more than 100 classes a year since then, teaching people from miles around basic computer literacy. And that’s in addition to thousands of informal training sessions that help patrons use computers and the Internet to write résumés and research papers, apply for jobs and college admission, start their own businesses, or find information about government services.
By August 2005, after an impressive local fundraising effort, Terrebonne Parish’s libraries had a second computer-training center and a total of 88 public access computers.
A Lifeline After Hurricane Katrina
People needed those computers, because when Hurricane Katrina hit nearby New Orleans in September 2005, more than 1,000 refugees moved into an emergency shelter across the street from the main branch of the library. Suddenly, the library’s computers were occupied morning, noon, and night.
Many people in the shelter had never used a computer before, but phone lines were down and they needed to find out if their friends and family were safe and if their houses were under water. Then they had to apply for help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. According to Wanda Bruchis, who runs the public access computing program in the parish’s libraries, “They wanted information, and we were it.”
Library employees worked overtime to meet the demand, and they met every morning to prepare for the rush. Their biggest concern was for patrons who couldn’t locate their family members. “We became social workers,” Bruchis said. “We became ministers.”
Three weeks after Katrina, Hurricane Rita hit Terrebonne Parish especially hard. One-third of library employees lost their homes, and two branch libraries were destroyed. But the staff buckled down again, this time to help their neighbors get the information they needed to communicate with friends and family and get back on their feet.
Information Have-Nots
In this crisis, libraries and their public access computers became a lifeline for thousands of people. But even under less trying circumstances, public access computing is absolutely essential. It is increasingly difficult to operate in today’s world without access to computers and the Internet. And for tens of millions of people who don’t have home computers, public libraries are the places to go for these tools.
And yet, in the mid-1990s, public access computers were hard to find. In 1995, the New York Times editorialized, “The most basic promise of the information age—that books, facts and figures will be widely and cheaply disseminated over telephone lines—will come to nothing unless public access to computers and telecommunications technology is broadly expanded.” Most libraries simply didn’t offer public access—in 1997, only 28 percent of libraries in the United States included computers and the Internet among their services.
Around the same time, the Department of Commerce released data showing that a significant percentage of Americans—most of them low-income minorities—didn’t have access to computers at all.
With so many information have-nots and so little public access, millions of people were on the wrong side of the so-called digital divide. And American life was growing increasingly reliant on information technology. The digital divide threatened to further isolate communities already marginalized by a host of economic and educational inequities.
Next: The Response