Erin Dummeyer: Most people were telling me that libraries were going to become obsolete.
Scott Brill: Yes!
ED: And we just have Google now. They really didn’t realize that’s an incredibly rude thing to say to someone who just started getting their master's in library science.
SB: And it’s totally wrong.
Randye Kaye: Those are the voices of two librarians. Erin Dummeyer and Scott Brill. Erin is the Library Director at the Mark Twain Library in Redding and president of the Connecticut Library Association. Scott is the Library Director of the Milford Public Library and Vice President of the New England Library Association.
I’m Randye Kaye, host of the podcast Good at Heat. I spoke with Scott and Erin because librarians quietly make the world a better place. Or maybe not so quiet. Libraries are community hubs where you can do research, yes, but also get access to technology, attend an author event, join a craft group, or take a workshop. And librarians create a welcoming space where it all happens. Our conversation revealed that books are just the beginning.
RK: Briefly, if you can begin with, like a one-minute, on how you got into the library biz.
SB: Sure. You know, it's funny. I honestly, for a long time in my life, didn't even have a library card. I'm ashamed to say, like many people, yeah, I was born and raised in Shelton, Connecticut, and I used the Plumb Memorial Library when I was a kid, and, you know, in high school. And then, of course, I went to college, and I used that library. But then in my adult life, for a long time, I didn't have a library card, a good decade, and I worked with my husband for a while in the travel business, and then 911 happened. And so that was not really a great avenue to be holding the fort down with. And so I was looking around, and I found there was a job in a library right there in Huntington, in Shelton, where I grew up. And that's basically how I started. I interviewed, and I got the job. I was thrilled, and I worked there for several years. People there told me, you really need to go to library school. This is like, your calling. This is something…
RK: Really, why did they say that?
SB: As you know, I also do theater. I'm very peripatetic. I like to do many things. I like to direct, but I also like to be the person in the group who's doing something. So I would do programming for kids and adults. I would do everything you do at a circulation desk at a library. I would do reference, I would do reader's advisory. And they're like, you have such a knack for this. I was able to use my mind in so many different ways to help people, and it just came naturally. It really, really did. And so everyone said, “Oh, you've got to go to library school.” Did I go to library school? No. So then I got another job, and it was a more important job. It was actually at the library I'm at now, but in the children's department, I loved it. I did story time. I started a chess club. Started all these things, and it was really a lot of fun. “You really need to go to library school?” Did I? No. And so then I got another job, a nd it was a more important job, where I was the head of Circulation of a library, and it was wonderful. And I really enjoyed it. And they said, “You really need to go to library school.” And I said, “All right!” And so I did. And then the pandemic happened, which helped in a little bit of a way, because I was sort of temporarily laid off from my job, so I was able to kind of expedite my library school. Within a year, I became the library director of the Derby Public Library, which was exciting to be there for about two and a half years, and then that led to now being the director, now almost for a year and a half, of the Milford Library.
See what Erin says, but I think many people that I talked to, who are library directors or even librarians, often come at it from a million different directions. It's very rare that we just went to college, went to library school, and then worked in a library. Oftentimes, librarians come from the theater, from social work. There's a former lawyer who works at a library. So there are many different paths to get to librarianship. Because I think, without sounding too haughty, a librarian wears so many different hats. We bring so much to the field from so many different directions that it helps that you had all this experience behind you, and then to become a librarian, that the people that are helping across the desk as patrons, you can help them so much more, because you may have also had a shared experience that they've had. So it really is wonderful to have come from many different directions to get it, and like, as you know, I did theater, community theater for a long time before we even thought of working in a library. So all that comes to the fore.
RK: So interesting. And in fact, in telling your story, you've answered question number one, which is, who do you help and how? So, Erin, how about you?
ED: So I came to libraries after college. I started working in a publishing firm. I really knew I liked books, and I think I envisioned myself being like a famous editor at HarperCollins or Random House and…
RK: Having lunch with your clients.
ED: Yeah, absolutely. Wearing stiletto heels. And what ended up happening instead is I got a job doing publicity for encyclopedias, which is just as exciting as it sounds. I remember at parties, I would tell people that they'd be like, “Oh, are you one of those people who go door to door and sell encyclopedias?” And I was like, “No, those. Those don't exist anymore.”
