Recently I had the pleasure of sitting down with Christian Esquevin, the director of the Coronado Library. Christian has directed the library since 1988, so we have him to thank for the current building, artwork, online resources, and much more within the library.
Many of us pass Christian as we go to and from study carrels, story time, and the stacks, but few of us know his face or his story. If you ever wanted to know how he got this job, or if the library will have faster internet soon (it will!), or what happens to books when they’re retired from the shelves, read on! Here is a little more about Christian, his 27 years as Coronado’s Director of Library Services, and his dreams for our library’s future.
What brought you to the Coronado Library? Are you a Coronado local?
I was actually born in France, and I still speak French. I moved to LA when I was four. I grew up in LA and then moved to Coronado in 1975.
After I graduated from college and started working, I decided to go to library school at USC. However, just as I was about to go to library school there was a demand for librarians, and then when I got out there wasn’t a demand. I was looking for jobs, and that was a time when LA was getting too big. So I came down here. My wife was a Navy junior and she had lived in Coronado, so this was an area she knew and loved.
After arriving in Coronado and looking for work, I got a job at the San Diego county library, which is a big spread-out library system. I worked in different branches, and eventually I managed a region of branches just before I got the job here in 1988.
Why did you choose library science? What do you love most about libraries?
I’ve always been a reader! I think a lot of librarians say that.
Sometimes library staff say they like quiet, which is the wrong reason to love working in a library. In a library, you don’t really get quiet, and you don’t get peace. You would be in the wrong business if that’s what you want! There are some libraries where you work on the staff side of the door, but 80% of librarians are working directly with the public where it’s often noisy. You’re not dealing in a peaceful situation necessarily. You’re dealing with kids or you’re dealing with teenagers, and you’re dealing with a lot of people at once who need to be served and made happy.
So coming to find peace and quiet is not what the library is for, but love of learning is! That’s a good reason to want to come to the library: you want that in yourself and you to share that and help others better themselves. It’s kind of like a mission. Library people all have this mission, especially children’s librarians.
Could you tell me about the library building? What changes have you made since 1988?
The library is actually 125 years old. This wasn’t the first library site, but it was the first permanent library. John D. Spreckels paid for a library to be built on this site. Fortunately it was never torn down during the various additions.
Ever since the 1930s there had been additions. In the 1970s all those prior additions were torn down to make room for an expansion. It was a pretty nice building, but there were still some weaknesses. The staff work areas had never been planned to be sufficient, and there was no plan for computers or any technology in the 1970s, or new collections or equipment. So it was already pinched by the time I came here in 1988.
By the mid 1990s, the library board, the staff, and I were applying for another remodel. That expansion finished in 2005 and added close to another 20,000 square feet for a total of about 40,000 square feet. That expansion also added staff work areas, public seating, and stack space, and it added to the Children’s Library especially. For our current Teen Library, we carved a space out of what had been the old Children’s Library.
The library has some of the best free internet in Coronado! Can you tell me about it?
Thank you! Actually, in the next couple of months we’re going to be expanding the bandwidth of the internet substantially. We’re getting it plugged into the CalREN (California Research Education Network). It will be about 10 times faster to become one gigabit per second. It lets us grow into the future. We want to provide the best service we can. The amount of usage keeps growing, as people are using more and more content.
How else are you trying to stay current and serve the community of Coronado?
You see in the media that libraries are kind of dusty places with books sitting on shelves. They represent the past. We, however, want to represent both what’s good about the past — preserving it — but also what is available for the future.
This library and other libraries have a unique position in society and in their communities as being “open door places.” You don’t have to pay anything, and you can come most anytime. You can get free help in innumerable things: how to do research, how to find information, how to get a great job, how to retire, how to pursue a particular field of interest or lifelong learning, or how to pursue your quest for betterment of yourself or your family.
We can help you find what you’re looking for, whether it’s in a book that sits on a shelf or out there on the web. We have some expertise in finding those sources. More and more we realize that answers may not be in the pages of a book, but through digital resources, so we are investing more and more time and energy and money into different resources.
What are some advantages to using the library for research rather than my own computer at home?
Some things are available to you when you Google a subject, and you think that you have a lot of things at your fingertips. However, you really don’t. So much is available that you have to pay for to see or read. In this case, we pay for it and we make it available to you for free, like newspaper databases or periodicals, or article databases. You can’t get those things for free. You might find a snippet, kind of a tantalizing thing that leads you on to pay for it if you want to get the whole thing, or you don’t get it at all because Google doesn’t list these things. So there is a lot of material available that we make available because we pay for those databases.
