Latest Hooker Sighting
Posted August 7, 2008
Librarians attending a recent GALILEO training session in Athens spotted among the registrees former AFPL director
Mary Kaye Hooker.
There has been no confirmation that MKH hung around to actually complete the training once she registered for it.
There is some speculation that perhaps MKH showed up at this training event to earn herself a few CEUs: according to
a recent search of the online list of Georgia librarians,
Hooker hasn't renewed her license.
Then again, perhaps licensure isn't required by Hooker's
current employer, Bauder College - located only a few
miles from Hooker's old stomping grounds.
Latest Earl Sighting (Sort Of)
Posted August 7, 2008
Various survivors of the McClure/Hooker/Garnes/Earl era at AFPL have reacted with astonishment, chagrin, or revulsion as
they've learned how former AFPL Central Library Administrator (and former Ponce Branch Manager) Susan Earl - now of Nashville,
Tennessee - is describing her job skills these days to prospective
employers.
Too put it mildly, Earl's self-description is somewhat at odds with what a few
of her victims at AFPL had to say about Earl when she finally left AFPL in October 2003.
...that Robert Taylor, head of Fulton County's Information Technology Department,
recently resigned. Posted October 31, 2007
We say...
What we heard is that Taylor resigned for health-related reasons. All we
know, in the absence of any official announcement to county employees, is
that county manager Tom Andrews (who himself is leaving the county at the
end of the year) has appointed an Interim IT department chief, and that the
appointment is effective today.
Latest Osborne-Harris Sighting
Posted August 16, 2007
Those who remember - fondly or otherwise - former AFPL Branch Services Administrator Barbara
Osborne-Harris may be interested to learn that she is now director of Coweta County's public library
system, located just south of Fulton County. (Found in the August 2007 issue of Georgia Public
Library Service News.)
We heard...
...that the manager of the Central Library's Children Department has
resigned, effective immediately.
Posted August 1, 2007
We said...
...we hope - for a lot of reasons - that this rumor is true. And that it
won't take library administrators
a zillion years to replace her, and that she'll be replaced with a
qualified, experienced, capable, imaginative, energetic, talented, dependable,
and humane librarian.
...that Deputy County Manager Keith Chadwell will soon be leaving
Fulton County government.
Posted June 9, 2007
There's been no formal announcement to all county employees of Chadwell's
resignation, but a little Googling revealed that Chadwell recently accepted
one of several county manager jobs elsewhere that he'd applied for and
been offered. Having been with Fulton County for the past seven years (at
a post that currently pays about $150,000 a year), Chadwell's next job will
be county manager of Broward County, Florida. He'd also been a finalist this past spring for
similar jobs in several other Florida counties, including St. John's County,
Seminole County, and Oceola County. Last year, Chadwell had applied for
an open county manager job in Irwin, Texas. [This information gleaned from
a variety of Internet sources including
this one and
this one.]
We said...
...that, because AFPL's library director reports to Chadwell, we hope that
Chadwell's temporary and "permanent" replacements, whoever those individuals
end up being, manage to strike up a harmonious and supportive relationship
with AFPL's director (and vice versa).
Some of us who've worked in various jobs over a period of many years have
concluded that - for just about any job - the single most significant
contributor to job satisfaction is the competence, maturity, approachability,
and supportiveness of one's immediate supervisor. Given the multiple stakeholders and
power-brokers swirling around any county library director, the "immediate
supervisor quality" factor might not be as important as it usually is for
the wage-slaves at the lower rungs of the county bureaucracy. But our hunch is
that, at the very least, a functional, positive relationship between the
library director and his/her immediate supervisor is a Good Thing for the
library staff and for library users.
...that AFPL's Human Resources Office has screwed up again. Big-time.
(Posted December 15, 2005)
Apparently, several job candidates (including some current AFPL employees
who'd been selected for promotions) were told that the allegedly vacant
positions they'd successfully interviewed for weren't vacant after all,
due to the county's recent budget-willies hiring freeze. Later, some of
them were then told the suddenly-pronounced-unvacant positions ARE, in
fact, vacant.
The evaporation of job vacancies may be unavoidable, but confusion around
what jobs are or are not vacant is avoidable. Providing clarity
about that is, at a minimum, what Human Resources Offices are for, right?
Not at AFPL.
Also avoidable, everywhere but at AFPL: all the wasted effort that goes
into interviewing for nonexistent vacancies and all the
confusion and frustration that come when positions are either
vacant or not vacant depending on which day it is, or depending on who one
talks to in the HRO.
