Dept. of Media Ads We'd Love to See Posted December 23, 2003
We interrupt the holiday frivolity of Fulton County taxpayers
to bring you this important message...
- A $17 million reverse discrimination lawsuit, with accrued interest: $20 million
- Hiring a law firm to re-investigate already-investigated EEO claims: $112,000
- Redesign of library's website that has not been implemented: $35,000
- Potential wrongful death settlements against the County from the family of a
murdered South Fulton Branch librarian and the family of the employee who murdered her
then killed himself: Undetermined Millions
- The firing of library director Mary Kaye Hooker: PRICELESS!
--submitted 12/20/03 by an AFPLWATCH reader
Happy New Year to You, Too
Posted December 18, 2003
Note: The following letter was recently delivered to library staff members.
The text of the letter is displayed below, accompanied by AFPLWATCH comments,
which are shown in red.
December 12, 2003
Happy Holidays AFPL Staff!
I wanted to take a moment to thank each of you for your hard work and
dedication this year. Each day, we receive countless comments about
the work that you do. In fact, a recent survey indicated that your
patrons rate library staff as outstanding!
Thank God for consultants. We had gotten the
impression from your little talks with us before that survey that
“The Staff” was responsible for nothing but customer service failures.
The Administrative Team has been working to make sure that we continue
to provide top-notch service to the public. Despite budget cuts and
staffing shortages, we continue to make progress. For example:
- GED Testing and Preparation: AFPL is the only library in the
Country that is providing testing!
Yeah, well, maybe all the other library systems in
the country are too busy providing quality library service and their
leaders are too smart to squander their time, money, and staff
energies into sideline ventures like educational testing. In any case,
guess what, folks? AFPL is not providing GED testing. Hooker can
claim "the library plans to provide testing" or "the library wants to
provide testing" but it ain't providing it now. Maybe it will in a few weeks or a few
months, but right now, it’s not. Perhaps the "Team" needs to add a fact-checker to its ranks
before distributing reports of its accomplishments?
- Health Literacy: AFPL is partnering with Morehouse School of
Medicine, Emory University and Fulton County to provide basic health
information to members of the public who otherwise would not have
access to this information.
Gosh. All those years of AFPL libraries stocking medical books, encyclopedias, consumer
health magazines and professional medical journals--not to mention providing access during the
past 5 years to all the health information on the Internet….we guess that was just us spinning
our wheels or providing only substandard health information, right? And while we’re on the
topic, this partnership with Morehouse et al that Hooker's been talking about for well over
a year now-what are its tangible results? Is it a database? A program at a branch? A
bibliography? Is it bigger than a breadbox? If this partnership is so marvelous, how come
your Average Library Employee doesn't have the vaguest idea where or
how or by whom or to whom this information is being transmitted?
- SIRSI: The SIRSI Implementation Team has been working hard to meet
the “go live” deadline of March 2004.
The projected “go live” date for SIRSI implementation is April 5, 2004.
- Ocee and East Atlanta: The planning process is complete! Ocee
construction should be complete by June 2004 and a groundbreaking for
E. Atlanta should occur in early 2004.
And for how many years did the residents of
these two areas clamor for library service or a new building before library
administrators began paying attention? And how many more months of
political wrangling and other delays then ensued?
- Book Bids: We submitted our 2004 book bid five months early this
year!
Meaning, we suppose, that you are now
acknowledging how late they were the past three years in a row?
(See other areas of this site for how flawed these rushed-through RFPs
were.)
None of our successes would be possible without your help. Thank you
for continually working to provide the best to the citizens of Fulton
County, the City of Atlanta, and Atlanta in DeKalb!
May you and your families have a healthy, happy and safe holiday
season and New Year!
Best regards,
Your Administrative Team
[signed:]
Mary Kaye Hooker
Barbara Osborn-Harris
Emma Stanley Tate
Michelle D. Carnes
Shawl Shah
Peggie B. Watson
Amy Weeks
Margaret Roach
Francine I. Henderson
Edward Robinson
Marty Messmer
Sylvia Culver
Anne T. Haimes
Doris Jackson
John Hilinski
Well, at least we now know who--except for Mr.
Messmer, who resigned before the date on this letter--reports to
MKH. How does the woman manage to complete all those employees'
performance evaluations on time, we wonder?
And we think MKH, or the Team, or whoever sent this letter, is being
far too modest in listing her/their accomplishments for the past year.
How come she/they neglected to mention so many other “accomplishments”
of Hooker's in 2003? For example:
- Hooker and her lawyers lost two separate appeals of the lawsuit
that found Hooker guilty of race discrimination.
- Decisions Hooker approved resulted in getting the library
sued again this year-and on the same charges, and involving some of
the same people that, in a previous lawsuit, resulted in $16 million
worth of damages (now nearing $20 million, taking into account the
$1,000 per day interest on the unpaid judgments).
- Hooker managed to catch the (negative) attention of the national
library press at least half-a-dozen times in 2003.
- Affter having crippled other areas of the library in previous
years of her tenure, this year Hooker destroyed another entire
department, the library system’s Technical Services Division. Now
the library system is operating three dozen mini-processing units
instead of a single centralized one, and the catalog is increasingly
congested with inaccurate information as a result of wildly inconsistent
data-entry from a untrained multitude of catalog-tinkerers.
- Hooker provided such a rewarding, rich, and positive, work
environment that she drove off into early retirement or resignations
another half-dozen library system administrators and managers. This
pattern of Hooker's must make for a jolly esprit de corps among Hooker's
current "Team Members."
- Hooker neglected recruiting for numerous critical vacancies
until they all became mired in the county’s hiring freeze and until
some of them were lost permanently in eleventh-hour budget cuts.