I don’t think people use these resources enough compared to how useful they can be. It’s one of those things that you don’t really use until you need it, and sometimes when you do need it you don’t realize that we have it. And for us to promote it when we do a press release and it’s in the media, or we do a flyer, but that’s kind of forgotten because people don’t need it at the time. It’s kind of part of the image thing. Once we get past the “libraries are books only” image, this will kind of disappear.
This is sort of a silly question, but I have always wondered: why does this library charge for holds and DVDs?
In the case of DVDs, we buy them ourselves; the city and the Friends of the Library don’t buy DVDs for us. So the 50 cents pays for the DVDs over time. Also the packaging that comes with the DVDs is really poor, so the fee also pays for sturdy cases that stand up to the abuse of being checked in and checked out week after week, dropped in the book drop, and used in people’s homes.
Charging for holds doesn’t really profit the library in any way. It just ensures that people are earnest. The books that are put on hold are usually popular books, and so we make sure that people really want to put a hold on a book instead of doing it frivolously. That nominal fee is to make sure it’s from an earnest effort, and the boo
k just sits on a waiting shelf.
Here’s another random question. I’ve always wondered what happens to the five copies of a bestseller after it isn’t a bestseller anymore. Is there a way I can buy your extra copies?
We don’t return those books to the publisher. Eventually, when we don’t need five copies sitting on the shelf, we discard three copies, and those go to the Friends of the Library. They can either put them in Second Hand Prose, or sell them at the book fair if they are in really good condition. So yes, you can buy our extra copies!
The Friends of the Coronado Library is an amazing organization. Do they really exist solely to make the library a better place?
Yes, they do. Any of that programming that the library does comes out of the Friends of the Library budget. We get no state money, just city money. Back in the days when city money was really tight, the Friends stepped in and paid for things, like the children’s programs, books on tape, books on CD, and the summer festival with all the programs and concerts. They continue to work with the library staff closely to fund an amazing array of programs for the library.
How can we be a good community user of the library?
Coronado is a very supportive community. We have thrived 125 years based on the commitment of the people who live here and who aren’t just users but supporters. It takes both. We need people to use the library and we do better by having active support, the kind of people who become Friends, the kind of people that become volunteers, the kind of people that become library board members.
We’ve had, looking back, an extraordinary amount of people that have been volunteers here, some people that have volunteered for 20 years. They’ve done a lot of different things: they’ve worked on special projects, helped out in the Children’s Library, checked out books, maintained the AV collection, and put plastic jackets on books.
The Friends of the Library is made up entirely of volunteers who have major, intensive volunteer efforts like the book fair. It’s a lot of physical effort concentrated over the weekend, but it’s a lot of commitment over the year. It takes effort, and it takes it over quite a long time. It’s that kind of effort that we really appreciate because it comes directly to us.
What are some of your personal contributions to the library?
I want to have different, special projects that keeps the spark going, keep the interest level going, and I’ve tried different things. Some of them we’re still doing today that I started 20 years ago.
One is the Summer Festival. It is a combination of lectures and activities and concerts. It was a way to duplicate for adults what brought children to the library.
We started the holiday animated window over 20 years ago to replicate the department store Christmas windows that disappeared a long time ago. We didn’t really have a place to do it, so we used to do it outside, setting it up under a tent. It was not easy to do! Subsequently we designed the space in the current Children’s Library.
You wrote a book! Can you tell us about it?
My sideline interest is old Hollywood movies, costumes, and designers, and I wrote a book about the costume designer named Adrian. He worked from the late 1920s to 1952, but his heyday was the 1930s when he kind of invented the “look of glamor” for Hollywood. He designed costumes for Judy Garland, Katherine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and others. He also designed all of the costumes for The Wizard of Oz, from Dorothy’s ruby slippers to the munchkins!
Can we check your book out of the library?
Yes, you can. I also write a blog about movie costumes and movies. It’s silverscreenmodes.com.
I have to ask this question: what is your favorite book? And now that I know you love movies, what is your favorite movie?
That’s almost impossible to answer; I have so many! Today, though, if I have to pick just one, I would say my favorite book is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. My favorite movie is Casablanca.
What do you love most about your job?
It’s so wonderful to see a lot of satisfied, happy faces, especially at story time with the kids and the parents. I love see the same folks who come in every day. I also love that there are always new projects and new challenges at the library.
Like I said, I didn’t come here for peace and quiet. I came for a mission of encouraging lifelong learning, and I love doing that at the Coronado Library.
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Related: Search the Coronado Library online catalog: http://ecatalog.coronado.lib.ca.us/
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Becca Garber
Staff Writer
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