The latest potential county hiring freeze hardly came as a surprise to
anyone else at AFPL, so why did it escape the notice of AFPL's Human
Resources Office? Don't the people in the HRO talk to their counterparts
at county headquarters? Don't the people in the HRO talk to each other?
(If not, why not?) Why didn't the HRO warn the employees conducting the most
recent spate of interviews for AFPL vancancies not to make firm job offers to the
candidates they had selected after finally completing all those dozens of
laborious interviews? Why is the HRO so consistently indifferent to the
inefficiency, confusion, and inconvenience that its bumbling oversight of
the job-filling process at AFPL creates? (And why is AFPL's HRO, and its
Branch Group Manager, permitting interviews that force applicants to answer
50 questions, as happened in one recent set of interviews at a branch
library?)
We sure would love to see the job performance measures that AFPL's
C-52-salaried HRO manager and its C-51-salaried HRO assistant manager are
supposedly evaluated by. If personnel screwups like this one have zero
unpleasant consequences (unpleasant for them, we mean), what kinds of
scenarios would have such consequences? What are HRO's manager
and assistant manager being paid for?
Our sympathies to all AFPL staff who wasted so much time away from their
other duties to go through the futile motions of hiring people for
nonexistent positions, to all those library employees forced to
endure job interviews all over again someday to get their promotions they
recently interviewed for already, and to all the outside candidates whose
good-faith efforts to land a position at AFPL have been surrounded by
ambiguous or contradictory signals or otherwise thwarted.
Our deepest sympathies go to those job applicants who resigned from their
previously-held positions before being notified (perhaps inaccurately?)
that their job offers from AFPL were null and void, and to those applicants,
internal and external, whose exposure to the ineptitude of AFPL's HRO was
not a new experience, but a repeat of some previous indignity wrought by
AFPL's HRO.
Merry Christmas indeed.
...that AFPL's Child & Youth Services Manager and Acting Central Librarian
Doris Jackson has (again) announced her retirement.
(Posted December 14, 2005)
This time, we heard that Jackson specified a departure date: December 27th. We
shall see soon enough, then.
...that AFPL's former Deputy Director Carolyn Garnes was spotted on
the Central Library's 7th floor this past Monday.
(Posted December 9, 2005)
We heard...
...that the manager of the Southwest Regional Library has resigned.
(Posted October 8, 2005)
Update: Branch Group Manager Anne Haimes
announced the resignation in an email distributed October 10th.
We heard...
...that some guy was running around the basement
of the Central Library with no clothes on until, 45 minutes later, the
police took him away.
(Posted September 30, 2005)
We said...
Given everything else that's happened at AFPL's Central Library since it
opened back in 1980, hearing this rumor didn't really surprise us. (On the other hand, since Central's basement houses
Central's Children's Department, the site of a nude male strolling
around must have been quite a shocker to any hapless kiddies and/or their
parents who may've been down there.)
What's really worrisome, though, is the 45-minute delay between the staff's
and/or patrons' discovery of said naked guy and the arrival of the coppers.
What if the crazed naked person had been crazy in some other way - had
suddenly started screaming obscenities at the top of his voice, say, or,
much worse, been found strolling around brandishing a knife or a gun? Would
the staff and visitors at Central been forced to cope with that for
almost an hour?
(We'll be glad to post any details about this rumored incident should any
AFPLWATCH reader be kind enough to send them to us
(anonymously or otherwise).
We heard...
...that former AFPL Deputy Director Lonita Walton (aka "She Who
Must Be Obeyed") recently applied for a library position at the Fulton
County Jail. (Posted May 13, 2005)
We said:
This is the second local library position we've heard Walton had applied
for: the other one we heard about was at AFPL itself. Other candidates got
both jobs, but we're amazed that Walton is bothering - not only because
Walton had told people she'd left librarianship to pursue another career
(first we heard standup comedy, later we heard the ministry), but because
of the boatload of bad karma Walton racked up in her years at AFPL.
...that John Szabo is paying a visit to the library system next Tuesday.
(Posted March 11, 2005)
We heard...
...that the library's former webmaster has been transferred into a public
service position at the Southwest Branch, and that no one knows who--if
anyone--is currently in charge of the library's web site.
(Posted January 28, 2005)
We said:
If AFPL has a new webmaster--or no webmaster at the moment--we think it
sure would be nice if someone in the library administration would tell the
rest of the staff about it. In the meantime, is there any way somebody,
somewhere, could correct the embarrassing grammatical error on the web site's first
page ("Fairburn Library is now re-open!") and replace 2004's list of
library holiday closings with 2005's???