In the case of branch (vs. administrative) staff vacancies, these
delays have doomed the employees in many branches that Hooker's
blithely wishing "happy holidays" to to permanent rather than
temporary stress caused by inadequate staffing.
- Hooker allowed the board to forget why it had (finally!) closed
down an underused branch library, resulting in their deciding to
open it up again, to the tune of $350,000.
- Hooker managed to get rid of her nemesis, Deputy Director Carolyn
Garnes, denying all responsibility for her also signing the same
incriminating documents that Garnes had signed and that had gotten Garnes
into such deep doo-doo.
- Hooker generously freed up a parking space at the Central parking
garage by beginning to park her vehicle in Central’s loading dock,
apparently out of fear that someone would damage her property or
perhaps attack her personally.
- Hooker was Atlanta's first-ever library director asked to resign
by a group of angry taxpayers.
- Hooker thoughtfully eliminated one of the reasons branch libraries
should continue their subscriptions to the New York Times by
failing to promptly provide, in adequate numbers, NYT
bestsellers to library patrons; not once in all the weeks of 2003 did
we purchase at least a single copy of all the NYT’s bestsellers,
something we’d routinely done before Hooker was hired.
- Hooker set up an entire new library department called “Customer Service”--and
then dismantled it within six months.
- Hooker allowed another twelve months to go by without investing
any additional personnel resources in routinely monitoring the library
system’s error-laden catalog, with the result that over 50,000 records
will vanish when we migrate to a new system next spring, and records
of over 40,000 lost items will disappear. And that's not counting all
the thousands of catalog records with errors in them.
- Hooker authorized, without sufficient advice from knowledgeable
branch staff, the purchase of several expensive online databases that
are of questionable value to the majority of library system patrons,
while allowing the licenses of several crucial databases to lapse.
- Hooker presided over an almost inconceivably fragmented and
confusing materials purchasing process that resulted in a large amount
of unexpended 2003 funds, in branches getting large amounts of
materials they didn’t order, and in branches not getting large amounts
of materials they did order.
- Hooker authorized the installation of an expensive system of “panic
buttons” in branches that make loud noises rather than silently
alerting the police-a measure that actually increases the risk of
violence to branch staff rather than decreasing it.
- Hooker allowed visitors to downtown Atlanta another 12 months to
gaze upon The Crater in front of the Central Library, and installed
screening that obstructs the view of drivers in that area (another
lawsuit waiting to happen?)
- Circulation in the library system she "leads" increased systemwide
a mere 1%, with half of the agencies losing circulation this year over
last year, including all the largest libraries (down 14,000 to 18,000
circs from last year).
And finally, a couple of stylistic comments on Hooker's (???) holiday
letter:
- Did the creator of this letter formerly work for Cosmo? Is
there any other explanation for the insertion of seven exclamation
points in a four-paragraph letter, even such a fiercely upbeat one
like this?
- the letter seems to have been written by a person with some sort
of multiple personality disorder: it starts off “I wanted…” then flips
into “we…” and “our…” and is signed by a “Team.” Somehow this doesn’t
surprise us.
Anyway, Happy New Year to you--or to you all--too.
Vendors Getting the Library’s Business
in 2004:
We Smell Several Rats…
Posted December 17, 2003; updated December 23, 2003
There are several suspicious features about the $5 million worth of
contracts for buying library materials next year which the library
board and director were successful in having the county commissioners
approve on December 17th:
- The bids submitted by vendors responding to the library’s Requests
for Purchase for the 2004 materials were reviewed and rated by people
not qualified to do so.
- Some of the scores given to some of the responding vendors' proposals
are not supported by the library staff's experience with those vendors.
For instance:
- A vendor who’s never provided opening day collections for AFPL’s
new branch libraries was rated twice as high as the vendor
who’s done an admirable job of stocking numerous new AFPL branches as
recently as this year.
- A primary vendor candidate whose web site annoys branch selectors
because it is so cumbersome to use received a score that was more
than twice as high as the score the current primary vendor's web
site received.
- A small local vendor of library processing services was scored
as highly as one of the major national book vendors for its
“vendor interface support and selection website services” or
its “on-site inventory” even though that small local vendor doesn’t
interact with selectors and has no inventory.
- The library director instructed the raters to consider--and
the raters dutifully scored--each candidates'"ability to alter shelf-ready [labels] to include [an alternate?]
Cutter system for opening day collections." This is a meaningless
requirement because the library system does not use a different method
of Cuttering library items for opening day collections than it uses
for any other collections.
- The library director instructed raters to consider in their
ratings--and the raters dutifully scored--whether or not the vendor
was “local.” As only one of the vendors under consideration was local,
it appears this criterion was invented solely to inflate the total
score of this vendor, which the library director has been trying to
steer business to for several years now. The location of library vendors
has never been used in previous years to evaluate vendors for a good
reason: it's not relevant to the timely delivery of library products
or services.
- One of the 2003 primary vendors of library materials had to request a
copy of the 2004 RFP - somehow, mysteriously, this vendor was
overlooked when the RFPs were mailed out to the vendor's competitors.
- In previous years under the library's current administrative
the teams of (qualified) bid-raters have felt pressure to inflate the
ratings of whatever vendor was currently in favor with library administators
and to deflate the ratings of the vendor who was currently out of
favor with certain board members. Two years ago, in fact, when the raters
resisted this pressure and rated the vendors empirically as county
purchasing regulations require, the library trustees rejected the
recommendation of library staff and selected a vendor of their own
choosing--until the county manager’s office forced them to accept the
vendor recommended by staff. Thus there’s no reason to believe that
this year’s raters--most of whom are individuals with zero direct
experience in dealing with these vendors’ products and services--would
have been spared such interference.
