“A tremendous leader,” is the way former Washington Governor Gary Locke described Martha Choe, former state coordinator for the Boeing 7E7 Project Management Office and director of the Washington State Department of Community, Trade, and Economic Development. Last November, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation lured Choe away from state government to become director of the foundation’s Global Libraries Program, which includes the U.S. library program and international initiatives. Since 1998, the U.S, program alone has committed $250 million to install more than 47,000 computers in almost 11,000 libraries in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. American Libraries caught up with Choe at the January 2005 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston.
American Libraries: How does your experience fit with the goals of the foundation?
Martha Choe: Having come from state and local government, most recently working for the governor heading up the agency responsible for community and economic development and national trade, it’s been gratifying to transfer some of those contacts and knowledge to what we’re doing, especially in the international arena, taking what we’ve done in the U.S. library program and, later in the year, launching an international program, which I’m very excited about. Because I have come to it from the perspective of a budget chair of the city council and being a strong supporter as we crafted the [Seattle] bond issue, which passed with flying colors and built our new downtown library and 23 branches, I viewed as an elected official the importance of libraries as a centerpiece in the community. As I come to ALA and continue to learn and talk with people about the emerging issues, around which there seems to be a consensus, I think I can transfer my perspective in terms of what resonated with me as a budget chair. Lots of very good requests came to us. And libraries certainly, at the local and state level, are in that position now.
In [American Libraries] current issue [January 2005], you review state-by-state what’s happened in terms of successful and unsuccessful efforts to fund either capital and/or operating votes. As ALA has identified, advocacy is a very high priority, mobilizing not only library professionals and library staff and trustees but also looking outside the library world as critical to the sustainability of libraries. I think my perspective, again, has been helpful. And so that’s what I hope to bring, in part, as well as dealing with managed, complicated projects.
We’re now in a phase of our U.S. program that’s quite different from our first phase; we are no longer the implementers, where our team actually went out and physically installed computers and hooked up the cables and did the training. We’re now faced with the question of how we sustain that initial investment, and that’s my top priority right now for the U.S. program.
In January, I sent a letter to state library directors, explaining what we’re planning to do in 2005. We just announced our 2004 Staying Connected round of grants to 37 states and the District of Columbia, and this is one of the ways that we’re hoping to bridge what we did in the initial stage, with long-term sustainability owned by local and state libraries. As part of that—because we’re not face-to-face anymore as much—we are placing a particular emphasis on rural sustainabilities. Those are the libraries that can’t come [to an ALA conference] because they don’t have a budget—unless it’s in their backyard. And we’re very interested in how we continue to hear their voice about what their needs are and how they sustain what they’re doing.
We had a great site visit to Dudley, Massachusetts on Friday, about an hour and a half southeast of here. The town just crested 10,000 people and we talked to Chuck Moore, who’s the rural librarian, and just listened. He’s got 15 computer terminals, and one of his top priorities is making sure that they work, because if they don’t work, he feels it’s a reflection of his library. He’s building support in the next three years to build a new library, replacing the one that he has, and looking to leverage local support with what he hopes to be the governor’s funding commitment. He’s trying to figure out what kind of technology’s coming his way; he’s looking for help in terms of tech support. His usual tech support person supports 68 schools and libraries, in addition to him, and this gentleman has found a way to establish a working relationship with the tech support so he gets answers. Chuck is pretty typical of rural librarians, who are on their own and doing lots and lots of things. So we’re working on a Rural Sustainabilities Project.
American Libraries: So this is part of a process of assessment?
Martha Choe: Yes, going out and seeing what’s needed. And we will be providing funding to the state to convene rural librarians at the state level and continue to provide training and support for them at a more local level. People like Chuck tell me they go to their state conferences and regional conferences. And we have been working closely with WebJunction.org to provide an online portal for assessment of technology, of skills, and actually the ability to deliver online training to their staff. We think that’s going to be very helpful.
We’re focused on targeting the fast-growing population in the U.S., which is the Spanish-speaking population, and again, looking at how we can train library staff to reach out to these communities, to provide them with the knowledge of the diversity even within the Hispanic community, and understanding some of the particular sensitivities and ways to make sure that community feels comfortable in libraries, to feel that it’s a place that they can go to seek information and help and learn how to use the computer and internet. So we’re excited about that. We’re also wanting to make sure that we’re continuing to address the early states with which we partnered, and those early states got an earlier version of hardware that’s now a little out of date, and so we’re going to be working with them to level the playing field and allow them to upgrade that hardware. And all of this for us is focused on how do we sustain that initial investment. So it’s a long answer to your initial question. [Laughter]
American Libraries: How have you been acclimating yourself?
Martha Choe: It’s been a quick start—and I’m lucky to have a really terrific team of folks, most of whom have been here from the beginning of the program—understanding what we’ve done and why we’ve done it, understanding who our main partners are and the different stakeholders and players in the library world.