February 9, 2005 Update: At an AFPL managers
meeting on February 3rd, Fulton County IT project manager Stephen Glover
mentioned that the name of AFPL's new webmaster is one Don May. The
grammatical error on the web page mentioned above has been removed,
but the defunct listing of AFPL's 2004 holiday closings was still there
as of February 9th.
We heard...
...that everybody in the Central Library--from security personnel to
the librarians all the way up the administrative ladder--are fully aware
that somebody's been systematically stealing Central's DVD's, videos, and
music CDs. (Posted November 16, 2004)
The rumor is circulating that some administrators are finally
acknowledging the urgent need for (back-to-the-future drum-roll, please!)
better security for Central's nonbook materials. (The latest notion seems to
be some sort of nonbook service desk, where staff fetch the nonbook items
a patron wants to borrow instead of allowing patrons, thieves and non-thieves alike, to
walk out with whatever they happen to want on any particular day.)
We said:
It's about time! Several years ago, Mary Kaye Hooker not only dismantled
Central's Film/Video Department, but forced staff to abandon that department's
effective efforts to secure Central's nonbook materials. Hooker turned a
deaf ear to staff predictions that these painstakingly-developed and
expensive collections would be immediately decimated by thieves if the
security measures in place were abandoned. Sure enough, it wasn't long
after Hooker's decree before the building's cleaning crews began finding
trashbags full of nonbook "security" cases every week, but Hooker & Co.
didn't seem to mind.
Nothing much changed even when, months after Hooker's departure earlier
this year, Central staff began to suspect a specific individual was behind
a recent spate of thefts, and alerted security to who this person was.
(Staff were not amused to learn that the alarms to Central's fire escape
stairwells were not turned on, as The Main Suspect has apparently been
using those stairwells to abscond with the goods, which he and his friends
then re-sell in Woodruff Park.)
We are encouraged to hear at least a few whispers that something might be
afoot in terms of arranging better security for Central's nonbook materials.
Too bad it's taken five years and and several tens of thousands of
completely wasted dollars--including all the money invested in staff time
and effort to track and reorder stolen materials--to address a problem
that Hooker created with a single stupid decree.
We heard...
...a new manager has been hired for the Northeast Regional Library.
(Posted November 11, 2004)
We said...
How do we know this? A memo from the Personnel Office? An announcement
at last week’s managers’ meeting? An all-staff email? Leaflets dropped
from a passing plane? No, staff have shared with each other the news that
a Human Resources staff member was showing the new manager around the
branch a few days ago.
In the same way, the rumor has spread that a manager has been hired for
the East Atlanta branch.
Gee, considering the long wait for these appointments and the growing
manager deficit in the library’s branches, you’d think AFPL's administrators
would want to share the good news with a staff that feels they are hanging
on by their fingertips. (Wouldn’t it have made a difference to the crowds
lining the tilted deck of the Titanic if someone with a bullhorn had been
able to announce additional lifeboats had been located? Wouldn’t Custer’s
men have dodged a few more arrows if they had heard a cavalry bugle coming
over the hill?)
Given the rate at which the library is losing staff, any good news about
new hires anywhere would be most welcome.
December 1st Update: Later on in November,
Haimes finally issued memos announcing the hiring of new managers at
Northeast and at East Atlanta.
We heard...
...that the manager of the new Ocee branch has been given a part-time
Administrative Assistant. (Posted
October 7, 2004)
We said...
...that it's odd how the managers of the other Regional Libraries have
somehow gotten along all these years without Administrative Assistants.
Besides, we thought the library system was in the throes of a severe
staffing shortage....
We heard...
...that library administrators have decided not to hire any of the
candidates who applied for a transfer to the vacant manager's position at
the East Atlanta Branch. (Posted September 21, 2004)
We said...
Given some of the other recent personnel decisions at AFPL, we wonder
why the bar is being raised so high for filling the vacancy at East
Atlanta.
We heard...
...that, in separate recent incidents at two different branches,
books patrons have objected to have been removed from the shelves.
(Posted August 6, 2004)
If anyone can verify either or both of these rumors, please
contact the Webmaster with the details.
AFPL has enough problems these days without letting some library users
decide what other library users will and will not be allowed to read.
We heard...
...that another branch manager, Cheryl Miller-Holmes, has resigned.
