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AFPLWATCH Artilces Posted in September 2003

Deputy Director Carolyn Garnes Abruptly Retires
Posted September 23, 2003

Read the memo announcing Garnes's retirement.

Read reactions to the memo from:

Dept. of Rolling Eyeballs

Further Evidence of AFPL's Downward Spiral
[Posted Late September 2003]

We regret to report several recent blows to the organization initiated by its own administrators:
  • On September 26th, the library director abolished the library system's Duplicating Unit.

    In her September 25th memo announcing the obliteration of the Duplicating Unit--a memo branch staff received via fax on September 30th, the day after the unit's closing--Hooker wrote that “staff will be assigned to a public service unit,” and that the county's administrative headquarters would be handling the library system's printing requests. Hooker did not explain why why this important library support function would no longer be performed by library personnel, who had made that decision, or when they made it; and did not mention that the unit's graphic arts equipment and supplies would be discarded. Although Hooker's memo described how to submit printing requests to county printing personnel, it did not specify how long branch library employees could expect the county to take to respond to their printing requests.

  • Branch managers were instructed on August 28th to begin marking as "Rush" their requests to the Technical Services Division for cataloging donations from their Friends Groups.

    So that's the kind of thing Hooker means when she says she wants the library system to function in "a more businesslike manner"? This decree means that Friends' donations will get to branches faster than the unprocessed or incorrectly processed new items selectors have ordered from the library system's vendors.

    Mary Kaye Hooker seems to be the only person in the library system unaware that her strip-mining of the staff in the Technical Services Division has left the system with an insufficient number of catalogers and other staff to handle the workload expected of them. Slapping a different label on an arbitrarily-chosen subset of the branches' numerous requests for cataloging and processing isn't going to magically speed up the productivity of that already-overburdened staff.

  • Branch managers were also told on August 28th that branch staff were henceforth to take on the responsibility of reviewing and making final dispositions about formal requests from patrons to remove items from the library’s collection.

    Safeguarding the "freedom to read" certainly doesn't rate very high among this administration's priorities. This edict:

    • Was announced without explanation, without any accompanying instructions or guidelines about how to accomplish this task, and without the provision of any mechanism for reporting these important decisions.

    • Radically departs from the previous, ALA-recommended and Board-approved AFPL procedure, which mandates that a systemwide committee of librarians promptly investigate and fairly adjudicate these protests, and do so in a manner consistent with the library system's written collection development policy.

    • Will inevitably lead to confusion and inconsistency as each branch haphazardly constructs its own standards of intellectual freedom. The wildly varying degrees of knowledge and courage--not to mention diplomatic skills--in the three dozen branches will weaken the library system's defenses against attempts to censor the contents of its collections.

    • Is an open invitation for citizens to file more lawsuits against the county. Without a systemwide policy in place to handle objections to items in the library's collections, it's easy to imagine legal proceedings being instituted, either by a patron infuritated by the fact that their objection to some particular item got handled differently than some other patron's objections to another item, or by a patron angry over the abrupt removal of an item from the library's collection without due process.

    This administration's blithe abandonment of the library's commitment to citizens' freedom to read is a telling, dangerous, and profoundly sad statement on the complete ineptitude of the current Powers That Be at the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, and how far off-course their "leadership" has taken us.

    There is no evidence that this radical departure from previous library policy has been cleared with the Board of Trustees or with the county government's legal experts.

  • "All financial actions will first go through the [Board's] Finance Committee before the [library's] Finance Department acts upon them..." --Mary Kaye Hooker, "Highlights of Monthly Activities, July-August 2003," page 2

    And this is the board of trustees convinced it doesn't micro-manage the library???


How's the Library Doing in Providing Online Databases?
[Posted mid-September 2003]

Since arriving at AFPLS, director Mary Kaye Hooker has consistently emphasized technology over books: more computers, more programs involving computers, more departments centered around computer services. Acquisitions practices have been greatly affected by this emphasis. Many databases have been purchased at great expense as substitutes for or enhancements to the book collection. Frequently, the database selections have been sound, and in theory they are good additions to library services. But in practice they don't always work. In fact, their availability is so inconsistent that they cannot be counted upon from one day to the next.

It is very frustrating to get a memo announcing the availability of the Mergent business database only to find that neither staff nor patrons are able to access it. AJC Online is a wonderful and powerful tool -- but is it working today? Many reference librarians have been forced to develope techniques for surreptitiously testing a database while listening to a patron's question before actually telling the patron about the source. (Staff have learned the hard way that it's better public relations to avoid mentioning something than to advertise the existence of a source only to find yourself apologizing later for the source's unavailability.)

On one day last month (August), only three databases were accessible, out of 15 tested. On the day these paragraphs were written the situation was much better: only six databases were unavailable (American Journey Online, CQ Electronic Library, Facts on File, Heritage Quest, Mergent, and Sanborn Maps). The reasons for unavailability vary from database to database and from day to day. In the case of the six mentioned above, three asked for passwords/user IDs, one produced a statement about browser incompatibility, another said that session cookies were not enabled, the last produced a screen with the very unambiguous message "FORBIDDEN."

