 Good evening and welcome to the Mechanics Institute. I'm Deb Hunt, Library Director here, and I think how many of you are here for your first time? Wow, a lot of you. Well, you need to come back. Every Wednesday at noon, we have a tour of the library in the building, and we have our next night tours coming up on Monday, April 2nd at 6 p.m. We've been around since 1854, but we continually keep up with the latest technology and services as a library, chess club, events, and cultural center. That connects people with knowledge, creativity, and one another. We are growing in word about 5,000 members. We're a membership library. I want to be really clear about that. We are not a private library because a lot of people think you have to go through a lot of hoops to join. It's only $120 a year. Best deal of the century. All right. So we are recording tonight's program and it's going to be streaming on Facebook Live. So if you want to watch it or share it with your friends after this event, you can do that. I'm going to give a shout out. We know we have some library colleagues from Texas that are watching us tonight, and I'm not sure where else, but I want to welcome them as well. Also, if you are a person who likes to do social media, we encourage you to tweet, post to Instagram, or also put it on Facebook, and our handle is miLibrary. So I want to just also say, if you brought a book to donate, there's a box back there on the table that I hope you'll put it in, and I want to talk a little bit. I also, before I introduce Greg, I want to introduce Ross Walroth. Ross, can you stand up? I didn't tell her I was going to do this, but Ross is the amazing person behind Project Cicero. It started in New York City many years ago, and it's been here in the Bay Area since 2015. So we do this every year. The Mechanics has been a spot for collections for the last three years. I think it's our third year. This year, we always benefit Title I and underserved schools, but this year, especially your books will benefit the libraries and school libraries and classroom libraries affected by the fires that we had here in Northern California. So I really appreciate you coming and donating, and if you forgot to bring it tonight, we'll still have boxes down in the library that you can donate in tomorrow as well. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce our state librarian, Greg Lucas. Greg has came. He told me because this is such a great cause, and he has a very busy schedule, so I really appreciate him driving all the way here from Sacramento, and he has a long drive afterward. So he's going to talk for a bit, and then we're going to open it up for you to have questions that you could ask of him. So prior to Greg's appointment as California's 25th state librarian in 2014, Greg was the capital bureau of chief for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he covered politics and policy at the state capital for nearly 20 years. Greg holds a master's in library and information studies. I'm sorry, science, library and information science from California State University San Jose, a master's in professional writing from the University of Southern California, and a degree in communications from Stanford University. During Greg's tenure as state librarian, the state library's priorities have been to improve reading skills throughout the state, put library cards into the hands of every school kid. I think that is amazing. We've got our ways to go. Yeah, I know. So we're working on that, and provide all Californians the information they need, no matter what community they live in. So please join me in welcoming Greg Lucas. Thank you, Deb. Well, as you heard, I'm Greg Lucas, California's state librarian, and I'm optimistic about the future. Before I tell you why, let me first tell you what we're not going to be doing over the next few minutes. This isn't going to be your usual dog and pony show. We're not going to reinvent the wheel or hurt ourselves by brushing up against the cutting edge or dropping down to the bottom line. Nothing at all is going to be run up any of your flag poles. There's not going to be any game plans or scenarios discussed whatsoever. We're not going to get our arms around anything or touch base. I'm confident you won't view me as a good role model. So if you want to go now, girl, this would be the time. We will not prioritize, we will not finalize, we will not maximize our potential. We won't reconcile differences, reach closure, gain consensus, close loopholes, have any meaningful, conduct any meaningful reform or work through any of what I'm sure are your many personal issues. I so do not feel your pain. There'll be no networking, no stakeholders, no multitasking, and certainly at the end, nothing to take away. Clearly for you all, this isn't a win-win situation. We're not going to break down barriers, we're not going to think outside the box. I'll give you no input and in return when I'm finished, I expect no feedback. There'll be no birthing, no bonding, no parenting, no nurturing, no getting in touch with your any child or any of that other new age self-actualization, stripped down to your tight whites and beat bongos in the wilderness crap. Namaste, not today. We will not interface, we will not upload and as you can see, I am not user-friendly. There'll be absolutely no meaningful dialogue, and at the end of the day, it'll be obvious that we've spent no quality time together. Harry Truman says the only new thing in the world is the history that we don't know. So what do we know about California? We know that nearly all Californians are immigrants. Some are just more recently arrived than others. In 1848, six years before the founding of the Mechanics Institute, in 1848, 157,000 people lived in what was then called Alta California, a territory of Mexico. 150,000 of them were native Californians. 6,500 were Mexican or Spanish Californios, and about 800 were non-native Americans. The 1850 federal census said California was home to 93,000 persons. The feds didn't count the native Californians, the ones who immigrated here tens of thousands of years ago, and by the time they finally did get around to counting native Californians a few decades later, there weren't a lot of them left to count. From 1848 to 1851, San Francisco's population jumped from 1,000 people to 35,000. Where did these new Californians come from? Well, they came from the same place that new Californians come from today, everywhere. When California became a state, 25% of the population was born in another country. Today, it's 30%. In 1860, every 10th person in California was Chinese. There were later efforts to turn back the so-called flood of Chinese immigrants, a policy backed by many of the governors of the latter part of the 19th century, including Leland Stanford, who got over it when his section of the Transcontinental Railroad started to fall behind and he discovered coolly labor, the main reason that the Central Pacific got across the Sierras. Now, if this were an English literature class, that would be a perfect example of irony. Of course, of course, in business and politics, in business and politics, where you stand depends entirely on where you sit. Listen to this, all laws, decrees, regulations, and provisions emanating from any of the three supreme powers of this state, which from their nature require publication, shall be published in English and Spanish. That's what the California Constitution said in 1849. California had two official languages until the 1870s when a new constitution was created and English speakers had become the state's majority. Unlike its neighbors, California became a state almost instantly, Gold Rush in 1849, statehood in 1850. President Polk called for building a U.S. Mint here in California before California was even part of the United States. Now, you think with all that gold laying around here, interest rates would have been pretty low back in the 1850s and 1860s. Actually, there weren't