(Posted July 21, 2004)
We said:
Former Deputy Director Carolyn Garnes hired Miller-Holmes to
manage the South Fulton Regional Library after the previous
manager of the branch, Gladys Dennard, was murdered by an employee
last July. This past spring, Miller-Holmes was transferred to the
Alpharetta Branch to fill in for its manager, Leona Bolch, who had been
transferred to the Northeast Regional Branch Library, whose previous
manager, Claire Skerrett, had recently resigned. After Miller-Holmes
left South Fulton, former Library Director Mary Kaye Hooker temporarily
assigned the manager of the Ponce branch, Bill Munro, to head up
South Fulton. Two months later, Munro was back at Ponce, and South
Fulton is being temporarily managed by Kelly Flowers.
The upshot? An additional management vacancy caught in the county's
hiring freeze, two additional Acting Managers at branches, and a
host of already short-staffed branch libraries discombobulated by the
"musical managers" solution to the problem of the county's hiring
freeze. This approach is getting more ludicrous with every passing
month--and every additional resignation. And the Miller-Holmes
transfer/resignation dilemma comes on top of the staffing disruptions
involving the transfers or resignations of managers at Central,
Fairburn, Northside, Bowen Homes, Washington Park, and East Atlanta.
Woe is us. How long do county administrators think they can operate
the county's libraries without full-time managers? Isn't it time to
finally face the need to shut down some libraries, so we can properly
staff the libraries we can afford to keep open?
We heard...
...that Buckhead Branch Manager Katharine Suttell has announced she
will retire in early August.
(Posted July 19, 2004)
We said:
Suttell was hired in 1978 to manage the library system's fledgling
telephone reference service that had been established in 1973. Over the
next 22 years, she expanded Information Line into a full-time department
and won the service national renown.
After former library director Mary Kaye Hooker renamed the department
to make it appear that she had invented the service herself, Hooker
later virtually dismantled the service as part of the Great Illegal
Transfer Massacree of May 2000, which is how Suttell landed at Buckhead.
Suttell was one of the eight plaintiffs in the successful
antidiscrimination lawsuit against Hooker and the board, and is the
third of the plaintiffs (after Janet Bogle and Sherri Bowers) to
retire or resign from AFPL.
One of the most respected and beloved members of the library staff,
Suttell's legacy includes the mentoring of dozens of reference
librarians who got their start in Information Line. Her departure will
constitute an additional serious blow to the library's corporate
memory and collective wisdom. The post-McClure/Hooker/Garnes/Earl
rebuilding of AFPL will be made more difficult and less exciting for
Suttell's colleagues because Suttell won't be among them any longer.
Suttell's retirement from the extremely busy Buckhead branch will also
create the eighth library facility without a full-time
manager--following the vacancies created by the departures of the
managers at Fairburn, Central, Northeast, Northside, South Fulton,
Bowen Homes, and Washington Park--since the county government
instituted its most recent hiring freeze. And we've heard that the
managers of at least two more branch libraries plan to retire before
Christmas.
August 11th Update: Suttell's last day at
Buckhead was August 10th. Library administrators have named Nancy
Powers the new manager at Buckhead.
We heard...
...that former director Mary Kaye Hooker has filed a lawsuit
against the county, claiming that her firing was racially motivated.
(Posted June 30, 2004)
We heard...
...that Willie Mae Harris, the library system's Head Cataloger who
retired a week before Hooker was fired, has agreed to return to her
former post. Posted May 26, 2004
We said:
For once, something positive has come out of the county's
notoriously slow processing of its personnel paperwork (in this
case, processing Ms. Harris' retirement papers)! Ms. Harris' return
would be an extremely lucky break for the library--we hope to be seeing
her again very soon. And we trust the library's new management to allow
Harris to do her job without the interference of people who
don't know nothin' about technical services.
We heard...
...that another branch manager is on the verge of announcing her retirement.
(Posted May 7, 2004)
May 19th Update: Rumor confirmed: Bowen Homes
manager Marie Lee will is retiring this month.
We said...
It'll soon be time for Hooker to play another round of "Manager Dominoes"
unless she can convince the county manager to thaw the vacant position
that manager's retirement's going to create.
Speaking of thawing positions, how come we're seeing so many Fulton
Count email announcements of recruiting for vacancies in other county
departments--at least two a week--while we're seeing zero notices for
library vacancies?
Is this discrepancy due to Hooker's having no credibility over in the
county manager's office? If so, we hope the county is fast-tracking
its plans to get rid of Hooker soon so the library's customers and
staff won't be made to suffer for Hooker's presence too much longer.
It's getting harder and harder to keep some of the county's busiest
libraries afloat with over 50 vacant--and frozen--positions.
We heard...