RK: One volume at a time. Pay by the month…
ED: Yeah. But part of my job was to read publications like Library Journals, School Library Journal, and look for reviews of our books. So those trade journals are all about librarians. There are always librarians featured. And I was like, man, librarians seem so cool. And not only that, because they were our primary customers, they seem really happy. They all seem to like their jobs. They seem to be really helpful. That really seems like the type of career I would love to pursue. So I ended up going to library school, thinking I'd probably be an academic librarian, but I just like people way too much. So it turned out that public libraries were really the place for me.
RK: I love it, and you didn't need three people to tell you to go to library school. One was enough.
ED: No, I don't think anyone told me at the time. In fact, most people were telling. I thought that libraries were going to become obsolete, and we just have Google now, which they really didn't realize. That's an incredibly rude thing to say. Someone just started getting their master's in library science.
SB: And it’s totally wrong.
RK: So what do you study in library school?
ED: Cataloging. I remember there was one on the history of libraries. I took a great class on professional writing for libraries. There's an academic library class. There was a government documents class, which was one of the most popular classes at my school, because the teacher was so phenomenal. So yeah, lots of different things. It really runs the gamut in that library school.
RK: So it's not just the Dewey Decimal System.
SB: And two big things were ethics. I had a whole class on library ethics, in other words, and we may talk about this, but if you have challenges, how do you deal with things like that, and and and privacy rights, and people who have a library card, they have the right to privacy. We don't just tell like a police officer, oh, this person checked all these books. So you have to understand the ethos of the library world. But also technology classes that was also important, because you really have to understand the library's really a foundation of helping people get to technology that they might not be able to access in another way, even just a computer could be something, but we offer e content and all that kind of stuff, so it's really important to be up to date on the latest technology. So I had classes in that. And also reference. You must have had a reference class, I would think.
ED: Yup.
SB: Yeah. How to answer questions and be prepared for them. But I was on a track of administration. I was learning management and administration of a library as well, what goes into budgeting and all that kind of stuff.
RK: Right. Of course, it's a business.
SB: Correct, it is. It's a non for profit business, usually, but, you have to understand how to also effectively deal with stakeholders in your town, your elected officials, other people in town, because you're you're advocating for a budget to operate a community hub, and you want to make sure that you know how to get the money that you need and how to deal with it if you don't get the money that you need, how you can work with your staff and with others to make things better.
RK: Just to sum up what you've said in your stories, my first question is always, who do you help and how? So I'm going to rephrase it differently for you guys. Because I did a workshop at the Library Association about thinking about your job in a meaningful way instead of, you know, what do you do? Right? Well, I am a blank, you say, I help blank by doing blank. So you help people in your job by doing what?
ED: So I once had this mentor of mine, and I did an internship at the New York Public Library years ago, and I remember her telling me that in libraries, you seek to touch lives. So what I mean by that is you're touching a life, however briefly, they may not remember their interaction with you, but you will create some kind of ripple effect in their life. And I'll give you one real-world example when I was working. One day, a man came in, and he asked me to help him fill out an affordable housing application. And I knew him, because his sons were always in the library, so we kind of knew his entire family. His wife would come in as well. And I did something very simple. English wasn't his first language, so I simply helped him fill out this application. You know, he did the rest. It was all of his information. And then, like, eight years later, I ran into him at the car wash, and he remembered me, and he had gotten into this town and this school district that he had wanted to get into with his kids, and he told me how great his kids were doing, and he showed me pictures. They were, like, over six feet tall, and I could tell that, you know, I didn't change this man's life, but I touched it in a very subtle way, and sort of perhaps helped cause some good things to happen for him. And I always think about that in my library work and my career is you might go in and just think you had a totally regular day, but you might have made someone smile, who was having a really off day, or you might have helped someone solve a problem, and you'll never know it. You might have even helped someone find a job, which affected their life. I mean, that's something that I know a lot of people are struggling with right now. So I think in libraries, we often have the opportunity to touch lives, and that's what I try to do. I think that's what my staff try to do is just have some kind of effect on people, however small.
