New library director will coordinate downtown Tucson move

“I’ll guess all of them,” Tess Mayer said last week with a laugh, and that in a nutshell is both the challenge and the opportunity as she takes the reins of a sprawling, 27-branch system that stretches from Ajo to Bear Canyon, Green Valley to Catalina.

Mayer began work Sept. 2, becoming the 16th director since the library first opened on the second floor of Tucson’s old city hall in 1883.

She succeeds Amber Mathewson, who retired in June, and there is no shortage of things to do. Mayer will address the library’s current staffing shortage, hoping to fully staff all 27 branches as soon as possible. She will be coordinating the relocation of the downtown branch to the old Wells Fargo Bank building across the street.

Finally, perhaps most importantly, she will be tasked with completing a new master plan that will reimagine what the library looks like 10, 15, 20 years down the road.

When the first draft of that plan was leaked last summer, howls of protest sent it back to the drawing board.

Enter Mayer, who now knows how many people care — and how many would like to weigh in.

“Even though the last year was challenging for everybody, it led to some important conversations and a lot of good ideas,” she noted. “All of us now use the library in our own different way. So how can we make the library easier to use and more accessible for everyone? How can we be what everyone wants us to be? There’s a lot to think about, and I’m looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say.”

Technology will play a big role in Pima County’s “Library of the Future,” but traditionalists will be happy to hear Mayer is committed to good old-fashioned brick-and-mortar libraries, too.

“People may come in looking for a book or a computer,” she said, “but I think it’s important to think of libraries as community spaces where people can come, meet, talk, and just be.”

Interestingly, Mayer had never been to Tucson until she arrived for her final interviews early this summer.

“I didn’t know much about Tucson, but the library is pretty well known to us public library nerds,” she said. “They’ve done a lot of great work around community outreach and engagement, and that’s what drew me to libraries in the first place.”

After earning a degree in American and multi-ethnic studies from Bard College in New York, Mayer had taken a position with the Service Employees Union in Seattle.

“A lot of our issues were that people didn’t have access to information they needed to get jobs, or do their jobs,” she recalled. “Contracts, benefits, worker rights. … We had people from all over the world, and even the ones who spoke English had trouble finding documents and information they needed to know.”

Over time, she learned answers could often be found at the library — and that the University of Washington was about to launch a new graduate program for future librarians.

“I met someone by chance who said they were going into the new Information School, and I should check it out, too,” Mayer said. “The more I thought about it, the more I realized it had pretty strong alignment with the work I’d been doing with the union. To this day, that’s the thing I appreciate most about libraries. It doesn’t matter what you’re looking for, the library will help you find it.”

Then, in her late 20s, Mayer enrolled in the program, found an entry-level job at the Seattle Public Library, and began a journey that now finds her in Tucson.

“My first library job was on the first floor of the new downtown Seattle library when it first opened,” she recalled. “I was in an area they called ‘Literary ESL and World Languages.’ Since I had been an ESL teacher in Venezuela, it was a good fit, and there was so much excitement around the new building it was just a great place to be.”

Mayer would later become the branch manager there, and later still the director of outreach services for the King County Public Library system.

Most recently, Mayer was at the Berkeley Public Library, where she served as director the last five years.

She ushered the library through the pandemic. She increased staffing 20%. She oversaw a ballot measure that will bring more than $5 million a year to Berkeley libraries.

While that system is appreciably smaller than the one she leads now — there are only five branches there — Mayer worked with library leaders throughout the Bay Area.

“Every system is different, but I think I have a pretty good sense of the challenges that are out there.”

There are new challenges, too. Like finding a new favorite restaurant. Or the best spot to watch sunsets.

“I’m constantly taking pictures,” Mayer confessed. “Every day I look out at the sky and am blown away. Last weekend, I met a local artist who paints landscapes and specializes in using natural pigments. She said to accurately capture our sunsets she has to use some artificial color. I kind of see that everywhere I look.”

Footnotes

• Tucsonans Joy Williams and Richard Siken have been longlisted by the National Book Foundation for this year’s National Book Awards. Williams’ “The Pelican Child,” a collection of stories scheduled for release Nov. 18, is among the 10 semifinalists in fiction. Siken and his collection, “I Do Know Some Things,” is among the top 10 in poetry. Finalists will be announced Oct. 7.
• Another Tucson author, Jen DeLuca, is celebrating the release of her sixth book, “Ghost Business,” which was released Sept. 9. It is the second installment in DeLuca’s new Boneyard Key romance series.
• The Tucson Tome Gnome project celebrated its fourth anniversary last weekend by giving away free copies of “The Bones Beneath My Skin” by T.J. Klune. To learn more about our favorite gnome, visit tucsontomegnome.com.