Interview with Marie Østergård

Library Director, Aarhus Public Libraries and Dokk1

Tuesday, August 8, 2023.  

(Interview has been edited for succinctness.) 

Given the enormous discrepancy between non-library social services in the United States and Denmark, I think it is prudent to take that into account when comparing the budgets of libraries with similar social missions. I imagine a library in Denmark has the support to do a lot more with what it is given for a budget when it is surrounded with other infrastructure that also supports widespread social well-being. Is this an accurate presumption? Of course, the overall goal of Dokk1 is to have everything in one place, but have you had to build any partnerships with outside agencies? 

We have a partnership strategy we constructed before moving into Dokk1. We had a deliberate intention to not be the ones doing all the activities and services in the building, so we wanted to have partnerships with other organizations and groups of citizens as part of that. 

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Right now, I would say we have about 200 different partnerships that come in and offer services and do activities in various ways. The whole idea of the library as a community hub is that the library is infrastructure around many different activities not necessarily carried out by the library itself. That could be social welfare activities, but it could also just be a group of people very interested in Mac computers for example, who work on Mac computers the first Wednesday of every month. There is a wide range of activities we are doing. 

 

If we didn’t have as good of a welfare system as we do, I think we would have even more partnerships with organizations that help vulnerable people in various ways. We do have partnerships with them as well. In our partnership strategy, we also defined different partnership arenas that we need to consider, and we try to make sure that we have a wide diversity in our partners through these arenas. 

 

One of these arenas is learning. One is great stories, such as music, literature, or theater. One is children and families, which pertains to play, learning, and experience. 
 

We have one that we call Democracity, which is about democracy, and how we work with the library as democratic infrastructure and enhancing people’s democratic self-confidence through activities in the library. 

 

We’re partnering with tons of different organizations that are working with us in the library space in these arenas. We haven’t defined a single arena labeled as “vulnerable people” or “homeless people” in that way. Instead, we include content in the other arenas that will pertain to their lives so that they are included. 

 

In terms of language abilities, we have a lot of people from different language communities, and a lot of international people who are just working, not speaking Danish. We focus on making sure that we always have activities that you can join even if you don’t speak Danish. 
 

Our partnership strategy is quite important for us, and it’s quite wide. Every staff member needs to be able to go out and do partnerships. It’s not something that stems just from me or middle management. Every single staff member should be able to do that. So basically, if you’re working with us, you have to be able to do programming, do partnerships, and be out on the floor, no matter what kind of educational background you have or what kind of job you were hired to do. You have to be able to do all 3 of those things, just in different contexts. 

 

Dokk1 includes a lot of institutions within its walls. Do all of these institutions play the same part in your vision for Dokk1? 

We have 18,000 square meters in Dokk1. Most of those are library. There is a tiny bit for citizen services, but it’s mostly library. We are inviting other organizations to come in and use that library space. On top of that, we have auditoriums and meetings rooms that can be booked for any kind of organization. It can be anything from political organizations to a club that likes rocking climbing in Nepal. They can make them open to the public, or they can make them open only to their organization. 

 

The whole open library space is curated by us to make sure that the activities are compliant with laws and rules about public spaces, but we don’t necessarily participate or corroborate with them. It is important to stress that the open spaces are under library legislation that disallows political or religious agitation and commercial activities. That’s basically it as far as legislative restrictions go. 

 

We did have to sell some space on the top floor as a rental space, and that is where you will see the law firm and the bank, which are not public spaces. That is also where you will see the back office for our citizen services, the city archive, and the ICT Department. 
 

If you had to guess, what proportion of people who use Dokk1 are experiencing some form of homelessness? 

I think we have a pretty good idea of how many. There are around 500 homeless people in Aarhus. I would say we normally have 20 or 30 homeless people in the building during the day every day. 
 

However, during the pandemic, we started to use an SDG lab as an outside space as part of our partnership with the homeless shelter next door. We were trying to figure out how we could do better outreach with this community, and we found that by using outside spaces and creating activities together with the people staying at the shelter that we had much better access to communication with them. We found that a lot more would come if we were doing it outside. When asked, they would say, “We know we smell, and we know that people don’t feel comfortable next to us, and we don’t feel comfortable going into a building like this,” even though we try to set a low threshold for entry. So, for us, taking it outside into their turf ended up making them much more comfortable. This made it easier to include them in the joint community at the library. We had always thought we had the homeless population pretty well covered, but it turned out we didn’t. 
 

What came after this was a project where we created a small library in the homeless shelter and hired what we call a social librarian. The social librarian helps us make sure we create better activities for this community. We’ve been doing a lot of different big activities like a music festival, an art exhibition, poetry reading, things like that. We started a reading club and a writing club. We then brought this writing club back into Dokk1 so that they would now come in and mix with every other user at Dokk1. That was a big success and is going on still. 
 

