AFPL's Current Trustees
Express Appreciation to Inept Predecessors
Posted December 29, 2004
In a startling display of denial-induced collective amnesia, the
recently-reconstituted library board agreed to formally acknowledge the,
um, stellar service to the library system rendered by the board's
former members. The
the
transcript of their discussion shows that they discussed this topic
with zero sense of irony.
Considering the magnitude of the former trustees' role in the current
dilapidated condition of the library system, we think the wording of those
certificates deserved more thought than it received.
On the off-chance that the board hasn't checked off from its to-do list
"Mail Suitably Flattering Certificates to Former Trustees," the ever-helpful
AFPLWATCH offers the following suggested verbiage for the certificates of
several particularly memorable members of that august body:
- To Alice Washington, in appreciation of her abiding racial
bitterness that infected the board's deliberations for over a decade....
- To Emma Darnell, for helping to build and maintain a Berlin
Wall mentality on the board by frequently and successfully pitting against
each other the library service needs of residents living in different
parts of the county....
- To Becky Fern, for browbeating her indifferent colleagues into
voting to filter the library system's Internet workstations long before
the feds forced us to and, in the process, driving out of the library
system AFPL's Electronic Resources Librarian. And for her relentless,
inexplicable praise of the Gwinnett County Library System....
- To Dorothy Blake (whose anxiety to be considered a "team player"
got so out of hand that it landed her on the witness stand in the library
lawsuit), for bringing to every board discussion a complete cluelessness
about every conceivable library scenario. And for proving that just because
someone was once a librarian doesn't mean she knows anything about
libraries....
- To Mary Jamerson Ward, who raised jurors' eyebrows by
threatening plaintiffs in a trial in which she was a defendant for her own
illegal behavior....
- To Benjamin Jenkins, for his inventive use of phrasing ("new
hires") to describe the board's vote to approve McClure's and Hooker's
expensive and illegal May 2000 "reorganization" of library employees....
There are, of course, other former board members--some of whom, to
everyone's horror, are serving on the current board!--who also richly
deserve similar certificates, but you get our drift.
We mustn't, however, neglect to acknowledge the special services rendered
to the library system by its recent board chairs. Our drafts of the
wording of certificates for this less-than-illustrious crew:
- To Ira Shucker, in appreciation for chairing the board
throughout the period when his wife chaired the Friends of the Library and
got the Friends into so much trouble with the IRS that the organization
had to be dissolved to avoid potential prosecution....
- To Roy Yancy (posthumously), for bringing to his term as board
chair the luster of an apocryphal degree from Duke University, and for
orchestrating the board campaign to drive out Julie Hunter, one of the
most competent, respected, and beloved library directors in the history of
the institution....
- To William McClure [where to start?! we may need an entire Wall of
Certificates here!]...
...for his unique accomplishments in "making the political personal" by
(for example) illegally inspecting medical information contained in the
personnel files of library employees;
...for an uninterrupted eight-year stint of rewarding cronies and
informants and punishing those who refused to pay him proper homage, and
for his stubborn vendettas against his perceived enemies;
...for perfecting the micromanaging of the library system's daily
operations to the point of personally monitoring how many items branch
libraries had barcoded during an inventory project;
...for hiring as Deputy Director his profoundly inept friend Carolyn Garnes,
who modeled for the lackeys she surrounded herself with how to successfully
ignore county merit system procedures and successfully mistreat countless
library employees....
...for introducing into library jargon the phrase "old white women"
[possibly the most expensive phrase in the history of litigation--about
$6 million per word, there, William];
...for assiduously abolishing--out of pure envy masquerading as
cost-consciousness--virtually all of the top-paying positions in the
library system's administration, leaving the library in the administrative
shambles it remains in to this day;
...for demolishing the library system's technical services support
functions by spearheading the campaign to transfer the majority of
technical services employees to branch libraries and to increase taxpayer
costs by "outsourcing" the former jobs of these employees;
...for gutting the number of staff responsible for managing the
once-admired, carefully-crafted collections of the Central Library, and
for transferring to branch libraries the Central Library specialists
trained to deliver reference and collection-building expertise....
- To Clint Johnson, for being the kind of leader who proposed
that library couriers deliver board documents to the branches located
near trustees' homes to save the library the cost of mailing them--while
he ignored the legal volcano that had erupted on his watch....
- To Rodney Poitier, for proving that a former part-time library
assistant can one day sit on the library board and even ascend to the
board chair's throne--even if the thrill (or the position) doesn't last
very long....
