She Brings Experience and Perspective to Her High-Wire Act

By Greg O'Brien
Special to the BIR

Amy Ryan hardly looks like the bookworm that she is. Resembling a university president more than a stereotypical librarian, the multi-tasking, cerebral president of the venerable Boston Public Library (BPL).

She is the first woman president in the institution's 151-year history - has set a motivating course for the library to serve the educational and cultural needs of Boston and to provide access to some of the world's most historic records, all in an economy that is forcing dramatic budget cuts while seeing a significant rise in library use.
Let's do the numbers: With a numbing collection of more than 33 million books, maps, and manuscripts, the BPL, the first library in America to allow the public to borrow books, the first to establish a children's room, the only public library that also serves as a Presidential Library and one of two public research libraries in the United States, has 26 neighborhood branches in addition to its august Copley Square "palace of the people" on Boylston Street, as gifted architect Charles Follen McKim called it in 1895. Today the central library complex has close to one million square feet of space and offers a mother lode of the system's more than 7 million books, 500 computers for public use, 7,000 programs and events, nearly 170 professional librarians, wireless access at every branch and a 24/7 online reference service. Each year more than 3.4 million people visit the BPL, and another 4.6 million regularly connect to the institution, a department of the City of Boston, through its website: bpl.org.

As BPL President Ryan is now absorbing the effects of state and city budget cuts totaling more than $5 million and the matter of providing the same level of superior service as library use is at a record high. Last month, for example, more than 300,000 books were checked out of the Copley branch alone, a ten percent increase over last year. A full plate in hand, Ryan—a problem solver with the enthusiastic support of Mayor Tom Menino, whom she praises for his commitment to the BPL—is sure to find her way.

Public library use traditionally increases during a recession—a topic that was the subject years ago of Ryan's master's thesis at University of Minnesota's graduate school for library science. "In down times," she says, "people turn to public libraries for reading and research, and to learn more about personal finance and job skills. Forgive me for saying the obvious, the Boston Public Library is free!"

But all told, this is not your grandmother's library, although it still contains the artifacts of a world-renowned museum: several of William Shakespeare's original folios; original music scores from Mozart to Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf"; the Sacco and Vanzetti death masks; and the personal library of John Adams, to mention a few. The BPL, with its signature Old World design, a symbol of the Athens of America, remains the Library of Last Recourse for Massachusetts and is an official depository of U.S. government documents, U.S. government patents, and United Nations documents.

So how did this 58-year-old freshwater lake swimmer (she was born in Sandusky, Ohio, on Lake Superior, and raised in rural White Bear Lake, Minnesota) who speaks in a slight nasal Midwestern twang (she pronounced the word aunt as "ant" until someone not so politely informed her the correct dialect was "ont") become president of Boston's most prestigious and most intellectual institutions? This after the vetting of 150 highly regarded candidates by a top-level search committee.

You can't judge a book by its cover, she would say.

The daughter of Boston area natives, the youngest of four children, Ryan, a third generation Irish American, was infused with Boston culture and intellectual curiosity from childhood. Before her appointment last October, she was director of the nationally recognized Minneapolis and Hennepin Country library system and honored by the city of Minneapolis for her leadership in merging the two systems—a prototype for other cities to follow. Her transition to the Hub has been as seamless as a season segue from the Celtics to the Red Sox, given her family history here.

Ryan's late father, John Paul, who has roots in Tipperary, was in management and sales for Weyerhaeuser Lumber Company, starting his career in the Boston area after his Army service in World War II. Her late mother, Ann Elizabeth (Hickey), whose family comes from County Armagh in Northern Ireland, was a housewife who later managed women's sportswear stores outside Chicago where the family lived for a spell. Weyerhaeuser moved her dad like a Triple A ballplayer from Boston, to the State of Washington, to Ohio, to Minnesota, to Illinois, and back to Minnesota—typical of the time in management sales. The couple met in Newton where Ryan's mom, who worked for the local draft board at the time, inducted her dad into the Army. It was love, perhaps tough love, at first sight.

