America Has a Digital Skills
Gap. Libraries Can Help Fix It.
SPOTLIGHT ON BIRMINGHAM, ALAs branches across the country invest in new technologies
and digital services, patrons are increasingly seeing them
as go-to hubs for personal and professional development.W
hen Calvester Sanders was promoted to head of
housekeeping at the Redmont Hotel in Birmingham,
Alabama, in 2016, she felt conflicted. On the one hand, she
was excited about the greater responsibility and better
pay. On the other, the thought of managing her staff ’s
schedules through the hotel’s computer system made her
anxious. “I literally didn’t know how to turn it on,” she says.It was Sanders’s manager who pointed her to the free
introductory computer classes at Birmingham Public
Library’s Central Branch. Despite her nerves, Sanders
started attending about twice a week. Within a month,
she’d learned enough to feel confident on the job. “I don’t
know why I was afraid of coming into the computer world,”
she says. “Now I love it.”The tools of the digital age—computers, the internet,
online training programs—are sometimes branded as a
threat to the public library’s relevance. But that argument
ignores people like Sanders, who value their local branch-
es precisely because of the access they provide to those
tools and to educators who know how to use them.
Talk to Marijke Visser, an associate director and senior
policy advocate at the American Library Association,
and you’ll hear story after story of patrons accessing
libraries in ways that could only happen in the 21st cen-
tury: ranchers in rural Nebraska bidding virtually at bull
auctions; farmers in Iowa using a 3-D printer to create
missing tractor pieces; veterans in Kentucky using tele-
conferencing to connect with their doctors. “If they aren’t
library users, people may have a nostalgic view of libraries
from when they were kids,” Visser says. “I think people
have to experience [today’s libraries] to kind of shake
that historical view.”Learn how the Birmingham Public Library is leading
the way: TheAtlantic.com/IOMLibrariesPhotography by Ty ColeSPONSOR CONTENT