many banks, so interest rates were three to 5% a month, which is what the state paid when it first tried to create a new government in 1849. A recurring theme in the inaugural and biennial messages of the state's first 10 governors is getting the golden state out of debt and its fiscal house in order. Does that sound familiar? Every governor since Peter Burnett in 1849, Democrat, Republican, or know nothing. Now, know nothing was briefly a political party as well as the regrettably all too common mental condition. But every California governor since Peter Burnett has said state government wastes taxpayer money. Quote, a state as well as an individual must be ultimately bankrupted if its expenses are allowed for a series of years to exceed its income. So concludes California's fifth governor, John Weller in his 1858 inaugural address almost 160 years ago. Now, there have been efforts at prison reform since the days when Californians only prison was across the bay in San Quentin. Weller actually was one of the prison reformers. He and the Lieutenant Governor and the Secretary of State personally rested control of San Quentin from the private vendor operating it. Now we're talking fisticuffs, drawn weapons, because of the profligate expense and managerial ineptitude of the manager of the prison. This was one of California's first experiments with the miracle of public-private partnerships. Now, Weller had sympathies with the southern states as did a majority of those living in Southern California where what was then sparsely populated Southern California. Like the Confederate states, the Southern Californians were afraid their agrarian way of life was threatened by all these uncouth, this uncouth mass of humanity that's here up north. Weller signed legislation to split California in two, creating a new federally administered territory of Colorado, comprised of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, San Diego, and San Luis Obispo counties. Voters in the new territory approved the idea by a 70% margin. Sent to Washington D.C. for ratification by Congress, there might very well have been a state of Colorado on the Pacific Coast if it hadn't been for the federal government being involved in that pesky Civil War thing. Since then, over 100 bills have been introduced to break California in half or into thirds. My suspicion is we're gonna stay the same geographically and culturally diverse state we are now for the foreseeable future, except there's gonna be a lot more old people living here, old people like me, just like the rest of the United States and a lot of the industrialized world. The conservative numbers I see are that at least 20% of California is going to be age 60 or older within two years. Within 13 years, one out of every four Californians will be 60 years of age or older. And a lot of things are gonna change as a result of that, how we think about education, how we think about housing, urban design, healthcare delivery, and libraries are right at the center of that social transformation. And that's really what makes California so awesome. I apologize to those of you in Texas who are listening, but hey, you're not here. So what really makes California so awesome is our libraries. Now I'm only partly kidding. I mean, all of our different kinds of libraries, academic, research, public, even private, are a far bigger contributor to California's world-renowned innovation than you might think. I'm loving this mic. And that contribution by libraries is gonna grow as we get deeper into what I think of as the library economy. This new economy, which a couple of smart guys from MIT refer to as the second machine age, is driven by digitization, information, and innovation. And the one place that touches all three of those is libraries. Ray Bradbury would be totally stoked, right, because he predicted this. California, by the way, has the most public libraries of any state, 1,119. And that says something about us, because not everyone understands the incredible return on investment that every library delivers. Now, so, like I say, I was only partly kidding. What really is our state's ace in the hole? I mean, our greatest asset hands down easily, of course, is Californians. Diversity is our biggest strength. There's no place anywhere at any time in human history that comes even close. California is the first time in human civilization that such a diverse group of people have ever been brought together as equals. Now, hey, there was a lot of diversity in the Roman Empire, but if you weren't a citizen, your only two options were slave or barbarian. And trust me on this, neither of those was the most bitchin' place to be on the Pax Romana food chain. 15 years ago, Governor Gray Davis said, there's 232 languages and dialects spoken in our schools, our courts, and across our state. More recently, the University of California puts the number at 300. California's already the first state in the continental United States with a white minority. The most recent census shows an almost 5% drop in the percentage of the state's population that's white. The Governor's Department of Finance says in the middle of 2014, we gained a Hispanic plurality. And I said, as I said earlier, close to 30% of our state's population, born in another country, that's the highest level of any state. Nearly 40% of Californians speak a language other than English at home, again, the highest percentage of any other state. And maybe, maybe, most impressively, out of all these statistics, is that we get along. As a consequence, this amazing mix of people is creating something new and beautiful, like, you know, Korean tacos, stuff like that. And California's libraries reflect that same diversity. So in Los Angeles, there's a branch, it's called the Wilshire branch. It's on third, if you know LA, and Vermont. So the largest group of patrons in this 5,500 square foot library are Mongolians, who are members of the largest community of Mongolians outside of Mongolia. The number two largest patron base are Oaxaca Indians, who do not speak Spanish. They speak Zapoteca, which is a native language. And number three are Bengalis, because the library is down the street from Little Bangladesh, which is a little further north on Vermont. Oh, and the former branch manager who told me the story, her people come from El Salvador. So here's the story that Maddie tells, that kind of illustrates this point. So Maddie and her husband are at a Bengali community event at a Chinese restaurant in Koreatown. They have a fabulous meal that can't be beat, and a group of older Bengali gentlemen begin playing music after dinner. Maddie's husband says, honey, I think they're playing Old Man River. Maddie says, something along these lines, which is, I love you to pieces, but we're at a Bengali community event at a Chinese restaurant in Koreatown, and I so don't think, like, that they are playing Old Man River. The husband says, well, I love you too, honey, but you know, sure as hell sounds like Old Man River to me, do you mind asking? And Maddie goes up to one of the community elders, and he says, yeah, well, you know, Paul Robeson was a huge friend of one of the leaders of the revolution that created the country of Bangladesh, and we sure as hell are playing Old Man River. And so her husband was sitting there very smugly and would have been sitting there very smugly for a long period of time, if a little kid didn't point to the door and say, oh look, dessert, tres leches, my favorite. So before we get to the guts of this speech, let's do just a little bit of myth-busting, right? So you've all heard these knuckleheads who say we don't need libraries anymore, we've got the internet. Well, you know, that's horseshit. I mean, as a former newspaper man thrust into the, that's one of those words, like we learned in library school, it's like one of those very technical, you know, librarian terms. As a former newspaper man who's been thrust into the anything is possible world of