”…A person who knows practically nothing about budget, personnel management, fundraising, grant writing, computerization, or library construction may be able to string together a sufficient number of buzzwords and nonspecific musings to impress a board of trustees [or county manager] desperate enough to find an impressive-looking and authoritative-sounding gal or fellow to show off to the media.

The morning after isn’t always pretty, as key staff are usually among the first to find out when the wunderkind turns out to be an empty power suit. The wonderful web sites created by his library over the past five years were done by others and the director who claimed credit for himself doesn’t know the difference between http and html. The wonderful, dynamic 'agent for change' doesn’t know how to write a coherent memo or run a meeting, let alone set in motion a planning process. More likely than not, such an interstate library administrator will be more than ready to move on….But by then, considerable damage may already have been done….

…Clever job-hopping directors might well conjure up answers [to interview questions] that depict themselves as misunderstood maverick geniuses or profound thinkers who became unpopular because they challenged ‘the establishment’ by providing ‘a breath of fresh air.’ They might even package short tenures as a positive characteristic of the ‘high-powered’ and ‘no-nonsense’ executive.”

“It is absolutely imperative for boards to check out the backgrounds of finalists by going beyond the standard check of references provided by the candidate.”

The Library System Director is expected to embody high standards of professional ethics and integrity in approaching management issues and to create and maintain an open and respectful work environment.

• When library employees normally working elsewhere have to help staff branches open on Sunday because branches open on Sunday lack an adequate number of employees to support being open seven days a week, those fill-in employees from other branches cannot, due to wage and hour laws, work as many hours at other times during the week.
  
  
• Libraries are not even staffed to offer Saturday hours, let alone Sunday ones. Whenever a library employee works on a Saturday, he or she works one less weekday the previous or the following week. For most branches, that means libraries are shorter-staffed on Mondays and Fridays than they are on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
  
  
• Ditto the long hours throughout the day that some libraries are open. Employees staffing libraries so they can keep their doors open beyond, say, 6pm don't report to work at 9am; they come in later, with the resulting staffing shortages throughout the morning hours.
  
  
• As long as employees occasionally get sick, take the vacation time they've earned, serve on juries, take pregnancy leaves and other kinds of planned and unplanned emergency leaves, attend committee meetings, go to training classes, or--God forbid--retire or resign--the staff remaining at a branch will be obliged to work harder to keep their library operating smoothly. These routine staff shortages hit the branches with the smallest staffs especially hard.
  
  
• Mary Kaye Hooker's decimation of the library system's Technical Services Division has burdened every employee in every branch with more ordering and processing duties. Every one of these additional tasks takes time and energy that cannot be devoted to serving the public.
  
  
• Another drain on the energies of library staffs is coping with recurring security-related incidents--especially the incidents at branches with zero only part-time security guards.
  
  
• A problem never factored into library staffing patterns is the massive amount of time required at every branch in the system to maintain and troubleshoot constantly-malfunctioning computer equipment for a public with unrealistically high expectations of computer-based services. The training and infrastructure--as well as the sheer numbers of needed staff--to support these customer expectations is terribly deficient.
  
  
• An unhealthily large proportion of every library's staff is made up of part-time employees. Not only are they unavailable at certain times during the work week to staff service desks and do all the other things they do to support public service, but there's no time for adequately training these hardworking part-timers for what we expect them to do. And yet managers feel obliged to staff their service desk with part-time staff. Connecting library patrons to the materials or information they need isn't brain surgery, but it does require a certain amount of skill that comes only through proper training.
  
  
• The county commission's and the library board's determination to open new branches and re-open branches that have been closed down means that understaffing throughout the system grows increasingly more serious and more widespread. The migration of staff from current work sites to the re-located Carver branch, the new branch at Ocee, an expanded East Atlanta branch, and a soon-to-be-reopened MLK, Jr. branch add additional pressures to the ones created by the frozen hiring for all vacated library positions.
  
  
• Budget-cutting hiring freezes that go on for months and months exacerbate the cumulative exhaustion and frustration of overworked library staffs. Hiring freezes are hard on all county employees, but hiring freezes hit hardest the county departments with the highest turnover rates and departments that deliver county services beyond the Monday-Friday schedules of county budget-cutters.
  
  

• Service desks once staffed by librarians are now routinely staffed with untrained library assistants--some willing and competent, some not.
  
  
• Anyone volunteering to work on a library committee--especially if they work in a smaller branch or department--knows instantly their attendance at committee meetings will make branch coverage more problemmatic for the branch or department manager.
  
  
• Because everyone spends so much more of their day staffing service desks, opportunities have become increasingly scarce for sustained concentration on routine collection maintenance or collection development tasks, for planning programs, and for a dozen other categories of "behind the scenes" work. More and more energy goes into just keeping the place going rather than making sure our services and collections are good ones. Little or no energy available for improving library services or collections.

• There needs to be a clear and dynamic (i.e., adjustable) relationship between the number of staff at each type of library branch and the total number of hours that branch is open to the public.
  
  
• There also needs to be a clear and dynamic (i.e., adjustable) relationship between the amount of work--as measured in some empirical way (such as the number of circulations per month and probably several other factors)--that a branch shoulders and the number of staff allocated to that branch.
  
  
• There needs to be a sufficient number of library staff allocated to operating any library that's open at all. No library branch or Central Library department manager, regardless of how small his/her staff, should be terrified by someone's asking for a day of leave or compromise their unit's service level merely because a staff member is expected to attend a committee meeting, attends a training session, or otherwise leaves the facility temporarily.

The vacancy situation is only going to get worse. Another part-time person departed today. More resignations are on the horizon. The fallout from the last few years is not over.

Why are they so loathe to cut hours, but so quick to increase them as soon as a few people are hired, even though the new hires are not yet functional? That's my recollection from the last time we went through this.

[Signed] "NoName"

"The Committee asked that the plaque [for the new library at Ocee] be created as soon as possible and that lead-in signs be installed prior to opening. Additionally, the Committee asked that Commissioner Fulton's name not be listed as deceased." --Comment recorded at the April 7, 2004 meeting of the library board's Building Committee [Notes, pages 1-2]

• County Manager Tom Andrews' meetings with library staff. Especially encouraging were his comments that library officials would be held accountable for enforcing county policies, and that county officials would work with library officials to address major obstacles to better library service, such as county purchasing and accounting procedures that interfere with the year-round ordering needs of public libraries.
  
  
• Acting Director Anne Haimes' prompt reassignments of the bevy of secretaries that Hooker had barricaded herself behind.
  
  
• Haimes' faxing out a long-overdue list of sensible holiday and holiday-adjacent library closings for the remainder of the year.
  
  
• Haimes' welcome reversal of Garnes' edict several years ago that Assistant Branch Managers, as well as Branch Managers, must attend the library's monthly Agency Managers Meeting. (Garnes' decree, which she claimed was necessary because managers were deliberately witholding information from their staffs, was actually based on Garnes' need for a larger audience for her monthly performances; her draconian attendance requirements made arranging coverage at some branches during Agency Meetings unnecessarily difficult.) Now if Haimes would also dispense with the demeaning, kindergarten-like sign-up sheets that Agency Meeting attendees are forced to deal with, the managers could resume meeting monthly like the "professionals" they're paid to be!
  
  
• Haimes' prompt actions to begin addressing the fact that five years of Hooker's slash-and-burn management style had resulted in numerous individuals working out of class.
  
  
• Haimes' invitation for volunteers for various systemwide committees to begin grappling with various chunks of the wreckage that constitutes the library system's technical and administrative infrastructure.