After 41 Years, Millbrook's Head Librarian Turns the Last Page

MILLBROOK, Ind. — Vivian Okonkwo-Baird can still point to the exact table in the Millbrook Public Library’s reading room where, in the fall of 1985, a children’s librarian named Harriet Voss sat her down with a stack of returned picture books and taught her the Dewey Decimal shortcuts the official training manual left out. Okonkwo-Baird was 19, two years out of high school, and had taken the part-time shelving job mostly because it was walking distance from her mother’s house on Birch Street.

On November 14, after 41 years at the library and the last 23 as its director, she will lock the front doors for the last time as an employee. The library board has scheduled a retirement reception for the Sunday before, expecting, by the early estimate of board president Walter Ngata, “probably half the library cards in this town to show up at some point.”

“I’ve had people tell me I taught their grandmother to use a card catalog and their granddaughter to use a database, and somehow that’s the same job,” Okonkwo-Baird said, sitting at a corner table near the periodicals section on a recent Tuesday morning, a stack of returned novels at her elbow that she was, out of habit, re-shelving herself. “It is the same job. The building changed. The job didn’t, not really.”

From Shelving to the Director's Office

Okonkwo-Baird worked her way from part-time shelver to full-time reference assistant by 1989, then to head of circulation in 1994, the same year the library completed the renovation that gave the reading room its current skylight and the circular stack layout longtime patrons still call “the new wing,” three decades on. She became director in 2003, after her predecessor, longtime director Harold Esposito, retired following a 28-year tenure of his own.

“There have been exactly two directors of this library since 1975,” said Ngata. “That’s almost unheard of for a library this size. It says something about how people feel about working here, and honestly it says something about how this town feels about its library.”

What Changed, and What Didn't

The job Okonkwo-Baird is leaving looks almost nothing like the one she started in 1985 on paper. The card catalog she learned from Voss was digitized in 1996. The library added its first public internet terminals in 1998, a makerspace with 3D printers in 2016, and a seed library and tool-lending program in 2021, the kind of expansion that would have been unrecognizable to a library director from the 1980s.

What hasn’t changed, she said, is what people actually come in looking for, even if the format has shifted from microfiche to e-readers. “People want help finding something, they want a quiet place to sit, or they want somebody to notice if they’re having a rough week,” she said. “I’ve had regulars who come in every day just to have one conversation with a staff member. That part of the job hasn’t moved an inch in 41 years.”

The Budget Fights

Okonkwo-Baird’s tenure as director was not without conflict. She led the library through two contentious budget cycles, including a 2011 proposal from the city council to cut the library’s operating hours by nearly a third during a post-recession budget crunch, which she successfully fought back against with a petition drive that collected more than 3,000 signatures in eleven days.

“That was the closest I ever came to quitting, not because I was tired of the fight, but because I was so angry it had to be a fight at all,” she said. “A library is one of the only places left in a town like this where you don’t need money to belong. I was not going to let that get cut on a spreadsheet.”

A Successor Already in the Building

The library board named assistant director Felix Nakamura, who has worked under Okonkwo-Baird for twelve years, as her successor in September, following a national search that Ngata said ultimately concluded the best candidate for the job was already on staff. Nakamura will become the library’s third director since 1975 when he takes over November 17.

• Okonkwo-Baird started as a part-time shelver in 1985 and became director in 2003.
• The library's current building layout dates to a 1994 renovation she helped plan as head of circulation.
• She led a successful 2011 petition drive against proposed hour cuts, collecting more than 3,000 signatures.
• Assistant director Felix Nakamura, on staff for 12 years, becomes the library's third director since 1975.

What Comes Next

Okonkwo-Baird said she has no specific plans beyond “finally reading for pleasure instead of for work,” though she has agreed to serve on the library foundation’s board in an advisory, unpaid capacity. She plans to spend part of the reception, she said, doing exactly what she did on her first day in 1985: sitting at a table near the stacks, talking to whoever sits down across from her.

Nakamura, for his part, said he doesn’t plan to change much in his first year as director beyond continuing programs Okonkwo-Baird already had underway, including an expansion of the tool-lending program and a long-discussed proposal to extend Sunday hours. “The instinct when you take over from somebody who did the job for 23 years is to prove you’re your own person right away,” he said. “I don’t feel that instinct. I feel like I inherited something that works, and my job is not to break it while I figure out what, eventually, I want to add to it.”

“I’m not going to pretend I won’t miss the title,” she said. “But what I’ll miss is this room at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday, before it gets busy, when it’s just me and the books and whoever came in early. I got 41 years of that. Not everybody gets to say that about a job.”