the internet, I swear, I do feel like the buggy whip salesman at the Skycar convention. I mean, the internet of course has changed everything and it's gonna keep changing things culturally and politically even more dramatically in the future. But in the process, the internet has made libraries and librarians even more important than they were before. Now look, so if you're looking for a needle in the haystack of infinite information, do you really think Google search is going to find that for you? And that's just one of the things that libraries do. I mean, before we talk more about the internet and the library economy, let's bust just one more myth, books, you know, the kind that have spines and pages in them, they're on the way out. Eh, thanks for playing. There's more books published today than have ever been published before, 2.7 billion last year, according to the book publishers, and of the 2.7 billion, 510 million were ebooks, 568 million were hardcover, and around 942 million were paperbacks, net revenues of almost $28 billion, that so does not sound like an endangered species to me, even in this digital age. Now the internet now causes us to communicate in entirely new ways and depending upon the generation, right, we connect with it in different ways. So an old fart like me thinks my iPhone is kind of a glorified Texas Instruments Calculator with a spiffy alarm clock and some cool tunes built in. It's like a task simplifier for me. Gen Xers tend to view it as a tool for social intercourse, and not that kind. And for millennials like my 25-year-old daughter, Katie, I mean, it's an appendage, it's a part of her. And for anyone who's connected, a torrent of almost infinite information comes with a well-phrased, even a poorly-phrased question and the click of a mouse. Now some of this information is reliable, some isn't, some's balanced, some's educational, some merely reinforces our prejudices. And what's changed now is it's our responsibility to figure out which is which. Didn't used to be like that at all. The news landed on my doorstep in the morning or it was read to me at night by Walter Cronkite or it was heard on the radio. There's more than one billion unique visits to YouTube every month. That's nearly 15% of the world's population. Over six billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. That's nearly an hour for every single person on this planet. By comparison, 103 million people, million with an M, watch this year's Super Bowl, the lowest viewership since 2009. News cycles, they're no longer a day for a newspaper or a few hours for a TV station. News moves instantaneously. We don't search for news, it finds us now. Couple years ago, the millennials began to outnumber baby boomers. 96% of millennials have joined social media. Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the web. I am so, so behind the times. It took radio, it took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users. It took television 13 years. It took the internet four years. It took iPod three years. Facebook generated 100 million users in nine months. If Facebook were a country, it'd be the world's fourth largest behind China, India and the United States. More than a billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each day. And based on some, I don't know about you, but based on some of the stuff that shows up on my wall, I'm not sure that's a really great thing. Nearly one in five higher education students uses electronic curriculum. 80% of companies use LinkedIn to find employees. 80% of all tweets are made from mobile devices. And the world of social media is expanding exponentially. Imagine what there's going to be five, 10, 20 years from now on clouds, on Dick Tracy wristwatches. Augmented reality, virtual reality. Last year the state library worked with Oculus Rift to put 100 virtual reality stations in libraries around the state to see how that might change training and teaching, particularly in underserved communities. This year we're gonna help those VR users create their own content. So will there even be laptops 10 years from now? Or will we just have goggles? These devices in our pockets, right? They do more than the tricorders on Star Trek, which is set in whatever, 2,200 something, right? So when Kirk had screwed up, and he gets on the thing to call Scotty and have him beam him up, right? He has to go for his phone, his communicator, right? He has a separate thing to do that. Like we have it all in one thing, 300 years before Star Trek, 200 years before Star Trek. Emails. They're totally yesteryear. Boston College has not issued their freshman an email for over seven years. Now these are all manifestations of the second machine age in which computers and digital advances are doing for mental power what the steam engine did for muscle 200 years ago. To paraphrase Eric Brian Jolson and Andrew McAfee in their book, The Second Machine Age, the economy being created by this, right? The library economy I was mentioning earlier is profoundly different than any kind of economy we've had in history. And that's shaken up a lot of individuals and that's shaken up a lot of institutions. So reaction to this change world manifests itself in different ways. At one end of the political spectrum it's Bernie Sanders. At the other end of the political, left, right, whatever. At the other end of the political spectrum it's someone like President Trump. At the Sanders end of the spectrum is frustration, right? Over a sense of fewer opportunities being available. Of money being concentrated in fewer hands which actually is a condition, right? That's facilitated by advances in technology. So if Deb lays bricks, right, faster than me she's gonna get more work than me and be paid more than me. But there's still gonna be work for me as a bricklayer if they can't get on to her schedule because even though she's the more rockin' bricklayer. Now, if Deb creates a piece of software that's faster and easier to operate than mine, I'm done. Game over, she dominates the market, I'm toast. And the downside of that and you see it happening every day is she's vulnerable to you coming along and having a software that's more awesome than her and then all of a sudden she's out the door and you're dominating the market. Automation and digital replication is permanently eliminating an increasing number of previously important types of labor. And it's not simply like lower-skill jobs. I mean, of course, how many elevator operators do you encounter nowadays? But think about it, how many tax preparers have been replaced by turbo tax? I mean, only a hermit would claim that telemarketing isn't becoming dominated by robocalls. And there's a book by a guy named Jerry Kaplan that's called Humans Need Not Apply. I don't know if you've read this, but he points out that automation is blind to the color of your color. And all this, all this is happening when it's harder than ever to get in and more expensive than ever to attend college where you can learn the skills that you need to succeed in this ever more rapidly changing world. I don't know if any of you have ever read Horizon Reports, I would inflict them only upon my worst enemy. They have them for academic libraries, they have them for public schools. Like I say, they're deadly, but they're instructive, particularly when you read the older ones. And so at the beginning, there's a lot of deep thought thinking essays and stuff published by these various doctors of thinkology and stuff. But at the end, they have predictions of what's going to happen in the future, in the near term, in the midterm, in the long term. And so when you look back at the older Horizon studies at what's coming in the distant, distant future, it's pretty darn funny. So as recently as five years ago, autonomous vehicles were a distant thing in the future. I mean, the state of California just published the rules to allow them to be on the highways. Sacramento just made a bid for the 2020 all-star