- To Annette Steed, for overseeing the board's enthusiastically
positive performance evaluation of Mary Kaye Hooker a mere two months
before she was fired; for claiming that the $18 million discrimination
lawsuit against the library director "had no bearing" on the trustees'
evaluation of the director's job performance; and for presiding over the
board's vote to spend $112,000 to investigate claims of discrimination
that the county's EEOC had already investigated...and then refusing
to fire the library director when the EEOC investigator reported numerous,
serious, and longstanding failures in the director's ability to lead the
library system.
We further suggest that special "Disappearing Board Chair Citations"
be mailed to former board chairs Steed and Poitier, who both
vanished from the board's chairmanship as abruptly and mysteriously as a
couple of rebels from some South American dictatorship.
And, finally, we propose that another separate certificate be mailed to
All Members of the Previous Board that reads:
For your loyal passive collusion with your colleagues, who a panel of
federal judges deemed as having engaged in a sustained campaign of
"trickery and deceit" to cover-up a series of ill-advised and illegal
transfers of AFPL employees to satisfy a what those judges (and a federal
jury before them) determined was a racist agenda; for disregarding on
several occasions the Georgia Open Records Act; for wasting incalculable
hours worth of staff time in futile attempts to satisfy your numerous
whims; for never raising a dime for Fulton County's libraries; and
for your individual and collective ignorance, amnesia, and grandiosity
over many, many years.
We'd like to believe that with a new board in place since last July
and with a new year now on the horizon, we could all "ring out the old"
and look forward to a more enligtened era in terms of board attitudes and
behavior. Alas, a majority of
the "new" trustees are reappointments from the old board. And while
Acting Board Chair Karen Handel made a good start with reining in some of
the early eruptions of grandiosity among a few of these holdovers, the
loony deliberations of the board during the single meeting when Acting
Board Chair Karen Handel wasn't presiding gives one no cause for optimism.
(Just take a gander at that set of board minutes and see if you don't find
yourself sliding into a familiar Slough of Despond.)
Will the "new" board members, once they finally get their bearings and
head into the new year, behave any more discerningly than the former ones?
Will the next library director be able to convince the new board that its
only usefulness lies in raising funds and determining broad policies
instead of telling the library director how to manage the library's
day-to-day operations?
We must wait and see. Meanwhile, we hope there will be no further
noises from the trustees lauding the disastrous performance of their
predecessors. Those people wreaked enough damage on the county's public
libraries--and drastically depleted the county's coffers--without anyone
needing to thank them for it. The current board's vote to provide their
predecessors with "certificates of appreciation" was an insult to the
library's staff and to the county's taxpayers.
Is Fulton County’s Commitment
to Customer Service a Myth?
Posted December 10, 2004
Late last Friday afternoon, SIRSI, the library system's circulation software
crashed. Again.
The SIRSI software crashes at least once every day, and some days a lot
more than once, but last Friday it took one of its more protracted breaks.
This time the system went down and stayed down until mid-morning the
following Monday. Leaving the library staff in the lurch as they struggled
to serve their Saturday and Sunday customers.
We've been told repeatedly that SIRSI software crashes aren't really the
result of problems with SIRSI. No, we're told, most SIRSI crashes are
unfortunate by-products of some temporary problem with the "firewall"
the county created to protect its main computer network from virus
invasions via the library's computers. Occasionally, like this past
weekend, SIRSI crashes because of something else altogether, like "a
BellSouth network problem."
But guess what? A difference that makes no difference is no difference. To all intents and purposes,
we can’t use our circulation software - who cares what the technical reason is? Certainly not
the library's patrons.
Annoying Our Customers
To a library user, SIRSI's being out-of-operation means:
- Waiting in a longer line for service as an embarrassed library
employee fumbles around checking out materials the slow, manual way. (That
means writing down long patron ID numbers and a series of long barcodes.
With every typo coming back to haunt the customer.)
- Being required to produce a library card to borrow anything. (Producing
an alternative form of ID like a driver's license won’t work when computers
are down, as there's no way to link borrowed items with the patron
borrowing them.)
