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Home Table of Contents Archives Frequently Asked Questions Contact Us AFPLWATCH Stories Posted in March 2003 Library Director's Letter Reveals Her Priorities? Posted March 27, 2003 Library users will be interested to find that nowhere in her defense of her tenure at AFPL, which she describes in her recent letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, does Library Director Mary Kaye Hooker mention the word BOOK. The Biggest Elephant in the Library's Living Room Where are the Recently Published Books, Recently Released Audiobooks, Recently Released Videos, Recently Released Music CDs, and AFPL's Recently-Vanished Electronic Databases??? Posted March 21, 2003 By far the most gargantuan of all the "elephants in the living room" that the current library administration seems unwilling or unable to remedy is the fact that for 4 to 6 months every year, library staff are not allowed to order materials for their branch collections. Branch staff are constantly trying to explain to their patrons why books published in September (the heaviest publishing season of the year) can't be ordered until April or May and won't be processed, cataloged, and ready for patrons to borrow until the following June! Library administrators refuse to or are unable to address this problem, although they are very quick to berate staff for providing "poor customer service." Every year, the Fulton County Commission approves county department budgets the last week of January. Library administrators are aware of this schedule and the need to have all requests for all library materials bids (which the County Commission must approve within given deadlines) ready to implementby the last month in January. Year after year, library administrators reward the remarkable patience of library patrons by not being ready to instantly implement its contracts with library materials vendors the moment the county authorizes the library to begin spending its budget for books, videos, audiobooks, music CDs, and licenses for our patrons to access to e lectronic databases. The result? Library patrons who, unlike their counterparts patronizing thousands of other county library systems in the United States, have to wait even longer to borrow materials published the previous September,October, November, and December. Library patrons relying on access to certain databases can find their access suddenly cut off when database licenses are not been renewed before the licenses expire. As of late March 2003 (as in previous years at this time), branch managers have still not been notified of their materials budgets for 2003; have still not had their staffs trained in the materials vendors' ordering systems so they can begin placing their orders; and they fully realize that it will be several months (June?) after they order their first books, videos, or music CDS before they will begin trickling into the branches for patrons to borrow. For some materials, there will be further delays because the recently-gutted Technical Services Division is too poorly staffed to cope with whatever processing or cataloging problems the library's materials vendors make in delivering materials to the proper branches once they are finally purchased--and all vendors make such mistakes. (Changing vendors every year does not solve this inevitable problem; it just makes it more difficult to minimize the number of problems, as new relationships and procedures have to be hammered out between the library personnel and the personnel working for whatever different vendors the library administration has chosen.) While refusing to correct this intolerable disservice to thousands of library users, library administrators stubbornly prefer to concentrate on other, often tangential matters, constantly churning out self-congratulatory nonsense about all the progress they're making and all the "new" services they're providing while failing to accomplish the primary mission of any public library system: assuring a steady, uninterrupted flow of new materials into its libraries, and guaranteeing uninterrupted access to the electronic databases public library patrons rely upon. The Library Administration's Disastrous Plan for Providing Bestsellers to AFPL's Customers Posted March 21, 2003 Excerpt from the minutes of the January 22, 2003 meeting of the AFPL Board of Trustees: Trustee Fern: "I just want to once more say that I hope that our new book bid is going to help our problem with...getting bestsellers. I think our library should be the best in Georgia. I just joined...a book club. Most of the members are Fulton County residents but one of them is a DeKalb County resident. She not only has the bestseller book [the book club is reading] but she checked it out from the [DeKalb] library. We may have it [in our library system[] but I haven't noticed it. I just want us to be the best. I wonder if maybe we can see a plan. What is the plan for ordering bestsellers so that we know that we're going to get them when everybody else is getting them? I just don't want people to say, 'Well, I can get anything I want in Cobb and DeKalb.' I want to be right there with them. I don't know what the plan is or how that works. Is there any way that we can know that?"... Director Hooker: "As it is now [branch] libraries have not been ordering bestsellers in quantity. What we...need to do is look at what Dekalb [County's library system] is ordering, how do they order, how is it breaking out with their money. Maybe we can learn some strategies that we're not using. Right now our bestsellers tend to be down here [at the Central Library]."... Deputy Director Garnes: "I want to step in here for a moment.... We're going to work through some way...to have an exception system that would [ignore the system-wide Holds service] and allow the owning library to keep a book for a period of time--either one copy of a bestseller, or two....We'll explore how we can have an exception system. That's what we're exploring....I think we do need to look at 21st Century practices, which we have not done in this organization. We are going to do it."... Trustee Runow: "...I'll make a note that [the library administration's plan] will be before us in March." Home Table of Contents Archives Frequently Asked Questions Contact Us