basketball game that a central feature of which is driving people from the airport to downtown in autonomous vehicles. So if you think the rate of change is quick, it's quicker than we think, and getting quicker all the time. Now around the time that particular Horizon report was issued on autonomous vehicles, the U.S. Department of Labor said this, 65% of little kiddos entering kindergarten will be employed in jobs that don't exist yet. But in all of this change, in all of this flux, in all of the stuff that's going on, this rapidly changing world that we live in, there is one constant, and that's information. More and more and more of it. A digital economy makes abundance the norm, which is a fundamental difference. Only the creation of the copy, of the first copy has a cost. One billion copies, a hundred, it doesn't really matter. So contrast that to an economy that's based on physical products. I make five skateboards. Boy, they're worth a whole lot of money, right? Because there's only five of them. Scarcity is what dictates value. And that's gone, that's completely changed now. So with all this rapid change, you have to be created industries where the only certainty is that accessing primarily digital information is gonna be central to everything. Explain to me why there is no undergraduate major in any of California's public institutions of higher learning in information management. If we don't know the jobs that these kids are going into when they graduate, why aren't we helping giving them skills that we know they'll have to employ? So I said earlier that libraries are at the, sorry, I said earlier that libraries are at the sole of this new economy. And in part, that's because they are souls, S-O-L-E-S. S-O-L-E-S are self-organizing learning environments. And it's an awful, awful acronym. But it is in these kind of ad hoc conglomerations where crazy pants ideas and previously unconsidered combinations are created. So to facilitate this role as souls, I guess, libraries now offer visitors, virtual or physical visitors, a broader array of connections, both online and in hand. And as I said earlier, libraries are now our hubs for creativity. And I think of them more as, okay, well, as you can see, I think of them as a kitchen because I'm sort of food oriented where you find out how to make something and then you can whip it together on the spot. More and more libraries have maker spaces. You've heard this phrase, which in my youth, right, a maker space was a sewing machine, a soldering iron, and a bag of Lego sitting on a table in the corner of the library. And you could use that, which had to be super simple. Today, people are midwifing an amazing array of innovations at significantly more sophisticated maker spaces. And some of these things are fun, right? But some are entrepreneurial. There's a mini biotech lab at the La Jolla Public Library. And so when I was there, we changed the DNA of jellyfish to red, white, and blue because it was around the 4th of July. And I, you know, maybe the jellyfish were bitter, but they weren't talking, so what the hell? We had fun. A kid who's missing two fingers, these two fingers, he used the Long Beach Library's maker space to create this, like I should do a PowerPoint to show you, but like it's this incredible like lime green and yellow prosthetic. And it looks like, you know, I swear, it looks like something like a Marvel comic book hero would wear and like, you know, like you'd wear that and it would shoot stuff out of the fingertips, you know? And so now, instead of him going around missing two fingers, he wears this thing and people say, wow, where can I get one? How can I get one of those? And of course, you know his answer. All you have to do is lose a couple of fingers. In Sacramento's central branch library, there's a machine called the Espresso Book Machine. You plug in your laptop and download the novel that you've written and six minutes later, a bound paperback pops out of the side of the machine. The most recent Pew Center study of libraries nationwide shows just as you might expect that more than 60 people, 60% of the people, still come there to check out books and other materials. But in one year, in one year, the number of people who said they came to the library for a class, a lecture or a program of some sort, jumped from 17% to nearly 30%. And I guarantee you that number will be higher next year. I can't say it enough, we're in the library economy. The free form activities and interactions that libraries foster develop the skills that propel the economy that we're in now. If Congress and the president of the United States are serious about kickstarting our nation's economy, they shouldn't, as the president proposes, eliminate the measly $185 million in a $4 trillion federal budget that's spent on libraries nationwide. They should triple it at a minimum. Now, it's good that there's all this creativity being encouraged in libraries around the country because California and the other 49 states have plenty of challenges. We hear a lot about our aging infrastructure. Well, I mentioned it earlier, how about our aging citizens? Every day for the next 15 years or so, 10,000 Americans will turn 65 every day. More than 1,100 here in California every day. So if you think that's a public policy challenge and a half, wait till the millennials get there. The pharmaceutical companies tell us there are drugs being created that will keep us routinely living to be 130. Retirement will be redefined. Probably won't even be called that, right? Like the marketers will take over. Second start, my encore career. I'm fond of new trajectory. I'm on a new trajectory now. I was a blood-sucking trial lawyer, but then at 80, I went to medical school to become a life-saving pediatrician. Just a thought, but if everyone is living longer, maybe long-term planning in government ought to be a little longer than an election cycle or two. I'm just saying, maybe Congress could pass a budget that lasts like a full year instead of a few weeks. Just saying. 80 years from now, not my problem, thank God, but 80 years from now, 90 million people are predicted to live in California. And I would tell those of you whose challenge it will be, that it certainly would behoove us to begin putting a lot of thought into questions like where and how. Now part of the problem in dealing effectively with all these challenges is our sanitized, politically correct language. If you cannot describe a problem plainly and talk about it honestly, how are you ever going to solve it? There wasn't a lot of equivocating from a shoot from the lip straight talker like Harry Truman. But today there are no Harry Truman's, just as there are no bald people, they're merely experiencing follicle regression. Short people are vertically challenged. Cheaters suffer from an ethical deficit. People are not fat, they might be morbidly obese, or broad of beam, full-figured, well-fed, big bone, chunky, chubby stout plump, plentiful, plus-sized, husky, hefty, even zaftig, but never fat. Men don't even have beer guts anymore, we sport portable liquid grain storage facilities. Which always makes me wonder, what does that make a two-bit hooker, a low-cost provider? Toilet paper is now bathroom tissue. Used cars are previously owned automobiles. Church schools are faith-based institutions. Nobody dies, they pass like gas, or they expire like a magazine subscription. This is true, this is actually true. The Army no longer issues dishonorable discharges. What the Army gives you now is a discharge other than honorable. So no double talk, no euphemisms, straight up. Being California's state librarian is my dream job. First, I love the state library, it's California's equivalent, I guess, of the Library of Congress. We have the privilege of helping tell California's story. Got a history collection with over a million items. Everything from Gary Coleman's campaign poster from the 2003 gubernatorial recall election, who could forget it, was up