...Hooker has "temporarily" transferred the manager of the South Fulton
Branch to Alpharetta and "temporarily" transferred the manager of the
Ponce Branch to South Fulton.
(Posted April 22, 2004)
We said...
Does Hooker think she can play "Musical Managers" indefinitely?
This game started when Northeast's manager resigned and Alpharetta's
manager was transferred into that vacant spot. When it came time
to pay Alpharetta's Acting Manager the salary increase a county policy
says she's entitled to after twenty days of doing her former manager's
job, Hooker freaked and came up with this "solution" to that problem.
As the county's hiring freeze continues, and the county's policy of a
mandatory pay increase for any employee working out of class beyond 20
days continues to be in force, and the Iron Law of Attrition also
continues to be in force (i.e, managers continue to retire, take jobs
elsewhere, get disgusted and quit, get fired, or die), and the County
Manager continues to turn a deaf ear to Hooker's appeals for thawing
frozen vacant management positions at the library (assuming Hooker's
making any such pleas)...well, it's not a pretty picture. Especially
since we can count on Hooker to create the maximum chaos at the maximum
number of branches with whatever stop-gap solutions she comes up
with--as long as she continues to be director, that is.
We heard...
...that former Building/Maintenance Manager Willie Kellings has
returned to AFPL. Hooker terminated Kellings a few months
ago, and Kellings appealed the termination to the county's Personnel
Board. The board has upheld Kelling's appeal.
(Posted April 4, 2004)
We heard...
...that Clare Skerrett, manager of the Northeast Regional Library, has
resigned. (Posted March 16, 2004)
March 25th Update: Eight days after dictating
a memo announcing Skerrett's March 26th resignation, Hooker faxed it out to
library staff on March 24th. Although not quite warp-speed in terms of communicating
this news, at least Hooker in this instance did deign to notify the staff
of the loss of the manager at the library system's busiest branch library.
Meanwhile, in the Robbing-Peter-to-Pay-Paul department, we've heard that
Leona Bolch, manager of the Alpharetta Branch, will be yanked from her
also-extraordinarily-busy library to temporarily fill Skerrett's shoes at
Northeast.
We heard...
...that one of the county's latest cost-cutting measures is slashing
its budget for providing security guards to the county's libraries.
That, for example, beginning mid-week, there'll be only 8 instead of 18
security guards assigned to the Central Library.
We said:
- The county shouldn't operate unsafe facilities. Libraries should
be open only during hours the county can afford to staff those libraries
with adequate levels of security personnel. Will we be cutting back
hours at some libraries, then, as a result of these security cutbacks?
- Some libraries have never had security guards assigned to them; now
there will be more libraries with no security personnel on duty, and
more days and parts of days in all libraries when security guards won't
be available to help staff prevent and/or cope with disruptive,
disorderly, threatening, or violent behavior.
- We wonder if the county is planning cutbacks in security for county
headquarters as severely as it's reducing security in county libraries?
We heard...
...that at least two, and possibly three, library trustees have
resigned from the board, and that one of these individuals is the
board's chair, Annette Steed. (The other two names we heard mentioned:
Thomas Jones and former chair Clint Johnson.)
(Posted February 10, 2004)
We said:
These rumored resignations--together with the news of trustee Bob
Fulton's unexpected death on February 24th, plus the usual large number
of absentees from AFPL board meetings--make us wonder:
- if the reasons these trustees resigned will be made public.
- whether or not the board will have a quorum to conduct business
at its February 25th regularly-scheduled meeting.
- who will be appointed to fill these suddenly-vacant slots on the
board, however many there turn out to be.
- how those appointments will figure into Mary Kaye Hooker's future
at AFPL.
Stay tuned...
April 4th Update: By comparing the list of trustees
on the library's web site and the names on the invitations to the
April 7th hoopla at the Central Library "celebrating" the library system's
new circulation software, it looks like at least five trustees are
missing in action. According to the agenda for the Fulton County Board
of Commissioners' April 7th meeting, the latest to flee is Dorothy Stanley, whose term
did not expire until June 30, 2004.
May 17th Update: The rumor about board member Clint Johnson's having
resigned proved to be untrue: he attended the March board meeting.
We heard...
...that Barbara Osborne-Harris has been appointed AFPL's Acting
Deputy Director.
We said...
...that, despite the county's budget cuts, we hope Osborne-Harris will
be getting some additional bucks out of the temporary appointment,
if this rumor turns out to be accurate. Hooker's been dumping the
Deputy Director's duties into Osborne-Harris' lap for many months now
anyway--Osborne-Harris might as well be compensated for doing those tasks.