RK: I love that. Scott…
SB: I think that's true. You know, it's funny. I know one of the questions sometimes you ask is about a quote, and one of my favorite quotes is by Robert F Kennedy, Senior, who, in a great speech, talked about the ripple of hope that we often don't know when we drop that pebble, the ripples of hope, go far beyond that we can even ever see and know. And Erin's right. I mean, I've experienced it many times. I tell it to my staff all the time, you may never realize the ripple that you've created with another person's life. And I agree we may not have changed it completely, but that you may have helped them launch into a path or to an arc that's going to help them. Oftentimes, we cite helping them find jobs or using the computers to do that. It happens all the time in my library, when I did story time in the children's library, you know, I was Mr. Scott, and it was very lively. It was very fun. You can imagine me doing silly songs, and the kids love it, and I love doing it, and I sat in like a big rocking chair, and all sorts of kids had all sorts of reactions, but one little boy was fascinated. He would be right at my knee, and he was there all the time. But he never sang, and he never really engaged, but he loved watching me, and everything he was little, and it came with his father every week. And I never heard the boy ever talk. You know, the father came in and said, I have to tell you, he talked in the car today, and he hasn't really talked in a long time. His mom had passed away, and he had this trauma. He wouldn't talk. He was not able to verbalize. But he saw Mr. Scott being silly and funny, and it was okay for a boy to be silly and funny and talk and laugh, and he started singing one of the songs in the car. You do not understand the ripple that you're creating by just being Mr. Silly Scott. And so I often have a tear in my eye when I tell it because it's…
RK: I’ve got a couple myself right now.
SB: I think what's even more magical about it is I didn't know I was doing that when I was a librarian, and that's what I'm trying to say, is that there are so many facets to librarianship. You can't describe a normal day. There are so many things that happen. The answer is, really, we help everyone. It's not just our community. I'll even go that because of the state of Connecticut, in a very perfunctory way. We're all connected. So if you want a book that we don't have, we get it from another library. Or another library can have our books. And so we're helping everyone in Connecticut. We're helping everyone throughout, you know, in a broader sense, as the President of the New England Library Association, I'm helping people in all six states, you know. So you do reach out, and it's really quite an extraordinary thing. And then we're all in this together with the ILMS funding and different things that are happening. There's the American Library Association, and when we're all in that together as well, you know? So we do see it as just this ripple. I think that's a beautiful thing that you said, Erin. I just believe in the ripple of hope and the ripples that we achieve in our lives.
RK: I love that. So you both answered my question and my standard fourth question, which is, is there a quote that inspires you?
SB: Although I have another one, of course, I do.
RK: Well, we'll go back to it. I used to travel around the country for various reasons, either for the theater or speaking. And if I go into a strange town, and I have time, I would head to the library.
SB: Good for you.
RK: Because, you know, that's where the people are. That's not where the tourists are, that's where the people are. And you just see how it's set up so differently. And some of them have easy chairs, and some of them have a reading corner, and some of them are just so interesting. And I don't think people realize the treasure that a library is, and it isn't just books. It's the children's department, and it's a librarian who says, how is that book? And I'm a big believer in small encounters.
SB: It’s programming and author talks and book discussions, and absolutely an E-content and streaming, and…
RK: …and tax help.
SB: And tax help, absolutely, believe me, yeah. Well, it's funny that you say that we used to go to Martha's Vineyard all my life, and that's just where we went as a family. And I have family who live there, and yeah, we went to the beach, but I also went to the library and visited the library, and my family, oh, the odd duck is going to the library, okay, but they're wonderful.
RK: It’s free. It's free. You know what else is good about libraries? When you get a book out, you have a return date, so you have to finish it or not; you have to make a decision. So anyway, reminds me, I have a book due today. But the second question is, who helps you? How do people help their local libraries? I guess you can talk a bit about the challenges that you face. I know that from speaking to both of you that the politicians in your town are very important, the police in your town are very important, and you probably have friends of the library, but who helps you in this endeavor of Touching Lives and a ripple of hope?
