• "Tax Ruling Could Cost Fulton Millions"
  
  
• "Security Force Recommended for Fulton Judges"

• "Best New Branch of the Several That Were Opened in 2005"?
  As far as we know, East Atlanta was the only branch library opened by a library system in Atlanta this past year. What's the point of anointing something the "best" from a field of one? (The magazine didn't give the new Atlanta Aquarium an award for "Best New Aquarium" for that very reason.)
  
  
• "Fastest Replacement of a Dilapidated, Too-Small Facility"?
  We don't remember how long ago it was that the board of trustees voted to build a new branch in East Atlanta, but we know it was a very long time ago and that its delay-plagued construction is hardly something any library system should be proud of. East Atlanta's conception-to-completion lag time was long enough that the branch manager who helped plan the new building was no longer on the scene when it finally opened; we wonder how many East Atlanta residents, promised they'd "soon" be getting a brand-spanking new branch, moved away before it got finished?
  
  
• "Most Convenient Entry/Exit of Any Branch Library in the Land"?
  The first thing patrons of this branch are confronted with as they get out of their cars and approach the building is a series of unmarked doors - none of which turns out to be an entrance! Customers are forced to circle around the building and enter at yet another door. There's no easy exit to the parking lot, either (unless somebody happens to have set the place on fire).
  
  
• "Best Use of a Branch Library's Second Floor"?
  Although the building vaults inspiringly to the heavens, that faux second floor is actually all unusable space. For a reportedly energy-efficient design, it seems to us it would be very expensive to heat and cool all that unusuable space. The amount of actual shelving and the disappointingly small meeting room doesn't seem to us much of an improvement over the cramped quarters of the previous building. (All the extra light, though, is a welcome relief.)
  
  
• "Best Positioning of the Service Desk for Efficient Monitoring of Branch Activity"?
  Hardly. There's only one way out from behind that thing, and if some adult needs attention with, say, a malfunctioning computer (we know such a scenario is difficult to imagine, but humor us), library employees must walk completely around the barrier-like desk to get over to their impatiently-waiting customer. If the employee (or even a patron strolling to the other side of the building) happens to be toting a book, half the time that's going to set off the damn alarm system. ("Best Positioning in a Branch Library of Theft Detection Devices?" Not.)
  
  
• "Most Claustrophobic Children's Area"?
  How anybody does any shelving when there's even one kid browsing in that alleyway of a children's area is a mystery to us.
  
  
• "Best-Staffed New Branch Facility"?
  The new branch opened to heavier business (like every new branch does), but no additional staff were budgeted to staff the place. Long after the obligatory photo-ops for local politicians at East Atlanta's Grand (Re)Opening, there were frequent pleas from the branch manager for help from other library branches in staffing East Atlanta's service desk. This sort of planning and resource investment merits an award?
  
  
• "Best New Opening Day Collection"?
  Who purchased books for the branch's grand reopening? A committee of veteran subject specialists from throughout the library system, like the ones used previously for opening/reopening branch libraries, right? Not this time. Was the branch given substantial additional funds for an opening day collection, like others always have been? It was not. Why was it necessary to import volunteers after the branch was opened to "shape up the shelves," and why do some patrons still complain they constantly find things mis-shelved (or unshelved) there?

• November 2005 circulation statistics
  
  
• Annual Circulation statistics, 2004-2005

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. [As of December 2005, make that almost two years.]

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.