Social Infrastructure in Hard Times: Local Public Library Usage and Recovery During COVID-19

Public services across the United States, including local public libraries, were shut down or shifted to limited operations after a national emergency was declared in March 2020 due to the spread of COVID-19. How did this event and the varied responses to COVID across local communities shape recovery of in-person public library visits? Using monthly panel data on library visits starting in January 2019 from SafeGraph, a company that compiles data on cell phone locations to track “visits” aggregated to points of interest like libraries, this work focuses on local public library visits in the State of Michigan, a politically diverse state. The findings show that political partisanship is a significant predictor of library visits after the start of the pandemic, controlling for other factors. Republican-voting areas have had a swifter return to pre-COVID library visit levels since the start of the pandemic.