Meanwhile, we will hold Ms. Osborne-Harris in our prayers as she continues
navigating the shark-infested waters of the Central Library's 6th floor.
Update: This rumor proved to be untrue.
We heard...
...that Hooker has told several people that Fulton County Commissioner
Bob Fulton told her to start looking for another job,
and that when she later met with Commission Chair Karen Handel,
Handel made it clear that Hooker did not have the support of the
commissioners and should look for another job.
(Posted February 10, 2004)
We said:
It's about time SOMEBODY told this woman to wake up and smell the
proverbial coffee! We only wish it hadn't taken them so long--over
four years!--to get around to it!
We heard...
...that the library's courier service is delivering library supplies
to the vendor Hooker selected to process library materials previously
processed by the library system's Technical Services Division.
We said:
No wonder daily pick-ups from and deliveries to branches have been
so unreliable lately! Not only has the courier service's staff been cut
(despite Hooker's repeated public claims to the contrary), but the
courier staff has been forced to spend part of their time, energy, and
gasoline delivering stuff to a vendor instead of delivering materials
library patrons want to pick up those materials at their local branch
libraries. Yet another way the award of this very questionable contract
has disrupted, rather than improving, library service.
We heard...
...that Northside Branch Acting Manager Dowman Wilson was retiring
as of December 31st. (Posted December 10, 2004)
We said...
Since Hooker recently dragooned Northside's manager Emma
Stanley Tate into serving as Acting Central Library Administrator,
it will be interesting to see how the staffing/management crisis at
Nortshide will be addressed. Wilson's retirement coming on the heels
of Stanley Tate's reassignment is just the latest example of how,
during a hiring freeze, constantly moving pieces around on the chessboard
won't keep the library's branches functional. How many more managers,
acting managers, assistant managers,and acting assistant managers--not to
mention non-management staff crucial to providing minimal branch
coverage--will leave AFPL before the county lifts its latest hiring
freeze? Will Hooker & the board finally realize the necessity of
PROMPTLY filling vacant positions so we don't get into these avoidable
staffing dilemmas???
We heard...
...that "Interim Collection Development Manager" Michelle Carnes has
decreed that as of January 2, all 7th floor personnel must start
conforming to the dress code forced onto public service workers this
past year.
We said...
This is completely uncalled for and irrational, as:
- 7th floor personnel have been performing their jobs
for decades without the nuisance of conforming to a dress code
- 7th floor personnel do not interact with the public--in fact,
they work behind a locked door all day
- the reason they've always been exempted from the various
dress codes that periodically plague library employees is a valid
one: 7th floor employees spend a lot of their time lifting and
opening boxes and doing a multitude of other physical tasks for which
"dressing down" is appropriate.
Carnes' motives for her unreasonable decree seem like purely
personal ones:
- Is the problem that Carnes simply can't bear to see the people
around her dressing more comfortably than Hooker, her new supervisor,
allows Carnes to dress?
- Is Carnes so angry about her (unasked-for) new assignment that
she's flailing around trying to find something--anything--she can
exert some control over as emotional compensation for the abrupt
elimination of her previous position and previous supervisor?
- Is Carnes showing herself to be one of those dreaded control
freaks who--prematurely and involuntarily catapulted (however briefly)
into a position of authority over others--are unwilling to earn the
respect of their new subordinates and who immediately begin finding
ways to make everyone around them as miserable as possible?
Doesn't Carnes understand that the few employees who still work on the
7th floor of the Central Library are unhappy enough as a result of
Hooker's relentless and tragic terrorizing of that floor's "human
resources" without Carnes piling on yet another layer of misery by
micromanaging the way Central's 7th floor employees dress for work?
If it’s Tuesday, it must be your day to be in charge
Updated December 10, 2003
If you’ve been keeping up with The Story Till Now, you know that the
library has had no head of Technology for a year and a half, it has
had no manager of Technical Services for almost that long, and it is
losing its Computer Hardware Services manager in two weeks.
Throughout the past month or so, library staff have been hearing
conflicting stories about what is happening with these crucial
vacancies:
- Library Planner John Hilinski proposed to Hooker that she
appoint him temporary manager of both Tech Services and Technology.
Hooker either declined to do this or refused to do this and told
Hilinski he would never receive any further promotions.
- Hooker decided on her own to appoint Hilinski as temporary manager for both
Technical Services and Technology but the Board wouldn’t approve the
proposal on the grounds that Hilinski wasn't qualified for either
position.