Problems at AFPLS with databases are not always technical ones. A whole family of databases from Gale Research which we purchased last year was canceled this year due to lack of funding. A November 9, 2002 memo states "funding to renew Gale databases will not be available until the allocation of the 2003 materials book budget." We are fast approaching the last quarter of 2003 and these databases are still not available to our patrons. One of the Gale databases includes the crucial source Contemporary Authors. Many selectors throughout the library system canceled their print subscriptions to this popular source because they thought it would remain available online to AFPL patrons. It hasn't.

Whatever databases are purchased for our patrons, they are accessible only if the library system's catalog and Internet connections are working. There continue to be numerous times when either the catalog or the Internet connections--or both--are not functioning on some or all work-stations. When this happens, of course, no databases are available, no matter how much or little the library paid for them.

Why are there so many technical problems in this library system? Why are the main functions of our Printing Reservations Software turned off in most locations because they don't work properly? Why does the library system's automated circulation system go down on a regular basis? Why is it getting slower and slower with every passing week, creating embarrassing and annoying delays in our interactions with every patron wanting to borrow something from our libraries? Why does the catalog crash mid-search so many times per day? Why should a patron's search for a book title sometimes take up to four minutes to accomplish?

While Mrs. Hooker has emphasized technology, she has simultaneously decimated Technical Services and computer support staffing. The brain-drain from these crucial areas of the library's infrastructure, either through personnel re-assignments or through employees being driven out of the system for other reasons, could be at the root of many technology problems faced by branch staff and branch patrons. At present, a handful of people are doing the work of twenty or more. The heroic few who are left in Tech Services and the computer support unit lack administrative direction, planning, and training, and yet they soldier on, doing the best job they can in the midst of chaos.

Is this situation, and the mediocre library service resulting from it, as good as it's going to get for the the citizens of Fulton County?


Good Luck to AFPL's Newest Administrator
(She's Going to Need It)
Posted September 7, 2003

At a September 4th meeting of library managers, Library Director Mary Kaye Hooker formally introduced AFPL's newest administrator, Barbara Osborne-Harris.

In her subsequent remarks to the managers, Ms. Osborne-Harris mentioned that it was an article she'd written about the "cluster" concept of grouping library branches that first brought her to Hooker's attention. That article elicited a phone call from Hooker, who said she wanted to discuss the concept with her. They agreed to meet when Osborne-Harris showed up for the American Library Association's conference held in Atlanta in the summer of 2002. This means that as late as June 2002, Hooker was still seeking information about the concept that she had used over two years prior to June 2002 to justify her controversial mass transfer of managers out of AFPL's Central Library.

Ms. Osborne-Harris also remarked at the September managers' meeting that at her June 2002 meeting with Hooker, Hooker urged her to "send us your résumé"--an interesting suggestion since at that time there was no vacant branch group manager position at AFPL. (Of course, maybe Hooker knew something then that the rest of us didn't.)

Be that as it may, Ms. Osborne-Harris arrives at AFPL under unusual circumstances. She replaces Valerie Jackson, who was demoted over a year ago (and who eventually resigned), shortly after branch manager Gladys Dennard, who Jackson supervised, was murdered in her office by one of Dennard's employees in July 2002. (After demoting Jackson, Hooker dragooned Louise Conti, the manager of one of the system's largest and busiest branches, into performing Jackson's duties. With Osborne-Harris' arrival twelve months later, Hooker is finally allowing Conti to return to her branch).

Osborn-Harris' extensive background in one of New York City's largest library systems would seem to qualify her for her new post at AFPL. In any other environment, she would certainly be considered a potential asset to the organization. But, contrary another statement Ms. Osborne-Harris's made at the September 4th meeting--that "AFPL is a lot like most other library systems"--there are several factors unique to AFPL that will hamper her ability to be an effective administrator here. Among those factors: Given Hooker's so-called management style and the current disarray of the organization's management even before the hiring freeze--not to mention the fallout from the multi-million dollar race discrimination lawsuit and the string of EE0 complaints subsequently filed against library administrators--Ms. Osborne-Harris's plans to spend her first few months at AFPL getting to know the library system's branch staffs might be a tad over-optimistic.

Stay tuned...and good luck to Ms. Osborne-Harris. She's going to need lots of it.


Everything You Always Wanted to Know About
The Georgia Open Records Act
Posted September 6, 2003

Mistreated library employees, curious former library employees, journalists, lawyers, and library users disturbed about the way the library system is being operated these days are among the many individuals who may find it useful at some point to get hold of particular letters, memos, emails, personnel files, minutes of meetings, policy and procedure statements, reports, or other documents created or received by library officials or other county personnel.

Under Georgia law, local and state government officials are obliged to give citizens speedy access to virtually any recorded information handled by local and state government officials. How you'd go about getting such information--and what to do if the government doesn't cooperate--is conveniently explained at the web site operated by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.



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