BOC Fed Up with Current Library Administrators?
Posted December 17, 2003; updated December 23, 2003
Last year, the Fulton County Board of Commissioners voted to support
legislation that would abolish the current library Board of Trustees
and change the person the Library Director reports to from the board
to the County Manager (as other county department heads do). That
legislation was not passed, but there's apparently going to be yet
another attempt in the upcoming legislative session to change the way
the library system is governed. Certain Commissioners are not waiting
for the legislature to convene in January to muster support for whatever
legislation is introduced.
On page 26 the agenda for the Board of Commissioners' December 17th meeting
is the following agenda item (#03-1532), sponsored by Commissioners
Pitts and Fulton:
Request approval of Resolution reaffirming support for legislative
amendments to Georgia law pertaining to the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library
System.
We hope AFPLWATCH readers will email the Commissioners and urge them to
unanimously approve the resolution and lobby for the legislation once
it's formally introduced.
December 23 Update:
The Commissioners approved the resolution, 5 to 1 (Boxhill voted no,
and Darnell did not vote).
Budget Crisis? What Budget Crisis?
Posted December 16, 2003
Item on the agenda for the AFPL Board of Trustees' December 17th meeting:
A recommendation from the board's Finance and Service Standards
committees to add $58,000 to the library's 2004 budget to continue
videotaping the trustees' meetings for broadcast on cable TV.
The $58,000 would be on top of the $9,000 it will cost
taxpayers next year to have the minutes of the trustees' meetings
recorded by a professional transcriptionist, and in addition to
however many thousands of dollars it costs to print, collate, bind,
and distribute multiple copies of those minutes, which typically run
to over a hundred double-sided pages per month.
Item on the agenda for the Fulton County Board of Commissioners'
December 17th meeting:
A recommendation from the library's trustees to approve its proposed
2004 contracts for obtaining library materials. Among the several
proposals is a $175,000 contract for a particular vendor to
process whatever library materials arrive at the library
unprocessed by other library vendors.
The trustees are asking the Commissioners to allow a vendor to
do tasks now being performed by (trained!) county employees. The
proposed contract does not specify whether or not the vendor's
employees would be doing this work at its own facility, or sending
its employees to the Central Library's 7th floor to do the work
there. In any case, if the Commissioners approve this contract,
they will be needlessly increasing the cost of processing library
materials by $175,000, since the library (i.e., county taxpayers)
will continue to pay the salaries of the library employees who
are now doing these tasks. The library board and its director
have decided to transfer these employees out of the jobs they were
hired to do; many have already been transferred elsewhere. In
other words, not only will no money will be saved by this
outsourcing contract - the net costs to the taxpayers will
be increased by $175,000!
Actually, the waste of taxpayers' money will be even greater if
the Commissioners approve one of the trustees' other proposed
contracts, for a specific specialty vendor who says it can
(along with other vendors in the marketplace) provide a type of
publication the library wants to obtain, but who
cannot process them, as the library's other materials vendors
are required to prove they can do. The Commissioners' approval of
this proposed contract will increase the number of unprocessed
materials arriving at the library instead of minimizing them,
which is supposedly the justification for dismantling the library
system's Technical Services Division staff by outsourcing the
Division's functions.
Toward a Glossary of Hookerspeak: Two More Entries
Posted December 14, 2003
Instances of modern corporate jargon take on whole new meanings
when used in Hookerspeak, Mary Kaye Hooker's contribution to the
family of languages. Below are some additional Hookerspeak terms that
keep surfacing...
“Train the trainer”
In present-day AFPL, this translates to “tapping wary library staff on
the shoulder, pulling them into a half-day session on a topic
completely foreign to them, and then announcing to them that they are
responsible for going back to their branch and training all other
staff to be proficient in this subject.
Sometimes, additional preparation is given by sending these helpless
and doomed sheep to outside classes on “how to train.” Since learning
to use Powerpoint and prepare handouts doesn’t address the fundamental
issue that the sheep are not expert in - and often not even familiar
with - the subject matter they are expected to teach, this additional
training is not helpful. For example, if one does not speak or read
Spanish, it will be impossible to teach it to other staff, no matter
how many hours one spends preparing overheads and class evaluations.
But Hookerspeak bulldozes right past these obstacles!
In Hookerspeak, one's lack of knowledge of the subject
does not prevent one from being required to teach it! Nor does lack of
aptitude for teaching, nor lack of time and resources and classroom
space at the branches where the “trainer” is to carry out the allotted
task. That a branch is open to the public all day, thereby tying up
both the computers needed to train, and the staff who need to be
trained, is not allowed to stand in the way of the “train the trainer”
juggernaut! It is the triumph of style over substance -just because
we're training you doesn't mean we know any more than you do!
“techies” - n. (tek'-ees) 1. Traditional corporate jargon:
staff member who is a trained and experienced computer technician,
capable of troubleshooting computer hardware & software problems.
2. Hookerspeak: staff members (of any and all classifications) rounded
up at random (some, on the basis of having mentioned having a computer
at home, others by virtue of being absent from work the day the
branches were told to name a “techie”), put in a room and told they
were now the “techies,” responsible for solving computer problems out
in the field. The experience was apparently very similar to what
took place in the Upper Room at Pentecost, except that, unfortunately
for the techies, no tongues of flame descended upon their heads to
enlighten them as to how to actually fix computers.
In the past 3 years, the techies have been called together a whopping
two times for some training in the mysteries of their assignments.
Other than that, their continuing education has consisted of being
given some screen captures of what to do in certain situations.