ED: So, Mark Twain Library, which is the library I'm a director at they is only partially funded by the town. We have to privately fundraise about 40% of our operating budget each year. So a great way to think about helping a library like mine is by donating. But I know that not everyone is always in a position to donate money, so they can also donate time. We have a few fantastic volunteer-run fundraisers that take place all year. But you can also just get a library card. Getting a library card helps your library because it helps us speak to our statistics and say these are the amount of people in our community who use us and love us, and it’s an important statistic we use when we are actually going to our towns, our mayors, our board of finance and making the case for funding the library is we say your taxpayers are getting so much out of the library because this is how many card holders we have. This is how many books they check out. This is how many eBooks they download. It really helps us make the case for why we should be funded. So you can support your library in a way that is no cost to you by simply using it.
SB: That's right, we, as Erin knows, we as directors, have to fill out the state report every year. One of the statistics, obviously, is how many library card users do you have? And it's a very important thing that you can have that number and show, hey, for this town, we have this percentage of people using the library, and it's a great statistic to be able to go back to a board of aldermen or a mayor, or whoever people do. Unlike the Mark Twain library, mine's a municipal library, so my funding is from the taxpayers. It is a city library. We do have an endowment, but there is money other than that; the main budget does come from the municipal funds. And so I have to advocate in a different way than, say, Erin might have to do. I don't necessarily have to fundraise in the way that she does, but I do have to advocate for the usage of the library and for the purpose of the library. I believe in community efforts, so you have community partners who can also say, hey, you know what? We also recognize the library as an ally in our work. So you really want to create those stakeholders in town who are also going to advocate for the library, so that you're not just siloed alone. We have a homeless shelter right near the library, actually, in Milford, and we just had someone from there today at the library. So we want to have that community connection and partnerships so that we know you say, Oh, I see they also, they also talk to the health department, have them come and speak. They also talk to this community group, and they have them speak. And so it's really important that the library is a community hub, but not the cheese stands alone, that it's really important to be part of everything.
RK: Partnership, community, donations, volunteering, using the library, talking about the library. I'm going to ask you about libraries in 2025 2026 what particular new challenges that people may not be aware of?
ED: Well, we've been seeing a dramatic rise in book challenges over the past few years.
RK: Oh, you mean like censorship, banning,
ED: Yes, people want us to take books off the shelf because they do not like the content within them. We learned through the American Library Association that last year, 72% of these efforts were not by just concerned individuals. They were from organized government groups. So anyone who does not want the government involved in what they can and can't read should be standing up for books right now and standing up against censorship, because that has been a major issue nationwide over probably the past at least five years, I would say.
SB: But it's a good thing in this light. And yes, I've had book challenges where I've had to respond. There is now in the state of Connecticut and the state of Rhode Island, just this year, a new law that challenges libraries. Libraries cannot censor. It was sort of that kind of law, correct me if I'm wrong, if I say anything wrong about it, Erin, it has our back. In other words, people have to fill out a form if they want to, if they want to challenge a reconsideration form of material. And we, all of us, libraries in the state of Connecticut, to ensure our funding, we had to kind of redo our collection development policy and by a certain date and make sure that we had a proper form to fill out. And that form is what's known as FOIAable. In other words, it's a public record, so the person challenging and my response both can be seen by the public, and so we can't do it just in a vacuum. Or I want that book off the shelf, take it off now. They must go through a process where the director has a period of time to respond, and then, if they don't like that, the board has a period of time to respond. But it's not just what you say, I don't want it. It's all that censorship. That's not what this is about. It's about making sure the due diligence and that you know the book is probably on the shelf or is on the shelf because it was vetted. It's a book that was gone, already gone through a process of either being award-winning or being on a list, or whatever. So it's really important that we have all this and to have this law behind us is very significant. We're, we're the only two New England states right now that have that law.
RK: Interesting. Okay, so, I mean, we could probably talk for hours about this. So I'm just going to mention that I have become aware that homelessness, using your libraries as a place to shelter, can be an issue. I understand that since the legalization of marijuana, the smell of marijuana coming into the library can be an issue. There's so much we can talk about with issues, and we don't have time for it. But if you're listening and you love your local library, be aware of how hard they work to make this library work for you, and be nice to everybody and touch lives and have that ripple of hope. So, I thank you for that. What's your favorite book you've read this year so far? Haha, that's a surprise question.
