“The moral of the story is, always check your spam folder,” directed Sara Day, the teen librarian for Woodland Public Library, northwest of Sacramento. “You never know who’s in there.”
This might sound like questionable advice, but Day speaks from experience — in her spam folder a few months ago, a message from the Obama Foundation lay buried underneath department store promotions and emails from hopeful hackers until she checked it on a whim.
“At first, we were like, this has to be a joke. This can’t be real,” she said. “But we did a little research, and we realized it was.”
The Obama Foundation reached out to them with an opportunity for former President Barack Obama to be featured in one of the Woodland Public Library’s TikTok videos, as part of a series of collaborations he was doing with public libraries across the United States.
The foundation told the library that they could do “whatever we thought would highlight our library,” according to circulation director Sylvia Moreno.
“Obama was just, like, an added bonus,” Moreno said.
They decided to do a modification of the “Pass the Book Challenge,” where they handed off a book or other item in a series of edited-together clips to show off everything the library has to offer. In addition to the Woodland librarians, and Obama, the video, posted on July 19, also featured another library star — Henrietta.
“We wanted to incorporate Henrietta the library cat,” Moreno said. “She’s been one of our most popular employees here since 2016.”
But Henrietta isn’t the only thing at the Woodland library that’s popular with the community. The location is “a program-heavy library,” according to children’s librarian Sara Vickers; from story times, to Lunch at the Library, to a kids’ farmers market, to their summer reading program.
“We try to make programs for different ages so everyone’s included,” Vickers said. “It’s very full, and chaotic in a good way.”
The library is arranged in a loop, and there are different corners where kids read picture books out loud, teens complete puzzles with friends and adults work on their laptops and enjoy a reliable Wi-Fi connection.
“It’s not just about books,” Obama said in a July 17 open letter to librarians. “You also provide spaces where people can come together, share ideas, participate in community programs and access essential civic and educational resources.”
Obama also appeared this summer in TikTok videos in collaboration with public libraries in Illinois, Maryland and Texas, and the Illinois Kankakee Public Library’s video highlighted their goal of providing access to banned books. Obama penned his letter to librarians around the same time.
In the letter, he noted that both books written by or featuring people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community and books by conservative authors have “been targets for removal,” and said that in his view, “the impulse seems to be to silence, rather than engage, rebut, learn from or seek to understand.”
“In a very real sense, (librarians are) on the front lines — fighting every day to make the widest possible range of viewpoints, opinions and ideas available to everyone,” the letter reads. “Your dedication and professional expertise allow us to freely read and consider information and ideas, and decide for ourselves which ones we agree with.”
Day said that making banned books accessible at the Woodland Library has been consciously celebrated — “Banned Books Week is kind of like a library holiday” — and that they don’t want to “exclude a viewpoint.”
“As a library, our goal is to provide information that gives you the whole story,” Day said. “Someone should be able to walk in and get two books that have different views, and check them both out.”
Day said that although she’s not sure why the Obama Foundation reached out to them specifically, other than their social media presence, she believes that their library is “a very special place.”
“A lot of people were surprised that they reached out to us and not the other way around, so that’s kind of fun. We’re really cool,” Day said. “But never in our wildest dreams did we think this was a possibility. Meanwhile, (our teens are) already talking about what they’re going to do for our ‘next’ Obama video.”
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