In her early years, Ryan was shaped through her parents' example and schooling in the humanities. She attended high school in Illinois, but most of her life was spent in Minnesota near St. Paul. She describes her father as "smart, caring, a successful businessman and an exceptional downhill skier, who taught her the sport." She says her mom was "loving, funny, and had a commitment to education." She always encouraged Ryan and her two sisters, Lydia and Susan, and her brother, Geoffrey, to read. Ryan is a voracious reader today, consuming a broad range of books, but with a recent fascination for fiction set in Boston. She has just finished Dennis Lehane's A Given Day, and is now reading Ann Patchett's novel, Run.

"I had a happy, uncomplicated childhood," she recalled in an interview from her spacious BPL office. "My parents fostered independence and intellectual pursuits." Both had a "Boston quality," Ryan says. "They were very witty, articulate, and intellectually challenging; they had a passion for learning, questioning, and conversation. They had an Irish look to them that you don't see in the Midwest."

Ryan's mom encouraged her to pursue a library career. After graduation from Mankato State University in Mankato, Minn., she earned a master's degree in library science from University of Minnesota, and was off and running on a library career that has turned as many heads as pages. "I never looked back," she says. "I realized my passion, then followed it."

With more than 30 years of collective public library management experience in the Minneapolis Public Library system and the nearby Hennepin County Library system, overseeing library administration, partnerships, and development, Ryan last year merged the two into a landmark united public library system with 41 libraries and an estimated 750,000 active library card holders who annually borrow 16 million books, an average of 17 books per resident. To do so, Ryan used her considerable communication, political, and business skills to gain the various approvals needed from the Minnesota Legislature, the Hennepin County Board, Minneapolis City Council, and an elected library board. The merger saw the full integration of library staff, resources and management structure. The skill set required for such a merger will be essential for setting a course for the Boston Public Library in the new millennium where public libraries have morphed beyond their brick and stone walls, becoming more relevant today than even a generation ago. The role of libraries is changing, not waning, with the technology of the times.

"Libraries today are extroverted institutions, not introverted ones, as they once were," says Ryan, noting the days when often the most frequently heard comment from a librarian was a "shush," followed by an index finger to the lips. "Libraries today are cultural anchors that foster learning initiatives and partnerships with schools, government agencies, businesses, and non-profits. We are the embodiment of the American Dream, helping to manage the flow of information and responding to the technologies of the day. Our role is information navigator, teacher, and mentor. Years ago, one would look to a library for a single answer to a question, now librarians help users navigate through 65 million Internet hits."

Managing a public library in a troublesome economy is indeed a high-wire act, says Ryan, noting she has set priorities to offer the greatest number of resources in demand to the largest number of individuals in the city. These priorities include advancement of learning, literacy, academic support for schools and career support and research.

Ryan's mother, no doubt, would be pleased. "My mom would be proud; being appointed president of the Boston Public Library flows from my childhood. It's a complete family circle," she says, noting that in walking to work every day she passes her parents' former home at 90 Commonwealth Avenue on her way from Beacon Hill where she lives with her husband, Steven Kaufman, a Brandeis and Northeastern University graduate who has taught college English and writing. The couple have four children in an extended family: Chloe, a senior at Simmons who graduates from the same college next year exactly a century after her maternal grandmother, Mary Gertrude Rock; Madeline, who wants to teach English and is preparing to attend graduate school in Minnesota; Noah, who works in energy conservation; and Hallie, an artist and mother of two.

After eight months on the job, Ryan concedes that there are times when she walks around the BPL pinching herself, as she plies her way through the millions of books, manuscripts, maps and artifacts in a setting as intellectually reverent as ancient Greece or Rome. And who wouldn't in her shoes. Ryan is all passion and focus with high-energy Midwestern values and a dash of wide-eyed gusto. She is the embodiment of the founding ideals of the Boston Public Library, as espoused by founders George Ticknor, Edward Everett, Nicholas Marie Alexandre Vattemare, Joshua Bates, and Josiah Quincy, Jr.

A first in every way, Amy E. Ryan is just what the BPL needs after a century and a half: new blood and a female perspective.

(Greg O'Brien is editor and president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/communications strategy company based in Brewster. The author/editor of several books, he is a regular writer for the Boston Irish Reporter and has contributed to numerous regional and national publications.)