Nevertheless, the library persists in the polite fiction that the
techies are all Bill Gates clones, and important projects like
upgrades and installations are entrusted to them. The entire library
is leaning on these reluctant conscripts, but in the language of
Hookerspeak, the techies are an elite group, stationed one per branch,
scanning the heavens eagerly for the giant “T” in the sky that summons
them to their next mission.
Readers are welcome to submit to AFPLWATCH their own examples
of this fascinating new field of study. You may also want to consult the recently-posted
introduction to Hookerspeak.
Reader Contest Posted December 14, 2003
Name That Crater!
Two years ago, there was a patio at one corner of the Central Library.
It was one of the unique little outcroppings of this Marcel
Breuer-designed landmark, a little outdoor space for the Children’s
Department. Above the patio lay an entire sidewalk, channeling
pedestrians past the front of Atlanta’s main library and allowing a
view of the building as a whole - not to mention making it possible to
walk past the building.
Then, two years ago, this entire corner of the Central Library's plaza,
patio and all, was dug up as part of the frantic race to renovate
Central before the American Library Association came to town.
An odd thing happened. The American Library Association meeting came
and went. The hole created from all the digging was still there. Its
shape and configuration kept changing. It got smaller. It got bigger.
Construction debris was strewn all over it. It got cleaned up a bit.
It got messy again. A fence went up around it. Special screening
panels were added to the fence. And yet still the hole itself remained.
It became so familiar a part of our landscape here at the library that
employees were in danger of taking it for granted. Soon we would be
unable to remember a time when the front plaza didn’t look as if it
had been the victim of a stray missile.
There were theories, of course, about the persistence of The Great
Hole. It was the portal to an alternate universe, one with a
functional main library, said some. No, it was Nature’s spontaneous
protest at what was taking place within the walls of Breuer’s building,
argued others. Yet a third theory was that The Great Hole was where
the staff of Technical Services would end up after the next round of
Hooker’s transfers--AFPL's version of Stalin’s Siberia.
Then at last the light dawned. All over the building, librarians
slapped their foreheads in belated realization. The hole was a
Metaphor, the kind authors are always sticking in their novels to
convey a Really Big Idea. Why did it take so long for such dedicated
bibliophiles to understand this? Clearly the hole is the symbolic
representation of the condition of Atlanta’s library system -
crumbling, disintegrating, a slippery slope leading to the abyss,
which despite the never-ending attempts at more and bigger disguises,
is an open wound on the body politic.
Like all good metaphors, our Hole deserves a name. Melville beat us to
Moby Dick, Dickens cornered the market on the ash heap, but surely
somewhere out there is an unused label we can hang on the AFPL crater.
We turn to you, our readers, for ideas. What shall we christen this
amazing eyesore? Give full rein to your imaginations, for it is
obvious that this unnatural depression is destined to be with us for
many moons to come. We might as well get on first name terms with it.
Our favorite reader response so far:
"Obviously, the Crater is Atlanta's own Hellmouth, as any good Buffy
watcher could tell you. Giles would recognize it right away. Interesting
how the forces of evil seem drawn to libraries. We need our own Scooby
Gang to rout them out and send them on their way."
Send your own nomination for the crater's name to AFPLWATCH.
Staff Alert! Posted December 12, 2003:
“As a general rule, Fulton County is required to keep a maximum head
count of 6,000 employees; hence, to increase staff such as [those that
will be required when the library opens its new branch] at Ocee,
somewhere else must take [staff] cuts.” --Mary Kaye Hooker to
the trustees at their October 22, 2003 meeting [“Highlights of Monthly
Activities: October - November 2003,” page 2]
AFPLWATCH Comment:
If this is so, then why does the county and the board keep opening new
libraries? Especially without closing down underused ones? Where do
they think these staff positions are going to come from, except from
the libraries their predecessors have already opened and which
desperately need their staff members to keep those libraries functioning?
Read previous "Staff Alerts"
A Breath of Fresh Air!
Posted December 9, 2003
At long last, a few moments of sanity--the faintest wisps of integrity--
emerge from a meeting of AFPL's board of trustees. Savor these
comments: they don't get made very often. (And notice McClure's
anxious attempt to squelch any board members' attempts to
criticize the board's interference in library personnel matters, a
practice initiated by McClure during Roy Yancy's chairmanship of the
board and perfected by McClure during his own disastrous term as board
chair.)
From the October 22, 2003 meeting of the board of trustees (Minutes, pages 65-68):
Trustee Stephen Dorvee: “…I just don’t see why this Board votes
on personnel matters like this [request for the board’s approval of an
employee’s “voluntary demotion”]. I have just been treated to a
10-minute discussion about confidential facts that I have no knowledge
of, peppered with comments about apparently previously confidential
facts about somebody who was voluntarily demoted which caused a problem,
which I know nothing about…and I’m being asked to vote on this. This
needs to be delegated to somebody who has knowledge of the facts
regarding this and apparently I’m not supposed to or I can’t know them
because we’re on TV. I think that puts this Board in a very, very
difficult position. And I think, perhaps, our legal counsel…would
agree with that. So I hope over the next few months we can get out of
the personnel business as a full Board and delegate that to somebody
who has some knowledge of what’s going on because I find this to be-I
mean, I’m being asked to vote on vapor.”
Board Chair Annette Steed: “The concern that you are expressing
has been expressed and probably is going to be expressed again and
it’s something that this Board needs to get a handle on. We need to
have some dialogue, some conversation and we need to come to some firm
stand about this, although we might have to go all the way to our
State statutes to do so….”
Trustee Becky Fern: “I just wanted to echo your sentiments.
