Leading the library

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

When the former director of the East Bonner County Library resigned in early 2024, trustees embarked on a monthslong nationwide search for a replacement. After interviewing a number of candidates, it turned out the right choice had been there all along. 

Vanessa Velez, who more than once served as interim director, was selected for the job in mid-July. She now leads 45 or so employees who serve a population of about 40,000 people — as many as 1,000 of whom may cross the library threshold on any given day.

Velez, 41, has worked at the EBCL since 2006 — the year she moved to the Sandpoint area after earning a bachelor’s degree in Spanish language and literature from Yale and spending a few years in Switzerland (where she’s a dual citizen). 

Despite her international and university travels, Velez is no stranger to the Inland Northwest — born in Colville, Wash., she attended high school in Northport, Wash. and came to Sandpoint because her best friend from home had relocated here.

She first lived in a cabin in Laclede — not far from the Klondike Bar — and worked as a server at the former-Beach House (now Trinity at City Beach) and the Coldwater Creek retail store. Once the summertime trade dried up, Velez moved closer to town and thought she’d get involved with the library — first applying to volunteer.

EBCL Director Vanessa Velez at the Sandpoint branch of the library. Photo by Ben Olson.

However, with four years of experience working in access services at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, she was a shoe-in for a paid position, starting out as a library page and desk attendant. Six years later, in 2012, Velez enrolled in an online master’s program in library and information science at the University of Washington, which she completed in 2015.

A few weeks into her official role as EBCL director, Velez sat down with the Reader to talk about what drew her to the job, how she views the role of public libraries, how libraries have faced technological and political challenges, and answered the toughest question of all: what’s her favorite book.

The following interview has been shortened for length.

Sandpoint Reader: What attracted you to library work?

Vanessa Velez: “The first thing would be the books. I was a lifelong reader and surrounded by books at home but also the library that we used was the Colville library, which was teeny tiny — I’m pretty sure it was just built out of what used to be someone’s little house. A thousand square feet maybe, and I just remember spending a lot of time there and what we could take back from the library supplemented everything: my education, imagination, everything.”

SR: How would you describe the role the library plays in the community?

VV: “Discovery, exploration, connection, those are the tagline terms I would use. You can roll in by yourself and look for something yourself or you can ask for help and get an extra level of interaction from a staff person, maybe get some more discovery and learn how to use some tools that you didn’t know about. Or you can take it a level further and access a program — take your kids to story time or attend an informational session or a book reading.

“We take it further than some libraries do. We have the Lifelong Learning Center, which is actually kind of unique with public libraries. Not many public libraries have a tutoring department like we do that goes through all ages. You have children getting extra attention for whatever — literacy, math, science — up through adults studying for their citizenship exams or learning English or learning other languages if we have tutors that can fill that niche. That’s an extra service that we provide.”

SR: What’s something about our local library that people might not know, but should?

VV: “You can do 3-D printing and explore virtual reality and attend a lot of different programs. … 

“When you’re looking for something to do, don’t forget about the library. Check the calendar. Library stuff is always free and you can get the same level of instruction and interaction from a paid program but it’s free for attendees, so it’s just super accessible. You’re not expected to buy anything, it’s all free services.”

SR: Because you’ve already paid for it through the taxing district.

VV: “Exactly. The value I would say is massive, though. When I look at my own tax bill I’m always kind of blown away by the dollar portion that goes to the library district, and I think, ‘Well, I checked out three books and pretty much made that up.’”

SR: Can you paint a picture of the on-the-ground impact of our library district?

VV: “The Lifelong Learning Center is unique. The garden is also apparently a unique aspect. We just had a representative from the ICFL [Idaho Commission for Libraries, which gives support for libraries around the state] come up on a North Idaho tour and he was super blown away by the garden. Not only is it an attractive space just to hang out, it’s also a showcase for local landscaping and garden plants. 

“And the connections and the education that can happen from a space like that have been huge. Not only showing people what you can grow here in this region, but having programs providing techniques and allowing people to come together and share tips. … Now you have this network that you can tap into and that was created just from a library program.”

SR: The old fashioned view of a library was a quiet, dusty place where you have to ‘shush’ and the job of a librarian is to sit at a desk and stamp your book; but that’s not what librarians do, is it? When did that shift occur?

