Dr. Skye Patrick - Los Angeles County Library
Libraries meeting the needs of the times
Listen to an audio clip from Skye’s story:
I grew up in the Midwest in the ‘80s, in Michigan. There’s a lot of viral memes of my generation being the feral generation. I think there’s truth to that.
My life was a challenge in the beginning. My birth mother had a lot of issues, and that led to my being in foster care several times, which was incredibly disruptive. Between foster placements, it was mostly me and my mother. With her challenges, I did a lot of mothering as a young person.
I was moved to several homes. Eventually I stayed in one until I was able to graduate high school. I had the ability to leave school early because I had the credits, and because I was in foster care. I would go to work. I was kind of a hybrid of being a high schooler and being hyper-employed.
I had two cards that were critical to me growing up. One was my bus card and one was my library card. With those two things, I escaped, literally and figuratively. I didn’t have any money, so I would go to the library. At the time, and I’m aging myself here, there were cassette tapes. I would check them out and carry them in my backpack. I carried the things I needed in case I didn’t come back, because that was real. There were times I would come back to those foster homes and my stuff would be in trash bags on the porch, for whatever reason.
So I always had a backpack, my cassette tapes, and a Walkman, and I walked everywhere. I walked to the bus to start my journey to school. My caseworker kept me in the same high school, because she understood that I needed to maintain some sense of familiarity. But because I moved homes all over the city, I had to get up at 5:00 AM to be on the bus so that I could get to school.
Those two cards allowed me a level of freedom that I don’t think most people understood. I had my own world. While the world that I existed in was incredibly challenging, I could escape. I worked at a restaurant in another city. I would take the bus from the south side of my city to the east side of the other, and I would pass by a university. It was interesting to follow the trajectory of the bus through the hood and into the beautiful, plush green grass of a traditional university. I got to see young people, probably with very well-to-do families, living this life that was appealing to me. It gave me an insight that there was something beyond.
And then there was the pool. When I lived with my mother, I often needed to escape her. So I would get up really early, go to the city pool and I would be there all day. I taught myself to swim. I was a fish, and it brought me so much joy. Some of the lifeguards, who were on the university swim team, took an interest in me. Having their guidance, I would just go back and forth, back and forth. I decided I was going to go to that university and be a swimmer. I went down another path, but at the time that was my big goal.
People don’t always understand the importance of these public spaces in our social infrastructure. They were so important to me. I never wanted to be a librarian, but it’s interesting how life lifes, right? In the early days, I found myself interested in music, art, storytelling narratives, and then documentary film, ethnomusicology and faith. These things kept leading me back to the library for free research material. Not only did the library position itself as a place for me to be in my early life, but it was also place where I could find my way around all those interests.
One of my earliest memories of the library is that a family friend often found herself there with her children when they were homeless. They stayed with us for a little while, but they used to go there all day because they didn’t have a place to live. She was enamored with reading. I was always a reader, but she read everything! And then she wrote stories to write her way out of the horrible world she lived in. I visited the big central library downtown in my early school days. But she was the one who reintroduced me to the library and its branches when I was 9 or 10.
Later, I worked in the high school library. And from there on, it just kept showing up. I had a work-study job in college at the library. Later, when I was living on the east coast and working as a musician in a band (I mean, working for beer), somebody came up to me at the end of one of our performances and said have you ever considered doing a program for the library? I said, no. She said, well, here’s my number.
We did one or two Kwanza programs for a library and I met a woman who was a librarian. Before I knew, she’s like, you could work at the library. I said, but I don’t have a library degree. And she said, well, do you have a bachelor’s degree? I said, yeah. And she’s like, well, you could work at a library. So that was my entree into libraries. And it just so happened that I eventually got to work for director Dr. Carla Hayden, who is the former Librarian of Congress and is now with the Mellon Foundation. She led me down the trajectory of becoming a professional librarian.
I think a lot of us come into this field kind of haphazardly. There are some who know this is what they’re going to do. But there are quite a few of us who meander in and end up staying because we have so many interests. You can flesh out those interests in libraries, through music, books, writing and programs -- and people, social infrastructure and values. In my opinion, there are very few professions where all these things converge.
It’s a people-centered profession. It’s always been that way. Whether you live in an urban environment, or even a very rural environment, the library is often the center of those communities. For me, it kept happening. I was teaching for a while, waiting tables for many years, doing sound engineering. I did a lot of different things, but I kept coming back to libraries. And then you grow up, at some point you’re like, well, what am I going to do with my life? I decided to put some energy into being a good public servant and to become a good librarian.
I was still very young at the time. Everybody else was 20 years older, and I was able to move up pretty quickly when people retired. I was also single without a family and could move across the country if I wanted to, which I did a lot. It allowed me to catapult through the system in a way that I don’t think a lot of people could. So all things aligned, and here I am.
We’ve hung our hat on the idea of the library being a trusted institution. I think we’ve also been ringing our own bell that we can change or even save people. That is patently false, but it’s also true. People have to save their own lives. We’re just an avenue. But I think it’s important to understand the value we bring.
We have been earmarked to pick up where the social infrastructure has literally fallen off. We have become a hub for the community, but to the detriment of the institution in some ways, meaning there’s an expectation that we can do everything. The expectation isn’t the problem. The lack of funding is the problem.
When you look back, all the way to Syrian times, you see that libraries were the center of community for a number of reasons. There were bathhouses or pools. There were the equivalent to bowling alleys, and food halls in the same building. So in some ways we’ve come full circle.
In the mid-‘80s, when technology really started to take off, people thought that libraries would die. Who needs libraries when you have the internet? But what we’ve learned is that libraries can turn to meet the needs of the time. It is our gift and our curse that we can be everything to everyone. We can do so many things to support our community. We just need the investment to really flourish. That’s where the opportunity is.
I’ve learned that you must continue to remain open to learning. I think often we get stuck in what we know and relinquish what we don’t know. Libraries are a great place to remain open, if you allow yourself to be part of communities that are challenging to you. You see a lot different people using the library -- homeless people, families, immigrants. It’s become a big hodgepodge of people, ideas, discourse, literature, arguments, and necessary conversations. If you let the library become a part of your everyday life, with all that it offers, the value outweighs the discomfort.
How do I stay open in a world that is increasingly closing in on us? Nobody wins when we’re so focused on how we are different that we cannot talk about what we have in common. The biggest thing I’ve learned is to remain open to whatever I perceive as “other,” and to create a place where I can hear you, even if I vehemently disagree with you.
It may be hard to have hope right now, but I know for sure that the only constant is change. I take that from our sage Octavia Butler. I hope that, like the phoenix, we will come out of these flames transformed. And in that transformation, I hope that there’s a place for all of us. There’s enough room, literally and figuratively. There are enough resources.
Some people find community through their politics. Some people find it through faith. Some people get it just simply through the library, where people can come and have these conversations. Community matters, probably more than anything. So find it!
Dr. Skye Patrick is the County Librarian and Director of the Los Angeles County Library, which includes 87 branch libraries, four Cultural Resource Centers, a mobile fleet of 15 vehicles and more than 1,200 employees. She was a recipient of a James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award in 2025.
When she isn’t working, Skye enjoys spending time in the woods and traveling with her family in their Airstream trailer. Lake Cachuma is her favorite place.
Beautiful, thank you for sharing this. ❤️ 📚
good one, Claire! fleshes out the idea of what a library is and can be...