Amber Mathewson has done about as many jobs in the Pima County library system as you can imagine — from children’s librarian to customer service and finally, director. But her favorite was bumping around the roads of Arivaca with a truck full of books, remembering how the bookmobile opened up her life as a child.
Driving the books around rural Arizona was “coming full circle,” she says.
Now Mathewson, whose first job at the library was in 1989, will return to being a library patron. She announced her coming retirement from the library system after 34 years of service this month.
During her time at the library she has helped secure funding for programs that have become a key part of Pima County users’ experiences: the seed library where you can pick up bok choy or squash seeds to the library nurse program that offered critical care for users in need.
She was also part of a tumultuous public debate over the future of Pima County libraries following the release of a report recommending the closure of several local libraries. That report was met with a wave of community outrage, but also reinvigorated debate over what local libraries mean to the community.
County administrator Jan Lesher celebrated Mathewson’s tenure in a memo dated March 5, saying “Amber’s unwavering dedication to public libraries, intellectual freedom, and equitable access to information has shaped the Pima County Public Library into a beacon of community learning and engagement. While we will miss her leadership, we celebrate her legacy and wish her the very best in her well-earned retirement.”
The process to select the next library head will be led by deputy county administrator Steve Holmes.
Arizona Luminaria sat down to ask the outgoing library director about how her library use will change in the coming years, what’s next for her after retirement, and more. This interview has been edited for clarity and length:
Q. What was your first experience of libraries when you were growing up?
A: I lived on a farm in Colorado that was like 25 miles from town, and so my parents didn’t take us to the library. We had a lot of books at home. I always loved reading and I went to a very small country school, only eight kids in the school. I had read all of the books in the library there, which was a small library. But the bookmobile came and I found out that you could get any kind of books that you wanted through the bookmobile, and then when I was in middle school, well, junior high back then we called it. I got to go to the big library in town, which was a Carnegie Library. And then when I was in high school I found out that I could use the library at the community college. And so it just was always this fascination of more learning, you know, having the opportunity to do that.
Driving the bookmobile when I was working out in Arivaca was probably one of my favorite jobs because it was coming full circle. The bookmobile is what really kind of opened up the world to me, and so it was lovely to be able to choose books and have certain patrons in mind and just to see if they got on the bookmobile and picked out what I thought they would.
Q: What do you want people to understand about leading a library system like the Pima County Public Library system?
A: Directors should really call themselves CEOs because that really is the work, so having to understand balancing budgets and all of that. In librarianship in general, but then also as a director, having that responsibility for staff.
As the community needs change, there are so many unmet needs in the community that staff are dealing with situations. Librarians today are dealing with so much more than when I started as a librarian. I never had anyone OD [overdose] in the bathroom when I was a manager and just this week one of our librarians saved a person by administering Narcan [an overdose treatment administered through a nasal spray].
We need to be really cognizant of the care that our staff needs as well and maybe the supports that they need in terms of social services themselves. You know, maybe they need to have available counselors.
Q: How does the library system deal with the bigger social gaps that its patrons experience?
A: We’re actually kind of grappling with the cooling center idea again. We’re already starting to talk about the coming summer. People have always used the library as a place to get cool. I’ve known lots of people who spent their day at the library so that they didn’t have to spend the electricity on cooling at home. It doesn’t really change the work unless the people that are coming in have other needs. So they need food, they need access to resources, all of that.
We just had a consultant who was looking at whether we need or could benefit from (which we all know we could benefit from) some social workers in the library. But what does that look like? When we get the final report, the answer to that will be having a couple of people on staff who are focused on connecting us to those services in the community and really partnering more with agencies that do that work to be in the library so that we’re not always the ones that are actually doing the service but providing the space and making the connections.
Q: What is your takeaway from the public response and conversation following the release of the Library Futures report this past summer?
A: People felt it was really drastic to talk about the closing of the libraries; really that piece was in response to the difficulties we were having in hiring enough staff. But I think that overshadowed all of the things that we were trying to talk about, which is, although having community centers as libraries is great, there are a lot of people who aren’t coming in to the library.
What we heard from the public was very positive: knowing that people are still very interested in libraries, want more access to libraries and will come out and support us. Our relationship isn’t broken with the public.
I think the really big lesson for us was that the public really wants libraries. I feel like we’re in a much better place than we were when that came out.
We’ve changed some of our internal hiring practices, but then also just worked really hard with the county’s HR team to make sure we were getting our positions out there and filled and doing it in a timely manner.
I haven’t gotten to work as much on things like creating 24/7 libraries that are accessible with a library card, or taking out our several library vans more often, so that’s kind of one of the goals for me.
Libraries aren’t the buildings, libraries are the people and the ideas and the stories.
Q: How do you use the library right now?
A: I don’t always have the time that I would like to to read books but because I drive back and forth from Sahuarita, I listen to books all the time. I used to do that on CD but my new car doesn’t have a CD player. That really forced me into using the downloadable audio and now I can hardly make my drive if I don’t have a book.
I love historical fiction but I also have been finding lots of nonfiction authors now that I didn’t think that I ever would. “Black Cowboys of the Old West,” a book about the history of Black Cowboys in America was really profound because having grown up in a very rural kind of cowboy culture community, I I didn’t realize that so many African-American cowboys had made significant contributions.
Q: What’s next for you after retirement?
A: I am really going to miss all of the staff. I have so many strong relationships, so that’ll be tough. And, you know, my identity for the last eight years has been as the library director, so I’m gonna have to figure out who I am.
One of my greatest joys is just walking down the aisle [of the library] and seeing a book that catches my eye and checking it out. I don’t usually go with the intent of a specific title and I always feel like there’s that kind of magic of like, this is the exact book I needed today. I’m looking forward to that.
I live equal distance from the Green Valley Library and the Sahuarita Library so I can use both of them.
I’m looking forward to attending classes. I like different aspects of art, so I want to get back into that. and, before my mom passed away, she was always saying, you really need to write a book. And so I may work with our writer in residence and see if I have a book in me.
Michael McKisson and Zixuan Deng contributed reporting.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