Whenever I hear something from the Personnel Committee…I know ahead of
time that I’m not going to vote on it. I’m going to abstain because I
don’t know anything about this. And I think that when, as a Board
member, I vote on something I am saying that I agree with this
practice. And if I don’t know anything about it, how can I say I agree
with it or disagree? So I hope that we can get out of the business of
hiring and firing because I don’t know these people or anything about
them.”
Trustee William McClure: “…There is no debate here of whether we
ought to just have the power or not [to control the library system’s
personnel decisions]. The issue is whether we will be held liable
under any circumstances and, hopefully, the attorneys will be able to
sort through this and resolve that issue for us.”
Trustee Stephanie Moody: “…Well, my take on it is if we don’t
have the knowledge then you are, in effect, just rubber-stamping
something that come[s] up to us without any knowledge of it and I
don’t see the purpose of rubber-stamping what we do not have full
knowledge of.”
|
AFPL Officials Sued Again
for Discrimination and Retaliation
Read the story as reported December 3, 2003
by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Read the story--with more details provided--as reported December 8, 2003
by Library Journal.
Read other news stories about AFPL that were published in 2003
New Round of Staff Transfers?
Hooker's Latest Reorganization Memo
Posted December 2, 2003
Library Director Mary Kaye Hooker is trying to use the trustees'
latest strategic plan as a springboard for what some staff
employees believe to be yet another round of involuntary staff
transfers.
Apparently having learned from the successful lawsuit against the
library's administration that being in possession of A Written
Document before reorganizing a large institution is A Good Thing,
Hooker recently distributed to staff a lengthy memo purportedly
outlining "Step One" of how she intends to implement her
interpretation of the board's latest strategic plan. For those who
might have forgotten, this is the plan devised in approximately 3
hours by an unrecorded number of board members one afternoon at
last fall's board retreat. (It's also the plan board chair Annette Steed recently--and
erroneously--described as molding the library's future for "the next
25 years.")
Hooker's awareness of her complete lack of
credibility among library employees and with several board
members (not to mention potential grievances and lawsuits filed by
targeted employees), is reflected in the fact that Hooker emblazoned across the top of the copies of
the memo she distributed to employees the responsibility-diffusing
words "APPROVED BY THE BOARD'S PERSONNEL COMMITTEE."
Because her four-page memo is so bloated with great globs of
Hookerspeak, most employees may've stopped reading it long before
they got to the deeply-embedded part that hints at more involuntary
staff transfers. Below is a copy of Hooker's memo, with
AFPLWATCH commentary shown in red.
TO: [AFPL Board of Trustees] Personnel Committee
(Corlice Abercrombie-Arnold, Chair)
[AFPL Board of Trustees] Service Standards Committee
(Mrs. Dorothy Blake, Chair)
FROM: Mary Kaye Hooker, Director of Libraries
CC: [Osborn-]Harris, Haimes, Earl, Jackson, Culver, Henderson
DATE: October 7, 2003
RE: Step One (Draft) of Staffing Plan:
“Community Building in a Diverse Age of Change”
In light of the Strategic Plan under consideration by the Library
Board of Trustees, Administrative Staff have reviewed the key
findings from the user surveys, non-user telephone surveys, and
focus groups to define the key skills and services need by staff to
deliver excellent service.
“In light of” this year’s (this month’s? this
hour’s? --we go through them pretty regularly) staffing plan, staff
probably need to expect the worst. Funny how all this exhaustive
thinking by board members and administrators always ends up having
to do with making changes in staff assignments. That’s the Hooker
shell game. Rather than accepting the responsibilities that comprise a
director’s job, Hooker sets up the straw man she calls "The Staff." All
responsibility is devolved upon this mythical personification. All
inadequacies fall at the feet of "The Staff," all failures are ascribed
to "The Staff"--and the solution to every problem is a change in the
assignments of "The Staff."
Having pretty much harvested all available bodies from the library
system's Technical Services Division, it’s predictable that Hooker
would next aim her McCormick Reaper toward staff working elsewhere.
That’s what we think this document presages: the next chapter in
Hooker's endless game of moving around the pieces on the chessboard
fast enough to distract most people from the fact that nothing is
changing, except the accelerating rate of deterioration of an entire
institution.
In our deliberations, our consensus was that a formula could define
our goal:
Customer Service =
Cluster strength (staff, collections, hours, programs)
+ Organization
+ Training (Staff Development and recruitment)
+ Strategic Partnerships
The Clusters! The non-existent, the
emperor-is-most-definitely-naked Cluster concept! Yeah, sure, it's
library employees' loyalty to their Cluster that forms the basis for
and motivation of their service to library customers. Ask any staff
member what the Clusters are all about, and watch for the ensuing
particularly blank look. Even Ms. Hooker, who claimed she had based the infamous May
2000 “reorganization” (i.e., the mass involuntary transfers in the
spring of that year) on the Cluster concept, wasn’t able to tell a
federal court just what the Cluster system means here in the
Atlanta-Fulton Public Library. But hey, just because no one yet knows
what a Cluster is or does, and despite the fact that the Clusters
exist only on paper doesn't prevent Hooker from trying to base our
entire new Strategic Plan - not to mention this really exciting formula!!! -
on them.
The creation of these so-called “formulas” is what happens when
you put the board in a room with a flip chart and a magic marker.
How about this for a "formula":
Staffing Plan =
No New Staff
+ Incompetent Leadership
+ Micromanaging Board
+ Hooker's Need to Seem Like She's Doing
Something to Earn Her Salary
The Strategic Plan showed that the preponderance of community
support asked for three types of services:
- Learning services
- Small business support
- Recreational materials.
