Mayor Daley’s 1993 Chicago city budget struck a major blow against public information in Chicago. The budget called for the closing of the Municipal Reference Library to the public, and the transfer of more than 50,000 documents to the Harold Washington Library. The MRL, located on the tenth floor of City Hall, had for decades been a key mediating institution between community activists, journalists, academics, students, and city government. The library primarily existed for city employees, but at least half its 20,000 yearly visitors came from the outside. The $450,000 slashed from the MRL’s $1 million budget was enough to nearly put it under.
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As 1993 began, the MRL posted a sign on its door that read, “Non-city employees contact the department responsible for your area of concern, or the Chicago Public Library.” The Sun-Times published a partial list of the now-lost MRL documents. These included “the only collection of documents from other taxing bodies in Cook County, municipal codes pre-dating the 1871 Chicago fire, census information from 1890 to the present, original bids and contracts on construction of the airport transit systems, city planning documents, five-year plans for capital improvements, annual reports from every city department, maps of most underground conduits and above-ground airways, two million clippings from all daily newspapers in the area and 23 community and ethnic newspapers.”
Malden’s staff has been reduced from 13 full-time librarians to three librarians and a part-timer, plus herself. Malden herself is no longer a city worker, but a private contractor. The library has been reduced from 5,400 to 3,200 square feet (with 2,000 square feet of storage space in the basement). It’s maintaining its archival collection of Chicago documents, but sent to the Harold Washington Library all its pre-1975 documents of other taxing bodies such as the Board of Education, the Park District, and Cook County. Malden says the library no longer has the resources to add documents to its collection. Subscriptions to about 150 periodicals were canceled, and Malden says the main library is not receiving them instead. Independent academic reports on Chicago were split between the two libraries. The MRL’s much-valued clipping file of community and ethnic newspapers is still available, but it hasn’t been added to since December 1992.
Last February the Municipal Reference Collection was booted out of its fifth floor space to make room for a literacy tutoring program. A library spokesperson says the move occurred to make the collection “more accessible to the public.” The librarians now manage the collection, indicated to the public only by a hand-made sign, from a small fifth-floor outpost in the library’s main foyer, next to the government publications desk. Malden predicts that the librarians will eventually be reassigned, and that without adequate security the collection will continue to diminish because of theft. It “will gradually drift away, the expertise will drift away, and it will become another government documents department,” Malden says.