- Not being allowed to borrow all the items the patron has just spent
his/her precious time locating. (Faced with the long lines of customers,
most branches coping with a SIRSI meltdown limit customers to borrowing no
more than 10 items, and Central reportedly limits customers to a max of 5
items. This news infuriates teachers with an armload of books
they've just rounded up for their next class. It annoys the parent who's
just negotiated with her kid which next batch of 25 books that parent
was planning to read to that kid. It frustrates the guy who'd been planning
to borrow a bunch of music CDs, a couple of videos, and a book or two, and
now must choose which ones to leave behind...and look for all over again
later, hoping nobody else will have already checked it out.)
- Not being able to tell patrons what library materials they've
already borrowed and forgotten to return. (This means that a patron is
prevented from avoiding or minimizing any fines for overdue materials. How
would you like it if a government employee from some other county
department couldn't tell you how much you currently owe the county?)
- Not being able to clear one's record of any items the patron has just
returned, or to find out if he/she owes any overdue fines on those
materials. (Some of our customers have been burned so often with incorrectly-assesed
overdue fines that they insist we immediately clear their records instead of
trusting staff to do that later on when they aren't busy helping other
customers.)
- Not being able to place a Hold on an item that the library owns but
that someone else has borrowed. Or determining the status of a Hold
the patron has already placed. Or even getting something we might be
holding for them at that very moment. (Library staff depend upon
SIRSI to manage Patron Holds, including an electronic alerts that a Hold
has arrived from another branch).
- No new library customers. (With SIRSI dead, staff can't register a new
borrower, no matter how much trouble a patron has taken to rummage up
sufficient ID and make that initial visit to their local library to get
that card, or to get a card for their kid.)
"Customer service" scenarios like this are apparently acceptable to county
administrators, because the library's customers have been living with the
library system's computer problems for 10 months now.
During the Hooker era, the thing that most enraged library employees
was that Hooker's upheavals caused us to give crappier service to our
customers. The same is true about these persistent post-Hooker technical
problems.
If we were McDonald’s and people were lined up at the cash registers, what
would happen if the cashiers had to tell the every customer...
"Sorry, we're going to have to limit your order--no fries with that Big
Mac! Oh, and since I can’t communicate your order via computer, I hope you
won’t mind my wasting 30 minutes of your life writing it down in longhand
and then walking it back to the kitchen! And, by the way, today we're only
accepting $1 bills!"
First there’d be a riot, and then MacDonald’s would go out of business.
But this is the kind of frustrating scenario the county expects its
library users to cope with when the county's computers fail. Over and over
and over.
Annoying the Staff
And that's only half the SIRSI shutdown story. Among the consequences for
library staff when SIRSI crashes:
- We're forced to apologize for long lines because we can't promptly
handle the library business of most customers before they're forced
to wait.
- We can’t pull from our collections the items patrons want sent for
pickup elsewhere in the county because a dead SIRSI cannot produce the
list of those items that are sitting on our shelves.
- We're forced to lend items to patrons with delinquent cards, expired
cards, and lost cards. With SIRSI down, we have no way of knowing there’s
a problem with a borrower's card or restrictions on their borrowing
privileges. (Plenty of patrons know this and take advantage of it when
SIRSI goes down.)
- We're forced to lend out materials that aren’t fully or properly
cataloged because a non-functional SIRSI can't alert staff to those items.
Consequently, we can't link these items to who's borrowed them. What kind
of stewardship of county property is that?
- Once SIRSI resurrects itself from the dead, we must stop whatever else
we need to be doing and clear from our patrons' records hundreds of items
that patrons returned while the system was down. (Otherwise, patrons end
up being fined for items they‘ve already returned.)
- We must frantically and manually enter (rather than scanning) into
SIRSI the barcodes of hundreds of items borrowed during the latest
meltdown. The pressure to update automated patron records ASAP inevitably
results in errors, each of which brings confusion into the life of some
hapless customer.
- Until the system is operating again, we can’t return items owned by
other branches. That includes items patrons are waiting to be sent to them.
(Meanwhile, we've been unknowingly checking out to patrons items that
other patrons have reserved: something we can't know if SIRSI is down and
can't alert us to this fact. Those mistakes force patrons to wait even
longer to read the books they've already been waiting for.)
- The library system's courier service schedule is disrupted and the
couriers have to double up on deliveries or simply let items pile up until
they have room in their trucks to get everything to its proper destination.
(Meanwhile, patrons are waiting for many of these items longer than
necessary.)
In a word, chaos. And chaos on top of the fact that many branches are
chronically understaffed to begin with.