- Hilinski has been appointed temporary head of both Tech
Services and Technology--in addition continuing his current planning
duties--as Hooker's way of giving Hilinksi the necessary "experience"
to qualify him for one of these permanent positions; Hooker's putting
off recruiting for these vacancies for that reason.
- Hilinski has been appointed temporary head of both Tech
Services and Technology, but Hooker has no plans to ever fill these
two vacant management positions, so Hilinski will end up doing
all the work but without any hope of getting a promotion out of it.
(This rumor fits Hooker’s m.o. of underfilling management positions so
she can placate Board members like McClure who are obsessed with the
idea that the library has too many highly-paid managers. Of course
this strategy also leaves the library vulnerable to employees filing
grievances for being forced to work out of class.)
- It’s not Hilinski who’s in charge of all personnel on the 7th
floor, but Michelle Garnes, ex-assistant to AFPL's recently-departed
Deputy Director.
- Nobody's in charge of the personnel on the 7th floor, and
Hooker is concentrating on figuring out how to get rid of the
remaining employees working there so there'll be no need for any
managers. Hooker (and the board, manipulated by McClure) is
hell-bent on crafting the only library system in the United
States without any Tech Services, Technology, or Computer Services
departments; in the meantime, the people working in these already
strip-mined areas have no supervision, or have different managers
depending on what day it is.
So there you are. Close your eyes and pick a rumor: odds are that your random choice will
make just as much sense - and take as much work to arrive at - as Hooker’s.
December 10th Update: The few staff members
still working on Central's 7th floor received the following memo the
first week of December:
To: Technical Services Staff
Information Systems Staff
Software Management Staff
From: Mary K. Hooker, Director of Libraries
Copy: John Hilinski, Planning & Special Projects Librarian
Ed Robinson, Financial Systems Manager
Michelle Carnes, Interim Mgr., Collection Development
Sylvia Culver, Human Resources Manager
Stephen Glover, Information Technology
Date: December 1, 2003
Subject: SSTD Interim Manager
Effective immediately, John Hilinski will serve as the Interim Manager
for SSTD. Mr. Hilinski will also continue to manage Planning and Special
Projects.
As Interim Manager, Mr. Hilinski will serve as your supervisor and begin
an analysis and review of organizational structure, duties and
responsibilities (group and individual), work flow, costs, outputs,
performance measures and management information.
Mr. Hilinski will also coordinate with the County's IT Department and
will work closely with Stephen Glover.
Mr. Hilinski will report directly to the Director of Libraries.
AFPLWATCH Comment:
It's difficult to say who's victimized the most by this latest
move of Hooker's: Hilinski's new supervisees--several of them paid at or above
Hilinski's salary and all of them doing jobs he's had zero experience
with--or Hilinski himself, for a host of reasons. Maybe the dozens
of employees already involuntarily transferred off the 7th floor were
the lucky ones? Most library employees believe Carnes and Hilinski's
main function will be to provide Hooker with plausible rationales for
transferring even more employees off the 7th floor. Once again, it's
the library's patrons and the branch staffs who are being abandoned
here as Hooker squanders the "skill sets" (to use a Hookerism) of a
host of people who previously performed essential support tasks for
public service workers and their customers.
We heard...
...that the Technical Services Division's Processing Unit has been
abolished--despite the fact that there are hundreds of
boxes of unprocessed books on the 7th floor (as well as elsewhere in
the Central Library). And that Hooker has taken photos of all these
unprocessed boxes--not as evidence of what a mistake it was for her to have
strip-mined the staff on this floor, but to prove to the trustees that
we need--surprise!--another expensive contract with an outside
consultant to deal with this Hooker-induced backlog of unprocessed
materials. Yet another rumor has Hooker contemplating a directive
to simply discard all backlogs of all unprocessed materials, so she can
delete from her universe this painfully visible monument to her stupid
management decisions about 7th floor staffing levels.
(Posted November 21, 2004)
We said:
Hey taxpayers, if either one of these rumors about
the Processing Unit is true, that sucking sound you hear is the sound
more of your tax dollars going down the tubes.
We heard...
...that AFPL Computer Hardware Services Manager Marty Messmer would
retire as of December 2nd. (Posted November 21, 2004)
We said:
As the Hooker regime's
"brain drain" continues and the library's conversion to a new
automation system looms, will Hooker delay recruitment for Messmer's
soon-to-be-vacant position, as she has for so many other crucial
administrative posts?
We heard...