Here at ALA [Midwinter Meeting], I’ve taken the time to try to meet one-on-one with lots of our key partners and just to learn and listen—what they’re doing, what they see as the issues, what input, observations, counsel they have for the foundation in terms of where we should be looking to focus our efforts. It’s been interesting because a lot of that discussion has converged the importance of advocacy, and making sure that there is the right kind of research and data to equip library supporters to go out and argue the case, as budgets are shrinking and there’s more competition for dollars.
So much of what I’ve done is to review what we’ve done, look ahead at some of our future challenges, and try to chart a course for how we continue our emphasis on making sure that there is free public access to computing through libraries, not only here in the United States, but around the world.
American Libraries: Do you see computers, the internet, and librarians tied to economic development?
Martha Choe: It’s a link that hasn’t been made as strongly as it should be—yet. But as a former economic developer, as I looked to market our state and help the regions in the state argue why they should be considered for an investment that could bring lots of jobs, one of the things that we pointed to was how qualified a work force is, how educated our workforce is, how productive our workforce is. And much of that relates to the role of libraries in terms of being able to provide access to the internet for lots of folks who don’t have it at home, and we know that that’s a role that libraries play.
Certainly, in just about every field, being able to understand digital information, how to access that digital information is central to being able to be considered in today’s workforce. And that’s been a critical role that libraries play in terms of having the physical connectivity and the computers and the training for their patrons, and so there’s a direct relationship. There’s a direct relationship. Employers and investors look to where they want to make long-term investments, millions and millions of dollars in many cases, they look for healthy, stable communities with good leadership, and they look for long-term investment and partnership. Libraries are central to the health of communities. They are used, obviously, as physical community meeting places. Librarians are often community leaders in terms of leading the charge for healthy communities. I’m not sure that link has been made in as obvious a way as it should be.
There is a lot of good work being done to commission studies on a return on investment in a classic economic development kind of a model. There’s good work being done to create a cost/benefit model, which—in addition to the greater good argument, which we all know is almost intuitive—I think will be very important to argue the case for why sustained public funding is critical to a healthy, vibrant, growing community, which employers and investors look for when they make those key decisions.
American Libraries: What is the challenge to libraries growing in that role?
Martha Choe: As I look at the budget situation at the state and local level, it’s not a pretty picture. It’s perhaps different than past years in which you would hang on by your fingernails and hope if you could just make it through this budget without cuts you’d be okay, and the economy would grow, your revenue would increase, and you’d be safe. As I look at both the federal, state and local level, there are some structural budget issues that change that equation.
At the state level, if you look at health care and criminal justice and entitlements such as welfare, certain social service programs, and mandated programs, those are squeezing out discretionary funding. And so you have libraries competing with social service programs, homeless programs, emergency food programs, higher education; you have all these of very important services competing with each other for a shrinking slice of the pie. I think that’s true, certainly at the state and local levels. That’s a catalyst for rethinking how libraries put forth their message, the partners with whom they partner, and looking even more aggressively, in addition, to trustees and to the friends of libraries who are absolutely critical, to looking at linkages with mayors and elected officials and CEOs in a new way that will echo the message that librarians have made for many years.
I joke that when I was a state agency director, I would go before the appropriations committee and I would always bring a businessperson with me, and I would joke that I’m a self-serving bureaucrat. I could make the same argument, but from someone who came from outside of government who could legitimately see the importance of government investing in what we were doing, it had a credibility that those of us who are part of government, part of the library, can’t make in the same way. And it has great resonance with policy makers and budget makers.
Much of the talk here at ALA has been about this epidemic of advocacy and looking at new ways of partnering and looking at, again, generating new kinds of data that hasn’t been necessary before, quite frankly.
American Libraries: How do you know so much about libraries, and how much more do you want to learn about them?
Martha Choe: A lot! It’s wonderful to be on a new learning curve and to try to be a sponge. People have been very kind with their time and information about helping me understand all the different facets of libraries, from Barbara Ford at the Mortensen Center for International Library Programs to Deanna Marcum with the Library of Congress and formerly with CLIR, and meeting with COSLA state directors, and so many, many different perspectives and different key players.
Like many people, I had an early love affair with libraries. I grew up in New York City, and my folks would take us every Saturday to the children’s section in the New York Public Library. My dad was an engineer, and he would go into the technical stacks and come back and I’d have my little stack of books, and that was kind of our treat. And once in a while, he took me to the Macmillan bookstore, which occupied a whole block, and I’d get to buy a book. My folks were immigrants, so English was not the first language, but education was their absolute highest priority.
American Libraries: Where were your parents from?
Martha Choe: Korea. And they encouraged us to read, they did everything they could to help us do well in school. And so, they have been a part of my life, like a lot of people, all through my life.