That “preponderance” of surveyed library
users also asked us to provide them with a quiet place with books to
take out, but we’ve proven over and over that we can’t meet those
basic expectations. So why not set up new goals to fall short of?
This is Cheese-Moving at its finest and most meaningless.
In order to review the skill sets needed by staff to fulfill these
roles[...]
“Skill sets” - someone’s been skimming
management books again. Stop it! Jargon can’t disguise a complete
lack of ideas and identity. You can talk about “skill sets” all you
want, but the fact is, you've got part-time library assistants
staffing reference desks at the Central Library. That’s how much
you care about matching skill sets to public service needs. By the
way, Ms. Hooker - when did you become so interested in “skill sets”?
Aren't you the library director who told your staff 3 years ago
that the notion of "reference librarian" was an outmoded concept,
and then went on to get rid of every subject specialist you could
find? When you announced your May 2000 transfers, you told
employees that you had made no effort to match the skills of the
transferred employees with their new assignments. So were you wrong
then, or are you wrong now?
[...] the Strategic Plan and Administrative staff outlined the
following services under each of the above categories.
- Learning services
- Study and research including AARL and Central
What collections will our patrons be using for
study and research at Central? Its decimated periodicals collection?
Its abandoned government documents collection? Its gutted arts and
humanities collections? Its film collection, once the finest in the
Southeast, now utterly destroyed? Its foreign language books that
staff were ordered to discard during the frenzied effort to reopen
Central in time for ALA's visit to Atlanta? The library system's
electronic databases that either don’t work without unprovided passwords,
aren’t renewed, or aren't even appropriate for public library users?
The circulating collections missing the 75% of new books published
outside AFPL's 3-month ordering "year"?
So after 3.5 years of downgrading reference service
into nonexistence, now reference is back as a priority! Does
that mean that the library's patrons can expect the person behind the reference desk
will be a librarian instead of a library associate? Surely not: that
wouldn’t serve Hooker’s goal of moving “back room” folks into public
service. Which is why a staff member who used to work in the duplicating
department now staffs the “reference” desk on Central’s 4th floor.
- Instructional services and programming
- Basic literacy
- Career development
- Computer literacy
- Consumer and government literacy
- English as a second language
- Family literacy
- Health literacy
- Legal literacy
- Life-long learning
There are many agencies in our
community that provide literacy training, legal services,
health education. But there’s only one agency that exists
to loan books, CDs, videos, DVDs to the public and to make
information available for the public to access. We cannot
be all things to all people when we are not able to be
even the one thing that we are supposed to be. Can we just
try to do that one thing well, rather than trying to do a
million other things poorly?
- Small Business Services includes
- Start up programming for all ages
- Collections
- International business
- Community Economic Development
- Micro-business incubator
How amusing to read what Hooker goes on to
designate as the libary system's new "foci"! “International
business” - you already tried that notion on the 2nd floor three
years ago, Ms. Hooker. It didn’t fly then and it won’t fly now.
When you've cut the budget for the newspapers and magazines that
support business research, when you've removed from Central
all the librarians with the most experience in providing business
reference, when you've repeatedly disparaged the entire notion of
specialization, when you have no one in charge of the technical
services function of selecting and renewing electronic databases -
how can you claim the library supports “international business”?
Or "small business," for that matter?
Since the materials budget has remained stagnant all during your tenure,
where will the money come from to build business collections in
branches? And when you finish utterly destroying the Technical Services
Division, who will ensure that AFPL's libraries will receive the many
business serials that underpin a business collection, and who will see
to it that the catalog accurately reflects holdings so patrons can
figure out which editions of these serials a particular branch owns?
Or do you not know what a serial is and why it’s important to know
where they are? And do you not realize that Georgia State University,
located a few blocks from the Central Library, operates a Small
Business Center? Why should AFPL be making half-hearted attempts to
"incubate" businesses when GSU, not to mention the Small Business
Administration, already does this? Or do you just want to take on
one more job that the library can do in a half-assed way, deliberately
ignoring the fact that other agencies already do that job, and do it
well?
- Recreational
- Books and other media
- Programs
- Computers
- Cultural Events
Same question: is anyone addressing the need
to get more money for books, computers, cultural events? The
Board, who hasn’t raised a dime? Hooker, who drove the head of the
library’s development office to seek the protection of the county
manager, leaving all his library fund-raising efforts stalled?
Beyond the money issue, there’s the fact that as of December 2nd
the library system won't have a computer hardware manager, doesn't
have on staff an Information Technology Manager to oversee the
increasingly complex technology issues (like filtering) facing
the library system, leaving AFPL with a total of 4--that’s right,
4--people in the entire computer department. Let’s repeat that: 4
people are expected to maintain nearly 500 public and staff computers
in 32 libraries spread out from Ocee to Union City--in addition to troubleshooting
the servers, staff email, and computer peripherals like printers
and print management software. Whenever our automation system
goes down--and it goes down often--there’s suddenly no catalog and
no ability to conveniently loan out library materials. What to do?
Who to call? Computer crashes are a daily fact of life for library
users and library staff, including the four poor souls remaining in
the pressure cooker of the computer support room. But let’s just
forget all that, shall we, and encourage the delusion that computers
can be one of our "new" “foci”? Right, with no resources, no money,
no staff, and no clue.
On top of these realities, Ms. Hooker, there’s the nagging question
of who’s supposed to order, catalog, and process library materials
now that you’ve put on life support the units in the department who
did those jobs? What's the point of crowing about half a million new
books and videos for small business entrepreneurs if those materials
are sitting in boxes waiting to be processed for branch use?
Training and Staff Development/Recruiting build upon the above foci
identified through the processes of the Strategic Plan, by staff, and
by the Administrative Team....