Take for example a branch library like the one in Roswell that lends out
well over 30,000 items a month, or 1000 a day. SIRSI was down all last
Saturday and all day Sunday. Taking into account the maximum number of
items patrons are allowed to borrow during SIRSI crashes, that left the
Roswell staff scrambling to discharge at least 1000 items when the system
came up Monday mid-morning, and then putting aside their other duties to
manually enter 2000 charges--not a quick process, considering the fact
that the person doing all this keyboarding must repeatedly stop to unravel
all the blocked card alerts, override any Holds alerts, and unsnarl
various other exceptional circumstances. And how happy do you think
the Roswell patrons were this past weekend as they were waiting in those
long lines for some "customer service"?
Customer Service Obstacle #1: Fulton County's IT Dept.
Ten months after we switched to new circ software blatantly incompatible
with county technology, and more than 10 months after Ms. Hooker sacrificed
the library’s IT employees to county headquarters, the library still feels
like the poor stepdaughter to the county's IT department. That's because
IT hasn't faced the fact that, unlike many other county departments,
the library operates seven days a week.
True, we’re not the criminal justice department - if the library's
computers go down, no dangerous criminals are going to be set free on an
unwitting public. But library patrons are county taxpayers who
deserve to get the library service they’re paying for, even on weekends
and evenings. The idea that we would be crippled for 2.5 days is not
something library users should have to live with - not unless they get
rebates on the part of their taxes that pays for the library during all
the SIRSI meltdowns they've endured the past 10 months.
We appreciate that county IT administrators are probably as frustrated
with the library’s technical problems as library staff and patrons are.
They didn’t ask to get landed with all the peculiarities of the library
circulation system that Hooker purchased with insufficient technical
advice, any more than they enjoy the frantic calls from staff telling them
the system isn’t working (again). But the library’s patrons have the right
to full service, and if that means the county has to assign more IT staff
to support the library's extensive and crucial computer infrastructure,
then that’s what should happen.
Customer Service Obstacle #2: AFPL "Administrators-in-Charge"
Equally maddening is library administrators failing to deliver the most
basic "internal" customer service. At any point in the wretched scenario
being played out in 32 libraries across the county this past weekend, did
any "administrator in charge" send out word to the branches about the
computer problems? You know, just a fax or a phone call from the bridge to
tell the hands below deck that an iceberg was off the starboard deck but
was being attacked with ice axes? Hey, we’d settle for semaphores or the
occasional tapping in Morse code. (Sending out an email wouldn't have
worked because the technical problems plaguing our circ system also take
down staff email!)
How hard is that to do - to communicate to all branches that there is a
system-wide problem and what the plan is for solving it, along with
periodic updates on how it’s going? Instead, 32 branches send in separate
work orders, each assuming that they may be the only one with a problem.
Meanwhile, 32 branches try their best to cope - but in the dark, desperate
for a little information to help them shape their service to patrons.
If a library administrator needs to work on a circ desk in the middle of
one of these computer meltdowns to see first hand what it’s like to
struggle along with no technology and no information about technology
breakdowns, so be it.
The Bottom Line
The county's technical difficulties belongs to the county.
County officials shouldn't be dumping the organization's technical
problems in the laps of the county's customers. Unfortunately, it's the
county's library users who are paying the price of all these interruptions
in library service.
Branch Budgets, Staffing Patterns
Still Don't Reflect Branch Workloads
Posted December 4, 2004
We've
said it before, but another month's
worth of branch workload statistics confirms the fact that
current staffing levels, budget allocations, and other
resources--such as the number of computers available to library users do
not reflect current workloads handled by AFPL's various facilities.
The relative amount of resources available to the users of a given
branch library are determined primarily by what type of facility library
administrators have designated it. Regional Libraries are assigned more
employees and more money to buy library materials than Area Libraries do;
Area Libraries get more resources than Community Libraries; Community
Libraries get more than Neighborhood Libraries.
For some time, now, however, the branches handling the bulk of the library
system's primary business--lending materials to Fulton County citizens who
want to borrow them--have not been getting their fair share of the staff,
money, and computer equipment needed to operate their facilities.
Branch resources have gotten out of whack with current workloads for a lot
of reasons, including:
- Fulton County's rapidly growing population.
- Uneven changes in library service area populations.
- Several consecutive years of steadily shrinking budgets for providing
public library services to Fulton County residents.
- Fulton County politics, including the legacies of the ongoing power
struggles among particular county commissioners.