When the Denver Public Library tries to communicate with this population, sometimes it’s to try and build a relationship of trust with them so that they feel like the library is a place they can trust. Is that similar to what you’re trying to do? 

That’s probably part of it. I think in our case it’s more along the lines of making sure that our services benefit this group of people and that we don’t accidentally exclude them. It’s our job to be for everyone, and so we need to make sure that they know that this is also for them. 

 

Have you experienced any kind of pushback from the general public about being an open space for people who are homeless? 
 

No, not at all. We have the same 20 or 30 homeless people who come in every day. We know who they are, and sometimes they know who we are. We do occasionally get complaints from people saying things like, “This guy over there is really smelly, you need to do something.” In cases like that, we will go up to the person and say “Look, here’s a number and an address where you can go and have a shower, and you’re very welcome back once you’ve gone and done that.” And they usually do, because they know us and we know them.  
 

One of our regulars is a great guy, and he has all of his life in plastic bags. He obviously needs to take good care of those bags, because that is his life. In the beginning, he would come and remove the books from a shelf so he could put his bags there. Then he would get comfortable on the couch and read the newspaper. In that case, we had to say “You can only bring five bags, and we’ll help you store it, and then you’ll be fine.” So now he selects his bags every morning, and the rest get stored away. 
 

One thing I know about a lot of US libraries is that homeless people use them as shelters where they can get out of the elements, and we have that too. A challenge we faced at one time was getting people out of the building in the winter when we closed at 10. We weren’t sure why this was, since we knew there was a shelter nearby where they could stay. What we found out was that the shelter didn’t open until 10:30, meaning there was a half-hour window where they were stuck outside in the cold. So, we talked to the shelter and asked if they could open half an hour before. They were able to arrange that and get it worked out in the end. 
 

When researching Dokk1, we saw that the building remains open far longer than it is actually staffed, and this was done with the philosophy that the general public could be trusted to take care of their own library and that any vandalism or other damage done would be minimal and can just be considered as part of the cost of having an open space for everyone. Was this direction at all controversial when it was implemented? 

No. In Denmark, this “open library policy” has actually been quite common for years. It’s been in almost every library in Denmark for a little less than 20 years. It actually wasn’t in place at the old main library, making it one of the only libraries that didn’t. We didn’t know what would happen when we implemented it into such a big building like Dokk1, so when we first opened we had all these safety measures in place where the building would close down in sections. What we ended up finding though was that this was unnecessary, because there was no trouble. One part of that is the open floor design. There are no closed rooms, so you really can’t hide anywhere. We also changed the hours of our student workers who work as our shelvers so that they would be there in the evening, so they’ll be around in the building. If something happened, they wouldn’t do anything besides maybe call the police, but just having people there working makes library users feel more comfortable. It’s a very warm, calm feeling in the building during the evening hours. 
 

A common question about policies such as this in the US is “Could something like that work here?”  

It could. I’ve had that question many times, especially from US people, and they say things like “This could only work in such a safe country like Denmark,” but what we’re seeing is that this is starting to work in many different countries around the world. There are certain locations where you might now start with it, but in every community, you could find one or two places where you could do it. It needs to be gradual. If you go from being your standard authoritative library with all these rules and all of a sudden open up all the doors, that wouldn’t work. It takes a lot of time to make people feel like this is their library. In some libraries, there’s a big list of rules you see when you come in, and you get a feeling of anxiety from it, but if you dare to take away rules, you give a feeling of responsibility to the community you serve. Once they have that feeling of being at home, they will take it upon themselves to take care of their library as their space. 
 

Obviously, there are some places where I might not do this, but I think it will work in a lot more places than we think. 

 

This model also demands a certain mindset of the staff. It means that you will be giving away power. But we already give away power, that’s part of the point. We are always trying to figure out how we can say yes to whatever people come up and suggest to us. 

 

A lot of what we’re discussing with this project is about budget. If you had a higher budget, what kinds of things would you spend it on? Do you have lofty dreams of different things you could create for your library, or would you use it more to enhance what you currently have? 

If we’re limiting it to Dokk1 and not the entire municipality, I would hire more staff to do more services and more outreach. There are so many services that I want to do more of. If we were talking across the entire municipality, I would build more libraries. There are communities in our municipality that don’t have a library and could really use one, or they have one, but it could be bigger. We have 18 libraries around the municipality, and some are very tiny.  