Sound eerily familiar? Here’s an excerpt from a
FORMER board brainchild, “Strategic Initiative 1" concocted at the
board’s May 2000 retreat:
Strategies: Provide an education program to train all
employees. This education program will seek to cultivate a new
mindset and inculcate a new organizational culture. Management
will assess the most critical needs, explore training
options…[T]he training will generally employ a cascading
implementation….”
Yes, the BOT (well, some of it, anyway) attends a retreat and comes up
with a long-range plan approximately every, oh, three years or so.
Retreating and strategizing is the easy part, however. The difficulties come next,
when you actually have to carry out the plan--or to remember that
you've made a plan that's theoretically driving your subseqent decisions.
The way we do it under the Hooker regime is we strategize, we
pontificate, we write a fragmented, grandiose plan using all the
latest management jargon (“cascading implementation”
for God’s sake), then instead of carrying out the plan we suddenly
develop the kind of amnesia normally reserved for characters on TV
soaps, we then spend three more years deteriorating, and then - Eureka! -
it's time to make another plan! We’ll even claim we've never done
this before! Sometimes the amnesia sets in almost before the retreat
is over with! That’s probably how, in 2000, the library director, with
board approval, managed to abolish the library system's existing
training unit approximately 3 weeks after identifying training
as a key part of "Strategic Initiative 1." Somewhere between the
cascading and the implementation, something always goes wrong.
...The process includes the following steps:
- Identification of existing skill sets of administrators and
librarians including undergraduate degrees, specialized work
experiences.
- Match skill sets to the community:
- May 2000: Ms. Hooker informs staff that she made no effort to
match skills to staff's new positions.
Result: Transfers.
- November 2003: Ms. Hooker informs staff that the skills
set of each employee will be identified.
Results:Transfers?
When skills don’t matter, transfer. When skills do matter, transfer.
“Transfer” is the only continuity. (This reminds us of that "Far Side"
cartoon that peeks into a veterinarian's textbook on treatments
for various horse ailments: “Colic? Shoot horse. Broken Leg? Shoot
horse. Cough? Shoot horse. Poor digestion? Shoot horse.”)
Employment at AFPL offers only two eternal verities:
- Every couple of years the board will conduct a brainstorm about
the library’s mission.
- When in doubt of how to proceed, the director will transfer some employees.
- Identify recruitment needs
- Basic training/recruitment/skill sets should include demonstrated competency in the following areas:
- Knowledge of learning styles
- Interpersonal skills
- Cultural sensitivity/diversity training
- World language (where needed)
- Technology and media savvy
- Public relations savvy
- Age specific development issues
- Subject matter specialists (where needed)
- Leadership
- Basic management skills
- Team work commitment
- Community building techniques
Ah, the fantasy world--now we’re deeply into
it! To bring us back to reality for a moment, let’s make a short
list of all the vacant positions in the library system. No, wait,
we haven’t got that kind of bandwidth....
OK, how about a little pop quiz instead? Take a minute to mentally
review a one of the staff vacancies that have occurred during
the past few years. Pre-freeze, how long did it take between the
time that position was vacated and the time Ms. Hooker and the BOT
allowed it to be advertised? Now, how much more time elapsed
on those occasions when interviews were actually conducted? How
often after the interview was nothing more ever heard about
the candidate selected?
Take a recent example, the Fairburn Branch manager position:
- vacated Fall 2002
- interviews conducted August 2003
- none of the candidates interviewed have heard anything more
about it to this day
- the position is still vacant
There've also been instances where interviews were held, none of the
people interviewed were ever notified of the upshot of those interviews,
another round of interviews were held, the “correct” candidate was
finally chosen. Example: The manager vacancy for Central Ivan Allen Department:
- interviews held Fall 2001
- no further word for months
- more interviews held
- administration's favorite candidate chosen March 2002
- candidate fired May 2002
How can you mention “recruitment” as a priority with a straight
face, Ms. Hooker? Have you already forgotten about the candidate
from out of town who was offered the vacant librarian position in
Central's General Collections Department last spring? Having
accepted the position, she quit the job she had only to be notified
later that the offer at AFPL was being "withdrawn"! How many other
external candidates have had similar experiences in trying to get
hired at AFPL?
While we're on the subject of "recruitment," just how many people,
at any level, have been recruited from outside the organization
during the past few years--including that year when we were going
to recruit at ALA but couldn't because the printed recruiting materials
didn't arrive in time?
The fact is that the hiring process at AFPL is a mess--and not because
"The Staff" is unable to hire properly but because of relentless
interference from the administration and the board. After all:
- Who authorizes the filling of a vacant position?
- Who authorizes the advertising of a vacant position?
- Who decides to stop recruiting, or to transfer a vacant position
without filling it, after interviews have aleady been conducted?
- Who decides to abruptly stop recruitment for a vacant position
--and without notifying those who have interviewed--merely because
they don’t like the person the hiring committee has recommeneded be
hired?
--You and the Board, that’s who, Ms. Hooker. Why have the vacant
positions of Public Relations Officer, Assistant Director for Technology Services,
Technical Services Manager, Assistant Director for Public Services,
Fairburn Branch Manager, Development Officer, Buildings Manager,
Deputy Director, Central Library Administrator, Collection Develoment
Librarian, Hardware Services Manager, and so many others not been
recruited for, Ms. Hooker?
As for those “skill sets," Ms. Hooker, aside from the hypocrisy of
your sudden rediscovery that certain positions require certain skills,
staff wonder whether the skills you list in your "Staffing Plan"--or
any other skills--really matter in this library system. We know “cultural sensitivity
and diversity training” don’t count - Board Chair Annette Steed just
told Library Journal that discrimination doesn’t affect the
day-to-day performance of your job, so we can safely assume it doesn’t
matter to anyone else's job either, correct?