- The self-serving collective delusion among Fulton's commissioners
that the county government can afford to continue opening and maintaining
new library facilities without ever closing or downsizing other facilities, regardless
of how underutilized or expensive some facilities are to operate.
- Policy decisions and resource allocations based purely on commissioners'
provincialism, board favoritism, or administrative cronyism.
- An inordinate reliance for resource allocation upon a model of service
delivery that takes into account merely the square footage of library
facilities instead of upon the different types of library services
actually used by the residents of the county's different library service
areas.
- A series of Fulton County hiring freezes and/or abolished library
positions unmatched by cutbacks in library services or hours of
operations--a practice that ignores the fact that library employees'
resignations, retirements, extended medical leaves, and unexpected deaths
seriously handicap any already-understaffed branch's ability to deliver
minimally acceptable services, and that ignores the service implications
of mounting staff burnout.
- Administrative inertia and a chronic lack of administrative leadership
at AFPL.
Interim Library Director Anne Haimes has said more than once that she has
a plan to reallocate budgets and staff systemwide. With the current
shortage of administrators charged with (and skilled in) scrutinizing
workload statistics so they can recommend changes in resource investments
in the various branches and Central Library departments, and given the
historical ineptitude of AFPL's board members when they become involved in
allocating resources or determining library hours of operation, we tremble
at the fate of whatever Haimes' plan includes.
Speaking of "plans" and "recommendations," we don't agree with Haimes that
she is legally required to consult the new board on the matter of
resource-investments. We think the law now limits the board to long-range
planning and advising the library director, and don't understand why
Haimes is so eager to involve the board in where staff work, how much
a particular branch can spend on library materials, or what our branches'
hours are.
In any case, it's unlikely that any new plan, no matter who devises it,
would be worse than the staffing patterns and budget allocations we're
using now. We need some radical changes soon, so the staff at branches
who've been working the hardest with the fewest resources can get some
well-deserved relief. There are numerous staffing patterns, library materials budget
allocations, and computer equipment inequities that have gone on far too
long. Library staff are weary of waiting for the new board to get its act
together, weary of waiting for a new director to be hired and become
sufficiently oriented to make some major changes, weary of waiting for
the county commissioners to come to their senses, and weary of waiting for
administrators to come up with a more useful model of grouping branch
libraries.
The bottom line: while we wait for better times, for a more competent
managers, and for more sophisticated models of grouping library faciilties,
library administrators should put the library system's (limited) resources
into its busiest libraries. Soon.. While she's at it, Haimes should
announce cutbacks in the hours of operation for certain branches until the
county calls off its hiring freeze. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure
out which libraries are the busiest, or which libraries should curtail
their hours (at least temporarily) to take into account the actual number
of people currently available to staff them.
Dekalb PL Makes Local Headlines (The Good Kind)
Posted December 2, 2004
Two stories beginning on the front page of the Metro section of the
December 1st Atlanta Journal-Constitution highlight accomplishments
of a local public library system…but it ain’t AFPL.
The first story points
out that the DeKalb County Public Library is deemed one of ten “Exemplary
Public Libraries” in a recently published book by that name. The book’s
author says she chose DeKalb partly because of its commitment to gearing
its collections and programs to DeKalb’s diverse populations, and partly
because the library director “believes in giving staff a significant role
in managing the system and spends a day working at a library branch about
every three to four weeks….”
The second story is about The Georgia Center
for the Book, headquartered at DeKalb’s central library, which its director
claims is responsible for presenting the most ambitious series of ongoing
literary events in the state.
Along with our admiration for DeKalb’s popularity among its customers,
we can’t help but wince at five sad facts that these two stories about
DeKalb remind us of:
- DeKalb PL's administrators were somehow able to spare their library
system from the recent rounds of county-decreed budget cuts that AFPL
adminstrators were unsuccessful in dodging in Fulton County.
- Dekalb PL's administrators were somehow able to pursuade their
county governors to exempt the library system from their county's
hiring freezes--something AFPL adminstrators never even attempted.
- No AFPL library director in recent memory has ever believed it behooved
her/him to spend time working alongside front-line library staff for two
minutes throughout her/his entire regime, much less “every three to four
weeks” like Dekalb's library director reportedly does.
- During the period a few years ago when the Library of Congress was
setting up a "Center for the Book" in every state, AFPL administrators and
board members were so mired in their own incompetence, so preoccupied with
their divisive and counterproductive politics, and so adroit in avoiding
anything remotely resembling an effort at fundraising, that they missed
the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for getting AFPL--the state’s largest
public library system--to host Georgia's Center for the Book instead of
DeKalb.