Davis, the rallying cry, to the diary of the wagon master who led the first wagon train into California in the 1840s. The people of California, you all in this room, own a Shakespeare first folio. And there's what, 220 of them in the world, something like that. Best part of it is, suppose it's right here in San Francisco, it's at the library at San Francisco State, the Leonard Undergraduate Library, go to the Sutro Library on the top floor, you could walk in the door, you don't even have to say that I sent you, actually that would probably be worse. But if you go in the door and say, I would like to see my Shakespeare first folio, they will bring it out to you. They'll hover, make sure you don't do anything nasty to it, but you can come out and take a look at it. And I would venture to say, of the many of the institutions that own Shakespeare first folios, you would be unlikely to be able to do that as easily as you can as the owners of the collection at the Sutro Library. This Shakespeare first folio, by the way, rescued from a burning building after the 1906 earthquake by the daughter of its purchaser, Adolf Sutro. It's a former mayor of San Francisco, the baths, the whole deal. Sutro had amassed 300,000 books by the time of his death around the turn of the last century because he wanted to create a world-class research library in San Francisco. And what he did was kind of like Hearst for art, except for books. He'd send people to Europe, buy every single book in the bookstore, and they'd bring back, like Hearst did this too, right? Bring back the trash and the receipts. And so that's what's allowed us to figure out what was lost. So about 200,000 of the books burned up in the fires after the 1906 earthquake. He had 1,500, I love the word, I'm sorry I can't help myself, 1,500 in Cunabula, which sounds like something Frankenstein would say, or blah, ha, ha, in Cunabula. But all it is, is books printed before 1,500. He had 1,500 of them before the earthquake, 49 afterwards, that's all that's left. So, however, but his daughter ran into the burning warehouse to bring out the Shakespeare first folio. Nobody's really ever proved the story is true to me, but like, what the hell, it's a great story, right? The Sutro celebrated its centennial last year, and we're working to digitally share more of the treasures there, so you don't have to go physically to the library. But we have King James, the first prayer book. Yes, that one. Charles II's book of Psalms, letters by Marie Antoinette. And we also own what is probably the oldest law book in the Western Hemisphere, printed in Mexico City in 1542. State libraries also charged with reminding Californians how libraries change lives, and with helping reduce the number of adult Californians who can't read a story to their kids, take a written test, or more troubling understand the label on a bottle of meds. Nationally, the US Department of Education says there are 32 million functionally illiterate Americans. Around four million of them are in California. So you can have the most awesome high-speed internet connectivity ever, but it doesn't mean squat if you can't read. The most cost-effective way to spend a taxpayer dollar is to use it to teach someone to read better. So you teach me to read, I'm gonna get a better-paying job. And when I get a better, because I can take a written test, and when you teach me to read so that I can take a written test and get a better-paying job, government's gonna have to spend less money taking care of my family because I got a better-paying job. And as a bonus, because I'm now able to read and I can take a written test and get a better-paying job, I'm gonna pay more money in taxes to the government so that they can put more money out in the field and create even more strong readers like me who are gonna do the very same thing. There is no other government expenditure that can even come close to paying as huge a dividend in human capital as what I've just described. So tell me why there isn't a literacy AmeriCorps or a red team for kids who aren't reading to a third-grade reading level. California, by the way, we were just sued for our failure to help school kids achieve a third-grade reading proficiency. And there's like a stack of studies that, like if you stood on my shoulders, there'd be a stack of studies that's taller than the two of us that says kids who aren't reading at a third-grade reading level in third grade, their life trajectories tend to go downwards, particularly if they're kids of color or live in underserved communities. So clearly there needs to be better coordination between colleges, schools, libraries, and other players in the reading and literacy world. But the bottom line of all this, right, is that there is no downside to libraries and literacy. Libraries are what community centers wish they could be. Reading is transformational. It's essential for economic growth, personally, nationally, globally. I'm often frustrated by how slow our state government operates. Some of our cities and counties, you know, San Francisco is one, are figuring out what the state doesn't seem to understand yet, which is that Californians expect government to respond the way Amazon does, fast, effortlessly, and intuitively, you know, like the internet. And in the nearly four years I've been a member of state government, I've been asked lots of times for the state to intervene. Can't you come and help us, Greg? And I always say, like, are you sure? Because most of the time, like, we're not gonna make it better. We're gonna add layers of review. We're gonna restrict local options. And I don't get why there can't be a structure that says, look, here's the goal. Here are three ways to get to it. You can pick one of those, the whatever one works best for you, or a combination of the three. All we really care about is you getting to this goal. But when I'm frustrated by that kind of stuff, I visit local libraries, academic, research, public, and I invariably feel better. Libraries are fast. Libraries are nimble. They rapidly respond to the communities that they serve. And the more connected they are digitally, the faster they respond. If you have half of your patrons who are Mongolian, right, then you're gonna put Mongolian English primers on the shelves of the kids section and offer programs of interest to the Mongolian community. No brainer. I've been to about 170 of California's 1119 libraries. Modoc to Calexico, inland empire, San Francisco, San Gabriel Valley, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Lake Tahoe, Orange County, the Central Valley. And what I see in libraries makes me optimistic about the future. And it makes me realize how much we can do to improve that future by investing in libraries. As I said, the bottom line is libraries are good for the bottom line. The S-O-L-E that animates our new economy. Libraries are the happiest and most helpful face that government is ever going to present to a community. Watch Little Kids. Watch Little Kids getting rowdy over a book at a story time. I don't care whether it's in Beverly Hills or Barstow. Watch that. And then you tell me if you don't feel like things are okay and they're gonna get better. Pete Segar, the folk singer says this. He says the world is gonna be saved by a million small things. And a lot of those million things are happening at libraries. Now, as awesome as California likes to think it is, we should remember that a quarter of our population lives in poverty or on its edge. For an, just so we understand what that means, for an individual, the federal poverty level is $12,140 in annual income. It's $25,000 for a family of four. Family of four at 200% of the poverty level has annual income of $50,000. And I don't think that really goes a hell of a long way anywhere in this state. Now, many of those 10 million Californians in or near poverty are children. Children in single-parent households that are usually run by women. Are the state of California's policies geared towards the people that do need our help the most? In some cases, yeah, but in other cases, no. Here in the state that's home to the Silicon Valley, right? At least 25% of the state doesn't have internet at home. There's a variety of reasons for that, but some of the reasons are economic. 