“Technology and media savvy” and “subject matter specialists”? Their
importance would be why you have staffed the Central Library's "computer
hub" with employees whose reference skills and subject expertise
play absolutely no role in their current jobs of assigning library
users to computer workstations and handing out the restroom keys.
Not to mention the subject specialist librarians you drove off or
involuntarily transferred to branches. How many librarians remain
at Central who are thoroughly conversant with the fine arts? With
film? With business? With government documents?
As for “leadership” - not in this library system. Library employees
with leadership skills are hunkered down trying to avoid being caught
in the crosshairs of the next round of involuntary transfers. There’s
no room for leadership to emerge in an institution engulfed in
paranoia, retaliation, and ass-covering. You’ve squandered the
opportunity at nurturing the next generation of leaders among the
employees already workign for this library system, Ms. Hooker, and the
board’s stubborn interference in the hiring process makes it mighty
unlikely that you'll be able to replace those from outside the
organization.
- Organizational Issues for the Project
- Initiatives are based at the service level
- Team/cluster based
- Each employee is hired as a resource for the entire
cluster and not just at one branch
- Cooperative sharing of materials and resources within
the cluster
- Bi-lingual resources and other specialized services
are shared cluster wide
- Cluster leaders and branch managers within the clusters will be held responsible for success of their branch and their clusters
So here we are at last: the purpose of the
Cluster is to complete the process of devolving responsibility as
far away from Hooker as possible. It’s the invisible Cluster which
is responsible for the success of the library! With the same
resources, the same staff, and wearing the handcuffs soldered in
place by a micromanaging board, the imaginary Clusters are now
charged with operating the library. Any successes will be claimed
by Hooker, but all failures will be laid at the doorstep of
The (Cluster) Staff. All vision will henceforth emanate from The
Clusters, as Hooker has abundantly shown she has no vision of her
own. All responsibility will be delegated to The Clusters, because
like every poor leader, Hooker craves power but avoids
responsibility and accountability.
The logistics of this pompous plan are laughable: if employees work
for "The Cluster":
- Who hires them?
- Where are they based?
- Who evaluates them?
- How are staff members to come up with "initiatives" when:
- the budget offers no flexibility?
- even flyers have to be approved by administrators?
- there are no support staff - to produce press releases,
to print flyers, to order materials
- there is no sense of freedom or encouragement of
creativity?
At the moment, branch staffs are stretched to the point of breaking:
they were short-staffed to start with, and the hiring freeze has left
some of them in desperate straits. They are being squeezed to death by
the administration’s arbitrary demands for outreach at the very time
they can barely keep the branch doors open to serve patrons who come
into their buildings. Without an adequately-staffed and competently
managed Technical Services Division, branch staff are now forced to
process their own materials; with an inadequately-staff computer support
department, branches are forced to provide their own tech support--and
to regularly festoon their workstations with "Out of Order" signs. But
none of this matters to Hooker: this plan will be pushed
through in the teeth of those realities because it allows Hooker to
transfer all her responsibilities as director to "The Staff." Nice work
if you can get it, and the board will doubtless allow Hooker to earn
her hefty paycheck in this amazingly self-serving manner!
- Next Steps:
- Identify key services requested by cluster,
e.g. Clusters I, III, IV have small business services
- Identify skill sets within the cluster
- Identify collection assets within the cluster
- Identify leadership role for Central to augment services with Ivan Allen services
- Clusters write business plans and plan programs, buying for next fiscal year
- Identify cluster deficits and assign/recruit staff accordingly
- Identify strategic partnerships
- Identify staffing skills sets for training/competency measures for evaluation
- Time Line
- October, 2003 - Identify skills sets
- November, 2003 - Identify collection strengths and weaknesses
- December, 2003 - Identify programming needs and partnerships
- January, 2004 - Set training/recruitment agenda
- February, 2004 - Align collection development needs within the clusters; set evaluations
- March, 2004 - order materials; begin programming.
- June, 2004 - mid-year evaluations
- September, 2004 - report to BOT
- Next steps
As of this writing, employees have not been polled for
a list of their unique skills. Under the circumstances,
it's a mystery why Hooker or her Human Resources Manager
would expect that employees will volunteer such information
whenever the administration gets around to asking for it,
as anyone who does so may be painting a big fat Transfer
Target on their backs.
Neither has there been any attempt to "identify collection
strengths and weaknesses," and this might be a tad difficult
to do with any objectivity since Hooker no longer has a Collection Development
Librarian on her staff.
"Next steps?" With Hooker the next steps are always the same: move the
shells around the board rapidly, defying the ability of the some
observers to notice that they are all equally empty. Not only have no
staff skills been identified, staff have not suddenly developed any
new skills. No new collection assets have appeared overnight.
Hooker's new scheme is a bit like one of those Five Year Plans in the
old Soviet Union. The same tired serfs push the same starved horses
across the same old fields, and with the same results. The Party
insists that the wheat harvest is bigger than ever. Throw in a few
buzzwords like “partnerships” and "strategic alliances" and the
uninitiated may fall for it, but the serfs know better.
They know better especially when they're told that Ivan Allen and
the other Central Library departments are to play a fundamental
support role in Hooker's new scheme. That’s what Ivan Allen and the
other departments at Central used to do until Hooker and the Board
decided to “reorganize.” Three-and-a-half years later, we’re right
back where we started, but with a library system in ruins and a
demoralized staff who numbly wait for the next blow to fall.
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