...that the manager of the Hapeville branch library has been suddenly
transferred to a staff position at the Northeast branch, and a
librarian at the Washington Park branch (transferred there from
Technical Services as part of Hooker's strip-mining of that department) has
been appointed Acting Director at Hapeville.
We said:
Whatever the reasons for these unannounced transfers, all employees and would-be
employees aspiring to and qualified for management positions in the
library system hope that recruitment for the unexpected vacancy at Hapeville will be
will commence very soon. Far too many positions in the library
system--especially management positions--have been filled over the past
few years through administrative transfers--many of them
involuntary--rather than through interviews with competing candidates.
This practice further damages the already dismal morale among library
employees who find that their accomplishments and qualifications are
often ignored in favor of some administrator's prejudices for or
against certain subordinates, or an administrator's attempt to resolve
chronic discipline problems, to scapegoat a subordinate for their own mistakes, etc.
We heard...
...that the trustees' Personnel Committee has thwarted Hooker's plans
to bring in Northside Branch Manager Emma Stanley to take over the
Central Library after Susan Earl departs on October 24th.
We said:
Isn't it interesting how The Hook doesn't trust any of
the department managers already at Central to manage the facility
until another Central Library Administrator is hired? Equally interesting
is the fact that the Personnel Committee has apparently stopped
rubber-stamping Hooker's personnel requests because they've learned
the hard way that they can no longer trust Hooker.
October 24th Update: This rumor must
have been false, or the Board must've ignored the its Personnel
Committee: While the branch managers were meeting at Northside on October 23rd, Stanley was
conspicuously absent due to the fact that Earl was giving Stanley a
tour of the Central Library. There's been no announcement, but Central
staff are assuming that they're about to get a new administrator who
knows little about the place but who apparently is in Hooker's
notoriously transient good graces...
We heard...
...that Michelle Carnes, assistant to former Deputy Director
Carolyn Garnes, has been involuntarily reassigned by Mary Kaye Hooker
to oversee the Collection Development Unit, whose manager resigned
earlier this month.
We said:
Carnes has no previous experience with
coordinating collection development, but significant facts like that
one don't faze library director Mary Kaye Hooker, as she continues
snatching people out of the posts they were hired for to perform the
tasks of others who she's either driven out of the organization or
whose vacant crucial posts remain unfilled for months or years on end.
October 24th Update: Since library
system's branch group managers have moved into Garnes's and
Carnes's previous offices, Hooker's statement to Collection Development
and Technical Services staff (what few of them remain, that is) that
Carnes would be returning to the 6th floor administrative offices
"at the end of the year" sounds like another one of Hooker's lies.
We heard...
...that, due to budget constraints, GALILEO has decided not to renew
its license with ProQuest.
We said: This will leave the state's (and AFPL's)
library users without free access to any periodicals in this
database that are not also part of EBSCOHost, whose license GALILEO
apparently does intend to renew.
We heard...
...that Central Library Administrator Susan Earl has gotten a job at
the Nashville Public Library. (Posted October 2003)
We heard...
...that Library Director Mary Kaye Hooker has been bragging about the
"positive" performance evaluation she recently received from her bosses,
the library's trustees.
We said: And who wrote that evaluation--Mohammed Saeed
al-Sahaf, Iraq's former Minister of Information?
We heard...
...that the Central Library recently set a new record for environmental
hazards in its elevators: poop one weekend, urine the next. This came
on the, um, heels of the lice on the 4th floor and just before the
flood in the basement and the mosquito infestation on the 7th floor.
We said: Keep your eyes off the horizon--that dark cloud might be locusts!
We heard...
...that Development Director Brian Williams's nameplate has been
removed from outside his office door.
We said: What is this--Ramses obliterating Moses's name "from
all the pylons and obelisks in the land"?
We heard...
...that Hooker is still poor-mouthing about not having enough
help on the 6th floor.
We said: If Hooker imports any more employees to
the 6th floor to help her, the building may just slide right down into
that gaping--and apparently permanent--crater on the plaza.
We heard...
...that branches are being inundated with unordered books about dog
breeds.
We said:
Who's the source of all this canine information? Most of the
small and mid-size branches long ago realized they have neither the
shelf space nor the funds to collect books on every breed of dog and
cat known to mankind. Yet again, someone else has decided they know
better what the branches need than the people who work there, as every
branch is getting copies of these unwanted books.
Meanwhile, Hooker instructed the library system's book vendors to cancel all
orders that were unfilled as of August 31st--a wildly premature decree
that has resulted in cancelled orders for thouands of books and other
library materials the branch selectors did want for their
collections.
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