40% of Latino families don't have the internet at home. And that's not specific to California. One out of three New Yorkers don't have the internet at home. But that's a large chunk of Californians who are on the wrong side of the digital divide. And what are they doing? They're lined up waiting for one of the 22,000 public terminals at California's libraries, just as they are in New York, just as they are in Ohio, just as they are in Arizona, and every other state, including Texas. They're waiting to fill out job applications, to pay taxes, to get healthcare information, worker retraining, it's lifeline stuff. Somebody said it this way, libraries are the most welcoming place for our disenfranchised. And they may be, they are that, I suppose, but they're a lot more than that too. People now come to libraries to create a prototype, to hold a community forum, to finish homework, to be safe. I've noticed in several reports, how within a few years, probably fewer than the reports predict, right? The digital divide isn't going to be about who's connected and who isn't. It's going to be about the quality of the connection. New e-learning platforms are already spiking up in use, VR augmented reality, gamification, mobile learning, with 21st century connectivity, libraries can help anyone, regardless of circumstance, to access the web's limitless information, and reshape it into the tools that are gonna make all of our lives easier. Libraries, libraries own the pre-kindergarten space. The Los Angeles City librarian just signed a deal with LA Unified Schools to put a library card into every school kid's hands. And whereas you heard Deb say earlier, we're trying to do that in every county. Now this surprises me. So kids, right, up to the age of 18, spend less than 19% of their 24-hour day in a classroom. And yet, the state of California is spending almost $65 billion on public schools to create a generation of lifetime learners. Ostensibly, that's the goal, right, with respect. So where's the investment in the other 80% of these kids' lives, where most of this lifelong learning is actually taking place? In a very real way, libraries are a community's first responders. So you remember Ferguson, Missouri? During the fires in Northern and Southern California, several libraries were the only place in town that had a working ISP. Those libraries were the community's one safe haven in a very, very literal way. One of the other things I'm really enjoying in this job is getting off of, particularly in Southern California, is getting off the freeway and driving surface streets, which has allowed me to see California's diversity more up close, that's poor grammar in it. I meet with a fair number of community leaders, advocates, and to a person, right? Everyone I talk with are people who are working as hard as they can to try and make things better. They encompass the full, wonderfully varied spectrum of Californians, and they're all working creatively to find commonality. And they're looking for connections. They're looking for ways to successfully navigate the changed world this new digital economy is creating. And increasingly, they're finding their path into the future at the library. Now I'm happy to duck or evade any questions you might have. We're coming around with the microphone. I guess I have no future in like musical theater. I can't wear these kind of... No, but it makes me want to like break into my fair lady, you know? She's so deliciously low. She's so horribly dirty, right? Yes? I noticed there's a new library that opened in San Francisco on Third Street. Is it focused on a particular type of learning? Don't know, but every new library is pretty great. I think it's in Mission Bay. It's on Third Street, I don't have the address. It's usually in the monthly publication that comes out about... Yeah, I had thought that was a branch of the San Francisco public library system. So you guys, you San Franciscans approved a bond measure, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago that allowed for the renovation of all 35 of the branches here. Yeah, the one in North Beach is really cool too after the upgrade of it. Someone in the front here? Characteristics, does the 21st century library have physically from an infrastructure and when you walk in, what are you looking at? Right, so the question is what physically, right? From a facility standpoint is a 21st century library. And I think to a person, right? So if there were smart library directors, and we have some here who are answering this question, they would say a facility that allows the flexibility to do what's being asked of libraries now. So the main branch in Glendale in Southern California, it's a big old 60s building where, like if the nukes were falling, like you would run there because you knew you would be safe. Like it's just like this kind of cinder block monolith. But one of the things that they consciously did when they renovated the library was to create a large open space in the middle of it. Now some libraries don't have the luxury of that, right? Because they're smaller. So some libraries now, rather than having a built-in computer terminal will use laptops. And you guys have seen these things where you just kind of pull the laptop out of this tree. So there's a number of the smaller branches in LA County that have turned the laptops as a way to allow for that flexibility. So I think primarily it's the ability to use space in different ways. Another thing you'll see in a lot of libraries is no books on the top shelf. Because people can't reach them. And to make room for some of these other things that communities are using. Is that fair, Ballard? Okay, all right. Question in the back. Thank you for that very interesting. I can send you more. I've got like a, there's a couple of white papers. So let's just trade cards at the end, right? Thank you for that interesting presentation. I noticed that University of San Francisco and University of California and Berkeley have something in common. They ban the public from using their facilities. They ban the public from entering their buildings. What can the state of California, or specifically your office do, to pressure these institutions to join the kind of direction you're talking about? Well, the short flip answer is we can certainly do more than we're doing now, which is nothing. So I wasn't aware of that. And I guess because I use San Francisco State because we have a library there, so maybe I'm getting preferential treatment. But I will ask, I mean one thing, we periodically get requests from the library systems of CSU and UC and the community colleges for that matter to give them grants. And I don't see why the discussion over whether they should get a grant couldn't include some discussion of who gets to use their library. I mean, not to make a big deal out of it, but we're all paying for that facility to be built. It's not like the students are paying for it. