A Note from the Webmaster Posted August 23, 2005
Will Fulton County’s Library System Be Safe
After Handel Moves On?
Posted August 22, 2005
Late last month, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that
Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chair Karen Handel would be running
for state office this fall. That news gives AFPLWATCH double cause for
concern.
- Handel’s chairing of the Fulton County Commission has probably averted
a few additional instances of mal-government that will always be threatening
to emerge from the commission as long as Emma Darnell and Nancy Boxhill
have seats on the commission. Although we don't remember exactly how
the chair of the county commission is chosen, for the sake of county
library patrons and staff we certainly hope neither of these two individuals
becomes the commission’s next chair, or even its next Acting Chair.
- As the election season approaches, we fear Handel may abandon one of
her many other jobs, Acting Chair of AFPL’s board of trustees.
Handel took charge of the board’s meetings shortly after the legislature
reconstituted the board's membership and reigned in its notoriously-abused
authority - and, perhaps more to the point from Handel's point of view,
after the county was successfully and expensively sued for allowing the
library board and the library director to discriminate against library
employees. On more than one occasion, Handel put the kibosh on attempts by
various “new” board members to re-insert the board's nose into areas the
legislators told the board to steer clear of.
Although we don’t quite understand why, after over a year now, the board
still hasn’t elected its officers, the library's staff and patrons have
been lucky that Handel’s been in charge of most of the post-board-reform
trustee meetings. We saw what happened during those few board meetings
when Handel wasn’t present, and it wasn’t encouraging.
What’s worrying us at this point is that the soon-to-be-Acting-Chair-less
board might be inclined to appoint Acting Vice-Chair Roger Rupnow as
Handel's replacement whenever the board notices that Handel has permanently
disappeared from the board's meetings.
We don’t think the trustee who didn’t realize that East
Atlanta’s circulation figures would drop when it closed for a few
months is the best candidate for library board chair.
July's Circ Statistics...and Part of What They Mean
Posted August 3, 2005
Last month's circulation counts
were distributed earlier this week, and they look numbingly familiar
to the past year's worth of circulation counts for AFPL libraries.
We say "numbingly" because, month after month, these statistics point out
the same inefficiencies and inequities in AFPL's out-of-whack allocations
of library staffing, library materials budgets, and computer equipment.
The only anomaly shown by July's set of circ statistics is the recently-reopened
East Atlanta's leap from the bottom of the Neighborhood Libraries' rankings
to its current place above the rankings of all the Neighborhood Libraries
and even all the Community Libraries. (On the other hand, East Atlanta's
patrons have access to 22 computer workstations - almost twice as many as
the patrons of the five much-busier Area Libraries.)
Otherwise, the same patterns continue that have been evident for many
years since the former AFPL board of trustees categorized AFPL's facilities
into four diffent types and assigned staff and allocated materials budgets
according to those facility types. (The single departure from these
outdated formulas: the allocation of additional staff to the East Point
Branch, which serves the area where a former board chair lives).
While it's true that circulation is not the only valid measure of a
library's level of "busyness," AFPL administrators seem to be ignoring
that circulation is an extraordinarily important measure of how limited staff,
budgets for buying library materials, and (to a lesser extent) computer equipment
should be parceled out among the three dozen facilities the library operates.
A few examples of how the current "facilty types" (and their corresponding
investments of library resources) don't jibe with the facts:
- Roswell, designated as a "Temporary Regional Library" before two
Regionals were built at the north end of the county, consistently out-cirulates
those two (and all other) purpose-built Regionals.
- Hapeville continues to out-circulate all other Neighborhood Libraries
and half of the Community Libraries.
- All the Area Libraries except East Point consistently out-circulate
the two Regional Libraries (Southwest and South Fulton) on the south end
of the county, despite the reported and/or projected growth in that area.
- The busiest Area Library, Alpharetta, consistently out-circulates
seven equally-sized or larger libraries, including the Central Library and
two regionals.
- The rankings of the busiest and the least busy Area Libraries doesn't
vary: Alpharetta is always the busiest, and East Point is always the
least busy - and yet there are more staff assigned to East Point than to
Alpharetta (or to any other Area Library), and East Point is the only
Area Library open on Sundays.
- Only 8 facilities handle more than 5% of the library system's total
circulation. Only 17 facilities (approximately half of them) circulate
at least 1% of the materials borrowed from the library system every month.
- Only 4 facilities handle more than 10% of the library system's total
circulation.
- The ten busiest branches - or approximately one-third of them - account
for 80% of the library system's total circulation.
Staff, materials budgets, and computer equipment should be reallocated
to address these and other workload differentials. It makes no sense for
resource investments determined over five years ago to remain frozen
despite demonstrable shifts in the places where most of the main function
of public libraries - lending materials - is currently and consistently
being accomplished.
|
.com