ED: I just read God of the Woods by Liz Moore. It was fantastic.
RK: Okay, it’s a mystery and summer camp, right?
ED: Yes, it's like a true crime, but it's a novel, so it's fiction, but it's been a while since I really had trouble putting the book down, but I had trouble putting that one down.
RK: See, I took that out. I didn't get into it. I brought it back, but maybe I'll take it out again. Scott…
SB: Well, you know, funny, I'm a nonfiction guy more than fiction. And so I reread because I was going to do a podcast on it. I reread a book called The Library Book by Susan Orlean. It's a wonderful book. It's about the Los Angeles Library's fire in the mid-1980s, but it's so much more than that. I suggest that anybody who wants to know what librarians do read this book. It's done very well. It's a mystery story. It's going back and forth because the fire has never been fully solved as to who actually started the fire that destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library. It's the rebuilding of the library. It's what librarians do. It's how they responded to the fire, but it's also how the community responded. It was it's a it's also about how they discovered new preservation techniques for books. It was very fascinating, but it also outraged how Los Angeles, as an inner city, has branches and money, and all the factors that would go into what a library is. And it also has to do with the AIDS crisis. It's a myriad of issues. This book is just endlessly fascinating, and so I found it like an onion again to read. I just love.
RK: Wonderful. Okay, so you said you had one additional quote or philosophy you wanted to share so…
SB: Just really quickly. Well, Tyrone Guthrie, who was a great theater director, he said, You make each rehearsal so much fun and engaging that the actors can't wait to come to the next one. And I really believe that I really would like to do that as just a person, but as a director, I try to do that. You may not always succeed, but I just, I kind of try to live by his goal of that
RK: I love that, Erin. Anything to add?
ED: I can't think of a quote that's fine. You want me to come up with a Mark Twain quote? I always got plenty of those.
RK: Oh, I love Mark Twain. What's your favorite Mark Twain quote?
ED: I was actually just reading, you know, his quote that's very popular, that says rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. He never exactly said that I found out. Yeah, he said something sort of similar. Because every once in a while, a rumor did go around that he was about to die or had died, and it really pissed him off. So he would respond in a sardonic way, like that. But he never exactly said those words, but it's still great to quote them.
RK: I love the Mark Twain House. We went there.
ED: Oh, it's fabulous.
RK: It's fantastic. So my final question is, why do you think we're here on earth?
ED: You know what? I can only say, why I think I'm here on Earth? And I hearken back all the time to actually something that my husband said about my father-in-law when he was doing his eulogy, and he talked about my father-in-law being funny, but never at anyone else's expense. And I think about that at least once a week, because I want to be someone who brings joy and is kind to others and lives her life in a way that makes others feel good and makes just a positive impact on people, but never at anyone else's expense.
RK: I love that. It's a standard improv rule: make the other guy look like a genius, right? Scott…
SB: You know, it's funny. I'm gonna gonna quote one of my favorite movies. And everyone's gonna like, oh no. You know this stuff stuck with me since I was a kid. You're gonna all laugh in The Poseidon Adventure.
RK: Which one?
SB: The original 70s one, Gene Hackman's character is a reverend, and he says, “You're a creative link from one generation to another.” That's why we're here. We are the creative link that brings us forward. And I always liked that because Randy, you know, we're both very creative people, and I think everyone's creative in their own way. I don't think it's just as the theater people, the artists, or whatever, I think all people are creative in their own way. And whether it's you raising children, and you know, then they're the new generation, and then they go on, or you painted, or that you were the greatest Baker, or you weren't a great baker, but you helped your family, whatever you contributed in that creative way. That's humankind. That's who we are. And I, I really believe in that as a person who is kind of a creative person, but that's also what I think overshadows the whole library thing that we're trying to do, that it's a very creative place. It's a place where you can find yourself, for free, for everyone. And that's the power, and that is really amazing to me.