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I thought you said San Francisco State, okay. You know, there's very little I can do about that other than ask them nicely. It was a question. There was a question right here. You alluded to this a little bit, but the public libraries at least are changing in their role. They're now one of the few civic spaces that we have left. And they're addressing all kinds of needs that go way beyond sort of traditional information needs, which makes me wonder if libraries shouldn't have more of a say in the governance of the spaces or the communities in which they exist. So maybe libraries, there's an opportunity in our role for libraries to be part of the governance of cities and counties in a way that they haven't been before because they're filling needs that cities aren't meeting. Yeah, that's a good point. So there was a period, so a lot of people who sort of came up or came into their own when the internet was new, still believe that that sort of trumps every other thing and it's been difficult for them to understand that there's still a role in communities for libraries. So you see it in public schools as well, right? So there's 6.3 million kids in California public schools and there's 807 teacher librarians, right? I'm sorry, it's up to 850 now. In Texas, right, there's 5.3 million kids and 4,300 teacher librarians. So there's a perception that, right, it's not necessary, like we don't need it because we have the internet and stuff like that. And so in my experience over the last three years, so that perception is changing. And but I think what libraries need and it isn't, marketing is not, I mean that's not really what I mean, but so for example, we've facilitated some meetings where we'll bring together a whole community and there's an outfit called the Aspen Institute that does this like more than we do. But so they'll bring together everyone in a community to talk about the role of the library. And it's fascinating to watch everyone at the table because they have no idea, right? Like if anyone who walks into a library gets it, but these folk are doing whatever their important thing is that they do for that community. And so going through that, we've just re-upped with them the Aspen Institute to do more of these things around California. So for example, we did that in Sutter County and the perception of the library and what it can do has been completely changed just by bringing people together. So yes, libraries should have a better understanding of the bigger role in the governance, but there has to be a perception by the governance an understanding of all that they can provide. And there's, I think doing things like I'm describing that may not be the answer, but that can make that process happen a little sooner than just kind of organically over time. I mean, like I say, in just the brief time I've been the state librarian. I mean, so now there's more, right? Teacher librarians in public schools than there were. The first two years, it was 807. Well, they've added 43. So the perception is changing. I mean, and they're coming around to understanding this idea that if you wanna have the most rockin' community center ever, it's already there, it's the library. And I think it's gonna be driven more by millennials just because of their lifestyle. So for example, if you read these Pew Center studies, you don't have to, but I mean, these national studies on libraries, the highest level of love for libraries is millennials, even though they don't use them all the time. But part of it is this, so many people now, right, they wanna live close to where they work. Like they don't wanna do this nonsense where they drive to the burbs and they have this horrible commute. So if you're trying to live near where you work and it's super expensive, like it is in San Francisco or LA, well, you're gonna have like a 700 square foot studio, maybe. Well, all of a sudden, that makes the downtown library, but that's where you go, right? And I think, okay, so you guys, the famous library in New York, right? The Ghostbuster Library, the one that's there on Fifth Avenue, they blew out the entire back wall of this iconic national registry library and put in like, you know, like what do you call it? Like a bar, table, height thing like at Starbucks and glass, so you could look out, there's a really cool park that it backs up onto and I can't think of the name of it. And they did that because, right? What is it, Bryant? Yeah, right, exactly. And so they did that because they learned from their customers that they were coming to the library to socialize, to not just do study hall and stuff like that. So my filibuster, do I answer your question? Question right here. Sorry, it's kinda half of an answer, isn't it? I had a quick question. So in thinking about intergenerational mixing and so often we're divided into ideas of millennials versus the baby boomers, but I've heard this idea floated that we're becoming less about our generation and more about our values and our lifestyle. So those who love books, those who love art, those who love technology and that we're kind of driven by those values rather than our age. And I had read this article, sorry, this is a little long winded, but I promise I have a question. It can't be any more long winded than me. I had read this article about this institution in the Netherlands that took retirees and juveniles that were in underprivileged communities that were struggling, didn't have family and paired them. So that the retirees had a sense of purpose, these underprivileged children had a grandparent figure and they actually had, they built a living situation where they co-lived together. And do you see that libraries have the potential for that kind of intergenerational collaboration, I guess you could call it, where you're really starting to mix? Well, so it's happening now, right? So the literacy program that's in libraries, that's who most of the tutors are volunteering their time. And so that program you're talking about in the Netherlands, there's school districts in California that have borrowed that and are putting that to use now. I was just in a longevity discussion Tuesday, I guess, Tuesday morning and that was the reason they invited me was because of the thought that you just expressed. So in a very ad hoc, but sort of steady way, libraries are providing that environment to do exactly what you're talking about now. How can, and so they asked me to come there, it's like, okay, what can we do, how much more can we do? Or how can we facilitate that happening in libraries? Facilitates that, but what barriers do you see from that happening? Is it a transport barrier? Is it how the space is laid out barrier? Is it an advertising, hey, this is available barrier? You know, I think it can be a variety of things. So I mean, there's all sorts of decisions and strategies that some communities are already doing to integrate older Californians into their thinking, but it can be things as simple as like, okay, so you can't have deadly sidewalks anymore. Like, I mean, you and I could fall down and hit our head on some of these sidewalks and that's game over. You have to have more reliable public transit. But I mean, what's interesting is to a person, right? So if you were to serve somebody like me, right? Hey, Greg, what do you think about having your daughter Katie send you off to an old people warehouse, right? And hang out with people who are older and sicker than you and you can just kind of sit there and decline along with the rest of them. So my answer would be like, no, like that's not really attractive to me. And to a person, right? You read these studies, people say, hey, I want to live in my home. I don't want to go to one of these things. And I want to feel relevant and value and share all of what I have learned with the people who are coming next. And there's ways you can do that. Like employers are starting to do this too, right? Where they'll pair somebody new with somebody who's experienced. So you've got all the drive and the eagerness and the excitement of somebody who's new, paired with somebody who's got some moves, right? Right, who's got some smarts and some savvy and wisdom or whatever you want to call it. But so, I mean, it's happening now. There's more. So one of the discussions we had was, well, can't you put something in libraries like a database, let's say, or some kind of suite of online content that offers the people who come into the library opportunities. So for example, if there's a thing called Cal Volunteers, and you can go there and they have a website where you can say what you want to volunteer in. Like you put in your zip code, right? And then you can