VV: “In the ’80s, culturally, it was the me-me-me decade and I believe that libraries at the time were dealing with a bit of an identity crisis and potentially losing funding for lack of perceived relevance to their communities. So if you were just dusty book repositories, what is your value at that point? That’s a time when libraries got into providing more popular materials — even more on the entertainment side of the spectrum, including other formats. As that developed, it became, ‘How can libraries step in to provide other services that are no longer being provided?’ like social services that were being gutted at that time, too. …

“That concept of the ‘third place’ or the ‘third space’ was also developed a few decades ago and that’s that the library can be the third place or space — you have home as your first, work is your second and what’s your third? For some it may be church, it may be a local watering hole, but it can also be a space like the public library, and so libraries started looking at what their communities needed and started filling those roles.”

SR: That also coincides with the rise in personal information technology in the form of home computers, so you have this confluence of technology and a hostile political climate, which forced libraries to adapt?

VV: “Yeah, and because libraries are still generally seen as trustworthy organizations and are apolitical — or should be — they’re not immune obviously to changing political climates, but they shouldn’t be controlled politically. Unfortunately there’s a little bit of that going on, but the idea that they’re aside from that is something we want to hold onto.”

SR: What’s it like to be a librarian in Idaho right now? I’ve read that something like 60% of librarians in Idaho are talking about leaving the state. What’s the mood? 

VV: “It’s variable. It’s a bit depressing to be attacked for providing the services that you have provided for decades and that most community members still want you to provide. I was hesitant to even apply for the position, but 10 years ago it wouldn’t have even been a question. I would have been like, ‘Oh yeah, in a heartbeat.’ But in this current political climate it does make it more fraught and stressful and just the time wasted responding to anti-library legislation is significant.”

SR: And it’s still unfolding. How do you plan to manage the implications of House Bill 710 [the ‘harmful materials’ bill now known as Idaho Code 18-1517B] since it went into effect July 1?

VV: “We’re in compliance with it, as stated in the law, and we haven’t yet had to respond to a challenge under the law, so I guess that remains to be seen. …

“Other libraries have had requests for relocation under the law and they haven’t seen yet how they have come to pass. The law does include a 60-day timeframe for a decision to be made. Even if some libraries got a request on July 1, we wouldn’t have seen that timeline run out for another month or so.

“The thing is it depends on your ability to absorb risk or respond to risk. The thing with smaller libraries that have pretty meager budgets, they don’t have the ability to pay legal fees. We do have a certain budget for legal fees — which is sad that we even need that and it has increased this year — but we have the luxury of being able to budget for that, whereas smaller libraries don’t have that option. … We can kind of wait and see what we have to do.”

SR: But this traditionally hasn’t even been an issue, has it?

VV: “No, no, no — we already had a reconsideration request process in place, like most libraries did, and we might get two a year. It’s not common.”

SR: What’s your favorite part of going to work at the East Bonner County Library?

VV: “ I just really love it when any service or program we provide has created a positive impact in somebody’s life. We get comments, at a minimum weekly, about how grateful someone is that they have gotten access to a book they wanted or were able to 3-D print a part for something that they were building or attend a program that they learned something from, or got tutoring for their kid who was struggling in a class. …

“The library creates connections that get people jobs, and that’s huge. That can set someone up for a lifelong trajectory that they maybe wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

SR: We have all this technology, but at the core of it is the books. What keeps books around?

VV: “It’s a way of preserving and transmitting information, but also snapshots of life, imagination — also how to do something. In librarianship, when you’re learning how to recommend things to readers, you talk about the concept of ‘mirrors, windows and doors.’ So a ‘mirror’ can be something that reflects your experience back at you; a ‘window’ might be a peek into another type of life or another type of world; and a ‘door’ is a portal to something even further into that.

“You can read for comfort, or you can read for a challenge or you can read for a combination of any of those things and I think that’s what’s so magical about books. …

“Books are at the core, but it’s really that transmission of ideas across time that captures that.”

SR: Now for the hardest question of all: What’s your favorite book?

VV: “I’m honestly not sure I can answer that. You would think that over the years I’d have a go-to answer for that, and everytime I’m like, ‘Uh, uh, uh, what’s the last book I read that was really good?’ …

“I’ll mention the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula Le Guin. She is such a beautiful writer and she always pushed the envelope with a lot of her concepts, but also had a very strong humanitarian core to her writing. It has everything — it has a protagonist that you want to cheer for that has a lot of learning to do but has a good heart, and dragons. The message of it is that you can’t run away from yourself, and you can be on this epic journey toward something and right a wrong that maybe you caused — that you have to deal with aspects of yourself to complete that journey in any kind of true way.”