- Even if AFPL deserved the kind of effusive positive coverage in the
AJC as DeKalb receives in these two stories, AFPL would never get
that coverage because Hooker and the former board stupidly abolished AFPL’s
Public Information Officer position several years ago. As we've seen over
and over again since then, in a city the size of Atlanta, a library
system’s having its own PIO is a prerequisite for convincing newspaper
reporters to file positive stories about a library’s activities and
accomplishments. Otherwise, the only time newspaper reporters pay attention
to the public library is when, say, its staff has been abused to the point
that employees file a lawsuit against the library's director and its board,
or things are otherwise going badly.
Surprise, Surprise
AFPL Ranks Among Most Mediocre
Larger Library Systems in the U.S.
Posted December 2, 2004
This year’s edition of the annual Hennen Ratings of 8,900 U.S. public
library systems is now available. A summary of the ratings was published
in the October 2004 issue of
American Libraries, and Hennen has posted to the Internet
the full results of his survey.
Among Hennen's findings:
- Like they did in last year's survey, library systems in Ohio and
suburban DC received the highest scores for systems--like Atlanta’s--that
serve more than 500,000 users.
- Among the country's larger library systems, Cleveland’s received the
highest score (864 out of a possible 1000). Atlanta’s score this year was
the same as last year’s: a lackluster 406.
- This year, the number of larger U.S. public library systems scoring higher
than AFPL outnumbered the number of larger systems scoring lower than AFPL by
almost 3 to 1. (Of the 62 larger systems, 46 received higher scores and 16
received lower ones.)
For a listing of all the scores for systems with service areas of 500,000 or more residents, as well as a listing of
Hennen's composite scores for each state, click here.
- Scores for other metro-Atlanta library systems (each of which serve
fewer numbers of users than AFPL) were all higher than AFPL’s score:
- Gwinnett County Public Library scored 666
- DeKalb County Public Library scored 428
- Cobb County Public Library scored 449
- In the survey’s rankings by state, Ohio ranked 1st, the same ranking as
in last year’s edition of the ratings. Georgia ranked 45th this year, up a
notch from 46th last year.
The Hennen ratings attempt to reflect both the different financial
investments in local library services as well as the different rates of
library use. The single most crucial factor in the Hennen score is per
capita spending for public library services.
Last year’s Hennen ratings were similar in terms of
Atlanta’s standing among other libraries of its size.
MLK, Jr. Branch Re-opens?
December 1, 2004
MLK, Jr. was supposed to re-open to great hoopla on November 20th, but
no AFPL employee ever saw any press release or press coverage about it.
The reopening of MLK, if it did in fact occur, is remarkable chiefly as a
monument to the wacky modus operandi of AFPL's former board of trustees:
- Prompted purely by the fact that MLK's lease was about to expire, the
trustees found themselves acknowledging that the branch had long been
woefully underused, and finally noticing that within a five-mile radius there are
five other AFPL libraries. The trustees decided that, given a year-long hiring
freeze and three consecutive years of library budget cuts, the library
couldn't afford to relocate the branch elsewhere, even if the branch
hadn't been consistently at the bottom of AFPL's circulation statistics
charts for several years.
- Shortly after closing the branch, however--and months after other
branches had absorbed into their own collections the most useful items
previously part of MLK's collection--the trustees caved in to political
pressure to reopen it.
- Added to the about-face in the decision to close the branch was the
spectacle of speeding up the re-opening date to accommodate the feelings
of a county commissioner who resented the opening--in another commissioner's
district!--of yet another branch the previous month.
Assuming MLK did reopen November 20th as scheduled, Inquiring Minds long
to know:
- who works there (there's been no announcement).
- what the branch's current operating hours are (there's been no announcement).
- how much money, if any, was spent on the branch's new collection (it's
not been made clear whether the branch's collection was refurbished after
the Great Post-Closing/Pre-Reopening Pillage).
- whether or not there's an embargo on Patron Holds for materials owned
by MLK and, if so, how long that embargo will last (there's been no
announcement).
December 3rd Update:
At a managers
meeting on December 2nd, Interim Director Anne Haimes announced the names
of the staff who had been transferred from other facilities to work at
the reopened MLK branch, and one of Haimes's secretaries distributed that
afternoon a revised version of branch locations and business hours that includes
MLK.
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