 

When comparing budgets across our cultures, it’s also important to factor in the cost of a worker. There is a big difference between salaries in Denmark and salaries in the US. When we compare ourselves to big libraries in the US, we are stunned by the amount of staff that they are able to hire. Our working week is 37 hours, and we don’t have much staff. The most expensive thing in Denmark is people’s time. I want to say that about 95% of our budget goes to salaries. So, when we work, we tend to do so at a very fast and efficient pace. When people come to visit from other countries and work with us for a few weeks, they tend to say that they are overwhelmed with the pace at which we work. 

 

So, with a higher budget, you might want more staff? 

Yeah. I would love more staff. I would definitely love more staff. And we have a wide diversity in educational backgrounds among my staff, and that’s deliberate. It’s amazing to see what happens when we put people together from different backgrounds and have them develop different activities and services. We can’t do our activities, outreach, and partnerships without the people. We can have unstaffed opening hours where people come in and borrow their books and do whatever, but that won’t make the library grow, it will only maintain it. It won’t grow what a library can be in people’s lives. For that, we need people. 

 
Our poster is focused on the UN SDG for reducing inequity. You’ve already talked a bit about how you work with the local homeless population to help create equity there. What other kind of programming do you have to create more equity in Aarhus? 

This question makes me think of the democracy aspect of our mission. Libraries are democratic infrastructure. They are places for people. Everybody should be able to come, and not many places are like that. What we’re working with is how we can increase people’s democratic confidence.  

 

I’ve had a lot of conversations about the wording of this with US librarians. When I say democracy, I’m not talking about democracy as a political system, I’m talking about democracy as a life form. How do we live together? Democracy basically means to talk to each other, exchange ideas, and listen to each other. But what we find is that a lot of people don’t have confidence in themselves or that their voice will be listened to. That is a job that the library can contribute to. How do we train that self-confidence in them, that they are worth listening to? 

 

So, we’re doing that in many different ways. For instance, we’re doing something called democracy fitness where we’re training young people in what we call the “different muscles” that you need to work like this. We are also doing a lot of debates in the library, where we facilitate it and make sure that it stays a safe, non-biased space so that we get accustomed to listening to people that we disagree with. We’re not very good in our society at being in the room with people we don’t agree with. We are in our own bubbles all the time. So, the library needs to be a space where you can meet people with opposing viewpoints. 
 

For me, that’s part of the equity. How can we contain all these different approaches to life and places where we are in our lives and keep having an open mind and interest in other people’s opinions without necessarily agreeing with them, or not always trying to change their mind, but just to learn and get more clever from doing that. That’s something that we’re working very heavily with, and I’m super excited about it. We’ve really been pushing it, and it’s been growing for a couple of years now. 

 

Another thing I’m very excited about is our media lab that we are creating for children and young people for strengthening media literacy while also showing them how to produce and create. They learn about how to interview, how fake news is created, how to create soundscapes and stories, all that kind of stuff. Through doing that, you also learn about the media landscape that you’re part of. We’re building this now and over the next 2 years, and we’re hoping to have it open to adults as well. 
 

The last thing I want to mention related to the SDGs is that we are also working heavily with climate sustainability and nature connectedness. How do we work with this as libraries? How do we stimulate people’s awareness of climate change, and how their own habits relate to climate sustainability? We’ve had a lot of success with creating learning communities around different types of climate activities. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for that in the library staff as well as the rest of the community. We haven’t found a good English word for it, but there is space in our libraries where you come share things, where you come and share things with other people. For instance, one week might be board games, where some people bring in games to give away and other people take them. It’s a big sharing pool. 
 

Quantitative data used to justify spending on library programming is a common discussion theme in LIS studies in the US. Is this a cultural difference between our respective countries in this field, or is there a lot of this type of statistical gathering and analysis surrounding Dokk1’s budget? How do you quantifiably measure Dokk1’s success in its vision for a more connected and supported community? 

I think you’re right in assuming that we don’t have the same demand for quantification as other countries do, but what we do quantify is the number of visitors, number of participants in different programs, and numbers of partnerships. We also quantify numbers of specific types of activities, such as activities for schools. We want to see if we’re effectively reaching throughout the municipality, or if it’s a specific type of school that is coming, etc.  So, for every number that we’re looking at, we have different things that we’re looking for. 
 

So no, we don’t have an obligation to provide specific numbers to the city. But when they ask, “How is your outreach to the schools in the city?” We need to have those numbers. Then maybe they justifiably say, “Well, you’re only reaching the rich school, you need to do something over here as well.” 
 

But how do you quantify impact? When you talk about impact from libraries, it’s very difficult to take other factors into account. For example, we want to claim we are helping kids read better. But we can never do that math, because that’s also the work of schools. So what we’re trying to work a lot more with is the qualitative data that we get from interviews. We’re having conversations with teachers and kids to try and get their impression of how we are helping. It’s a difficult path. 

 

I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe we shouldn’t accept the premise that we need that data to justify our existence. Because how do you measure quality of life?