The State of Canadian Public Libraries
I have to begin with three important disclaimers:
This post is mostly focused on the state of the Toronto Public Library system (TPL) rather than libraries across the country. That’s mostly because TPL provides easy-to-find data representing their usage history. But TPL should hopefully act as a reasonable proxy for the rest of the country.
As much as I planned for something very different, this post will (again) contain more good news than bad. I’m really sorry. Sometimes life sends you to places you didn’t intend to visit.
I haven’t set foot inside a public library for at least 20 years. Although I will note that a nice handful of my books are available in TPL branches.
We’ll start at the bottom line. TPL is far from cheap: it cost the City of Toronto a cool quarter billion dollars in 2024.
The bad news is that people aren’t using library branches the way they used to. The total number of physical items (books, magazines, DVDs, etc.) circulated by the TPL in 2009 was 31.2 million. By 2023, that had dropped to 12.6 million. It’s true that part of that downturn can be blamed on a December, 2023 ransomware attack that shut down library computers for many months. But 2022’s circulation number was 15.8 million and even 2019 - the final pre-COVID year - saw only 22.6 million. So the overall trendline is pretty obvious.
In-branch visits are also moving in the wrong direction. There were just 12.5 million of those in 2023, compared with 17.5 million in 2009 (when there were significantly fewer people in town). The average annual circulation volume by physical branch fell by 53.26 percent between 2012 and 2023. At the same time, circulation at the branch identified as VIR (for “virtual” access) increased by more than 1,000 percent.
The circulation rates of the three worst-performing branches over that time dropped between 63 and 71 percent. Those would probably be good places to start a cost-reduction review. But the clear trends tell us that the mid-term future of libraries will probably involve a lot less real estate.
The truth is that you can hardly blame a library for such changes. The internet has completely changed the ways we entertain and educate ourselves and conduct research. The only important questions are whether there’s still a useful role for modern libraries and whether Canadian libraries are using a cost effective model to meet the new challenge.
Well to that end I can report that active library memberships in Toronto are stable: there were 1.3 million of them in 2009 and there are now 1.2 million. As you might imagine, WiFi sessions increased between 2014 and 2023 from 2.3 million to 6 million. And electronic items (like e-books) were borrowed 12.3 million times in 2023 vs. just 3.5 million in 2014.
To illustrate some of the value today’s TPL provides, a library card provides free online access to scholarly journals, academic papers, online learning resources, and loads of great data.
But there’s one more important piece of good news here. I decided to assess TPL because of a recent Free Press article called The Death of the Public Library. In that piece, Zac Bissonnette barely mentions the internet as a competitor to libraries. Instead, he focuses pretty much exclusively on an ideological movement currently dominating American librarians that redefines the primary function of a library.
Rather than providing access to knowledge, many American libraries now see their primary role as serving homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicted populations. When - as they inevitably will - the problems those populations bring with them overwhelm library spaces, traditional knowledge-seeking consumers are driven away. For the ideologues in charge, that’s a feature rather than a bug.
So I was curious to find out whether those trends were making an impact here in Canada. To my happy surprise, I could find no evidence in Toronto. Sure, branches in the downtown core do face elevated rates of vandalism, theft, overdoses, and inappropriate behavior. But that seems to be a product of those specific neighborhoods rather than policy choices.
Toronto branches even seem to have avoided hosting overtly controversial and polarizing events like the drag queen presentations so popular in some parts of the U.S.
Assuming I’m not missing anything - and assuming that the Toronto experience is broadly representative of the rest of the country - then our libraries seem to be in decent shape, all things considered.
We are both heavy users of the TPL. When the City of Toronto amalgamated with the other five parts of Metro Toronto, that brought more library branches under the TPL umbrella - 100 at last count. So our access to books widened.
We are also donors to the TPL Foundation because we believe in public libraries - and will fight to defend their right to hold events that we ourselves may find offensive, and to stock books we may not want to read (our kids are adults and can decide for themselves!).
I never minded paying fines on overdue books when those were in force because I knew the monies went directly into the TPL, not the general city revenues.
I have no data, only personal experience, but the Vancouver library system seems to me to run well. There were a few hiccups with the digital transformation, but it now works fine - the urge was resisted to over complicate it. There is often a long wait for some books. Eg, I am now 70th in line, down from 90th, for 10 copies of one book. But it does not matter. Lots of books are available to take out immediately. My neighbourhood branch is usually busy with people of all ages companionably crammed in. The building in which my branch sits is somewhat overdue to be upgraded, but that is finally scheduled for next year. I wonder what will happen to them all as they must disperse next year.