My previous career was in the private sector, in banking, and my office was right next door to the downtown public library, and as part of my job I would look for business opportunities. So I would go to the business section and look at the business information in terms of sectors, financial information, data on companies, and that was a wonderful resource literally right at my fingertips. In my private-sector life, the library was very important. Going from that into my position as an elected city council member, as I traveled around the city—because the city of Seattle elects their council members at large—as I traveled from community to community, one of the things that I saw was how important libraries were to the soul of that community. And most of them were low-income, very diverse, new American citizens, and you could tell a lot about the health of the community by the health of the library. And people in neighborhoods were passionate about libraries, they were very protective, and they owned the libraries because they were de facto after school homework centers. They served so many different needs. I remember when we were looking potentially at some reduced hours, communities would come out in droves, defending their libraries and talking about what role they played. So I was able to see sort of the role libraries have played in all different ways, and of course now, I’m seeing it from a foundation perspective in terms of what we’ve done and continue to want to do in public-access computing. It’s been great to add that, and, of course, this whole new chapter of technology and public access has transformed libraries. Now, people expect that to be one of the things that libraries offer.
American Libraries: What would you say if someone asked, “What do we need libraries for? Isn’t it all on the internet?”
Martha Choe: That is a really interesting question, that we talked about at the city council when we debated the size of the bond issue and when we tried to figure out how much the downtown library would need. We asked that exact same question: What’s the role of libraries? This was a number of years ago. But with technology, with the internet, we all concluded, with some very good expert help, that in our lifetime, books would never go away, that books will always be very important, but that we had to accommodate and support this emerging technology. We didn’t exactly understand where it was going—this was before Google, this was before a lot of development—but we knew that this was going to be a critical way to level the playing field in terms of the divide that we were seeing happen between those people who could afford computers and couldn’t afford computers. The internet was just emerging, but we could also see that as a divide, and we saw our role in the city and the role of libraries as a place to try to equalize that. It’s interesting now to go in—and I love the stacks because we were able to take out a lot of the stacks that were in storage, it was wonderful to be able to do that—to the computer room and see 400 computers all being used. That will continue to be a very important part of what libraries offer, but they also provide professional assistance to find information, to try to solve problems. I think libraries are very, very important, especially in an information age.
American Libraries: Such as helping young people learn to make judgments about what they are looking at?
Martha Choe: That’s even more important, because there is so much information available now. Having the benefit of professionally trained librarians and library staff is essential.
American Libraries: What impact will the Google digitization project have?
Martha Choe: I think it’s very exciting. It’s another chapter in a different kind of access in terms of making the collections from Stanford and Harvard and other universities more widely accessible, and I know there’s lots of discussion about using that even as launching pads for further discussions about what else to open up. It’s very interesting how Google is now a verb, which I [Laughter] think is a statement in and of itself.
American Libraries: It’s an adjective, too. We’re all Googlized.
Martha Choe: It’s an adjective, it’s an adverb, it’s a verb. It’s a Google world. But I think there’ve been some interesting articles about how do libraries, then, respond to Google and what does that mean for libraries. So it’s really fascinating to look at the phenomenon of Google and the library world.
Deanna Marcum and I actually talked about another interesting phenomenon in the library world, which is this huge turnover because of retirements. And she explained that 60% of her employees are eligible today.
American Libraries: We’re talking about the entire Library of Congress?
Martha Choe: Yes, 3,500 employees. So she saw that as an opportunity; I’m not surprised.
American Libraries: Is there anything else about the foundation that you want to point out?
Martha Choe: The Gates Foundation is focusing in this next year and beyond on, again, sustaining our initial investment in the U.S. We will be applying the lessons learned from the U.S. program and our work in Mexico and Chile to expand on International Library Initiatives. So looking at a new program, in that there will be an invitation to submit a proposal, and we are targeting this at developing countries and ones that obviously have a library system and some telecommunications infrastructure and a free public access policy. We’re looking at what we’ve done in the U.S. but in a more traditional grant-making role, as opposed to an implementer role, but hoping to leverage government initiatives that will offer free public access through libraries in those countries that we eventually select.
American Libraries: How does this relate to the Access to Learning Award, the one that’s already underway?
Martha Choe: It will be another program. We had our International Library Initiative, which Carol [Erickson] has managed, working with Chile and Mexico, and before that, Canada and the U.K. And this is now just an expansion of that. We’re making it a competitive grant process, so when we select our partners, there’s actually a process that they go through instead of just going up to Chile and saying, we’d like to work with you. We’ll be ready to launch that initiative later this year.
American Libraries: How does it all fit into the bigger picture?
Martha Choe: That’s good. The only thing I’d like to add is just, to put it in a broader context of the foundation, is we continue our work in global health and in education. . . . We seek to identify the points of early intervention where we could really tackle the root cause of the problem and change the course of that long-term. We’ve deliberately chosen to focus in these areas because we think that’s where we can make a significant impact. Not surprisingly, our founders, because of their brilliance in understanding the potential of science and technology, have looked at how that can transform the world, whether it’s in HIV/AIDS or malaria or education. And we’re in it for the long run-not as a permanent funder, but we’re really looking to sustain our efforts in a way that will make a systemic change in whatever area we chose. So we deliberately focused on these areas for the long term.