pick. Like I want to do Meals on Wheels, or I did this a while ago and I did it for animals, like animals. And the first thing that came up was like Squirrel Rehab. And I'm reading that going. What's the, well, like, you know, I started out on Acorns, but, you know, pretty soon I was stealing to support my macadamia nut habit, right? Like I, and then they explained it to me. It's like, so, you know, Greg, like the little squirrel falls off the limb and you nurse it back to health. It's like, hey man, like if the little squirrel falls off the limb, like it's defective, right? Like, that's Darwin, you know, but so the conversation was about, sorry. But it's like really like Squirrel Rehab, you know. Like I'm Perry, I'm a macadamia nut addict. But so, so things, but you can only find that if you go to this stupid Cal volunteer, excuse me, I know the cabinet secretary, but if you go to this one website, that's the only place you'll find it. But if you can offer stuff at the library, where if you come in and say, I wanna volunteer, the librarian can say, well go look here and do it yourself, or I will help you, what do you wanna do? That you can facilitate some of these relationships that you're talking about, these intergenerational connections. But the program from the Netherlands is, it's being, who's the guy? There's a famous sci-fi writer, William Gibson, I wanna say, who says the future's already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. And so there are places in California that are putting that strategy to work. And I'm not pandering, although I'm capable of it. But at the meeting, right, the longevity meeting, that was one of the things that's right here in my old reporter's notebook, underlined saying, this could be a cool thing for libraries to facilitate. So, yes, ma'am. Question back here. Yes, hi, good evening. It's kind of a three-part question. Is a three-part question. Three-part. Is your position one that is appointed by the governor? I serve at the governor's pleasure. How long is your term? There is no term. I serve at the governor's pleasure. Like you could call me tomorrow and go, man, you were way over the OB marker at the Mechanics Institute. You're yesteryear, right? You're going the way of emails, Greg. I'm done, right? And then lastly, do all the other. That was one part or two parts? 1.5. And then lastly, do all of the other states have a state librarian? Yes. There's a association of state librarians. It's called COSLA, the Chief Operating Office, Chief Operators of State Libraries of America or something like that. And like we have conventions and we play like Dewey Decimal System Drinking Games, but there's always somebody who gets really loaded and allowed in all the other librarians. And then you turn and go, shh, right, joking. You know, it's done some really good things, the association, and it sure helped me. I mean, my background wasn't in libraries. I'm a newspaper man. And so the other state librarians were very generous in educating me and kind of, you know, here's things you ought to pursue. But what we don't do a terrifically good job of and part of it is because, you know, it's not the same as in California as in other states. But so a lot of the other state libraries are divisions within, say, the State Department of Education or they're a division within the Cultural Heritage Agency or something like that. So in California, we have the luxury of, so I report to the governor. And so he's a little more tolerant of me saying stuff like I did to you, which is why don't these pinheads in Washington like triple what they're spending on libraries instead of this zeroing it out bullshit, right? So, but that's not the case in every state. And so we've had, in my judgment, you know, we could have more success lobbying, but you know, to a certain degree, we're shackled by just the nature of the jobs in other states. But there's some really amazing things that are going on in other states, particularly some of the small ones. Yes, ma'am. This is our last question. You mentioned earlier that the career of the future was information management. How do you see the curriculum for that career of the future as compared to the current librarian status? Yeah, I don't think that's a career per se. That's a characteristic of almost every job in the future. If we don't know what some of these jobs are that haven't been created, we do know that we're going to live in an environment where there's a growing amount of information that's out there. And so how do we find the needle in the haystack? So, you know, you've seen these things where they talk about, okay, so there was the web, and now there's web 2.0 or what, are we still on 2.0 or are we on to another one now? Okay, but so what's happening now is there's a lot of innovations where the value comes from aggregating or connecting these disparate pieces of information, right? So whatever the job is that I'm gonna have in the future, even if I don't know what it is, it's going to involve, you know, manipulating and understanding and, you know, coordinating information. So I don't know what the right name of it is, but it's a kin, I think, in some way to librarianship, but it's more like how do I understand the value of big data? How do I create work of my own and connect it to someone else's work? Right, so think about, do you guys use ways? Ways, the, right? So ways couldn't have happened without, I mean it's like there was GPS, but then somebody figured out a way where all of us who use it, like they can instantaneously grab what we're saying and create these routes, right, based on that transfer of information. So I think understanding how you can pull together disparate things like that is more what I was thinking of. I don't think it'll transplant or replace librarianship, but it's sort of a skill that you'll need, regardless of what the job is. Shall we take one more? Can I answer your question? Okay, we'll take one last. We'll take one last. Oh, I need all the suggestions I can get. No, okay. I volunteered for, since I retired about 10 years ago, at the experience court going into the public school system and tutoring it and also 826 Valencia and there they emphasize. What I think there's a need of, and you mentioned it, is with 30% of Californians being far and barred to somebody to set up a program to teach literacy to these people from all over the world that I hear. I mentioned in the speech, there's a lot of different entities that participate in literacy and there's a lot of different flavors of it, right? There's digital literacy, financial literacy, health literacy, there's any number of different things and we, the state, have done a poor job of coordinating the different efforts. So what you'll find sometimes in libraries, which is really cool, so we'll be doing this adult English learning tutoring, but at the same time, they'll have conversation clubs where they pull together different kinds of people and my favorite is, I wanna say it's in the city of Santa Clara where they do this conversation around American holidays. So it's like people that aren't used to Thanksgiving baking a pumpkin pie or like folks whose day of independence isn't the 4th of July and it's not red, white, and blue, learning that and learning English around events like that. But yeah, there's so much more that we could be doing but I think the first step is to, you know, like talking about aggregating information and bringing it together. You know, the different players, public, private, schools, I mean, we need to be talking to each other and figuring out, okay, so what do you do best? What am I doing best? What are you doing best? Okay, let's do that, let's focus on that and let's find a way to, you know, maximize what we can do with the money that we've got. Okay, thank you so much, great. Thank you all for coming and for donating books for Project Cicero. We'll still be collecting them tomorrow. Thank you so much. We'll see you next time.