Manager Dominoes III: Now It’s The Patrons’ Turn
Posted January 28, 2005
A couple of weekends ago, a patron went out of control at the South Fulton
branch. She came in to use a computer, and freaked when one wasn’t
instantly available. A staff member trying to soothe her made the classic
mistake of allowing her to use a staff computer at a reference desk. When
staff eventually told the patron they needed their computer back, that set
her off again; the way we heard it, the out-of-control patron then ran
behind the service desk and created havoc back there. One of the staff members
on duty, in fear for her safety, pulled a pair of scissors on the patron.
Seeing the commotion escalating, a patron - that’s right, a patron -
called 911.
We were going to turn this incident into an amusing story, but the fact is,
it’s not funny. Security is a big concern of the staff at all branches -
and at all urban public libraries. But there is no excuse for this to have
happened at the South Fulton branch, where, less than 3 years ago, an
employee entered the library one morning to find her manager murdered, and
a co-worker a suicide. No wonder that in this recent incident an employee
pulled out a pair of scissors to defend herself. We doubt there’s an
employee in the library system who hasn’t made at least a tentative plan
for what to do if endangered by a patron, but at South Fulton, where the
memory of a needless tragedy haunts the branch, staff have every reason to
fast-forward to red alert at the least sign of trouble.
But one of the most striking elements of this story is who turned in the
alarm. Why was it a patron who had to call the police? Why was there no
leadership among staff?
For the answer to that, let’s take a look at how the management at that
branch has been handled since long-time manager Gladys Dennard was
shot to death in her office
one July morning in 2002.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, staff members were given the opportunity
to transfer to other branches. Some employees did just that. The assistant
manager stepped up to put the branch back together, and managed the branch
in an acting capacity for approximately a year. When a new manager was
finally hired, the infinite wisdom of the Hooker/Garnes administration
dictated that the choice fall on someone from outside the system. Their
choice, spectacularly, didn’t work out, so Hooker (by this point sans
Garnes)--now finding herself caught with another vacant manager position
in the midst of the county's interminable hiring freeze--dreamed up to
manage South Fulton a system we called
"Manager Dominoes."
As bizarre as that management approach was, it paled in comparison to
what came next.
A series of C52 managers at other branch libraries were ordered to begin
rotating into South Fulton, one week at a time, to provide “management” to
South Fulton. The absurdity of Act II of "Manager Dominoes" got even
curiouser when a few C51s from other branches were pulled into the act.
Like a scene from a surreal war movie, managers parachuted in to assist the
locals, only to boomerang back onto the plane before their boots had hardly
hit the ground. Some temporary managers touched base in the branch long
enough to introduce themselves and then never reappeared. None of them
could provide effective leadership, given their brevity of their stints
there. Is it any wonder South Fulton became so chronically leaderless that
it was a patron rather than a staff member who took the initiative to call
police in the recent crisis?
South Fulton is a branch that had already endured the unthinkable. How can
anyone in the library system's administration not feel guilty about what
they've put the South Fulton staff through over the past two years?
What happened a couple of weeks ago could have been another tragedy. God
knows that public libraries attract the disturbed, the enraged, the
perverted, and the bizarre. Each branch needs strong leadership to give
the staff and the patrons a bulwark against disaster. But the South Fulton
branch deserves it the most, along with a permanent reprieve from the
uncertainty, the drifting, and the fear.
Memo to County Manager Tom Andrews:
Minimum Requirements for a Functional Library
Posted January 25, 2005
Revitalizing the county's dilapidated library system is going to require
many years of careful attention, but there are two pre-conditions that
must be achieved before substantial progress can be made:
- You need to go ahead and appoint the next library director.
Last May, you did the library's customers and staff the huge service of
firing Library Destroyer Extraordinaire Mary Kaye Hooker. Everyone expected
an obligatory interregnum of several months while you and your minions
scoured the land for another director. At first you told us you hoped to
have a new director on board "by Labor Day." That day came and went. Later
we heard that interviews had finally been conducted, the candidates
narrowed (eventually) to two, and that you'd probably appoint someone by
the end of the year. That didn't happen. Then you got understandably
preoccupied with negotiating the 2005 budget (including, we couldn't help
but notice, a long-overdue though somewhat astonishingly large pay raise
for yourself). Well, now that's finally done. Can we have our new library
director now?
Think of it this way (we do): It's not been a mere seven months since
we had a director. It's been over seven years since the
library system was blessed with a competent, inspiring, courageous, humane
full-time director. That's a long, long time for things to devolve, as
things certainly did the moment former director Julie Hunter tendered her
resignation to the former micro-managing library board.
Come on, Tom, give the county's beleagured library users a break!
- You need to immediately authorize hiring for all vacant
management positions in the library.
Library staff have not been told whether or not the commissioners'
approval last week of the 2005 budget included an end to the county's
hiring freeze.
- If the county's hiring freeze is over, we'd like to hear you spell out
the good news loudly and clearly, so the cumbersome gears of the library's
hiring machinery can be set in motion and people can be hired to run the
parts of the library that have been drifting along for months now without
the direction and support of managers.
- If the county's hiring freeze is still in effect, we think you should
acknowledge the dangerous confusion the hiring freeze has created for the
library on top of the mess left in the wake of Hurricane Hooker and several
generations of inept library trustees, and authorize the immediate hiring of
at least all the numerous vacant manager positions in the
library system.
Despite the incredible (and insupportable) number of hours they are currently
open to the public, libraries don't run themselves. The
rank-and-file are getting mighty worn out trying to simultaneously serve
their customers well and manage the joint.
The need to immediately replace the library director and the library
system's missing managers does not minimize the importance of replacing
all the missing non-management library employees. Nor does it minimize the
crying need to adjust the libraries' operating hours to reflect current
staffing realities. But replacing the director and the managers would at
least give some relief to library employees still on the county payroll
who are not trained--and who are not compensated--to manage the facilities
where they work--or try to.
Upshot of the County Commissioners' Final 2005 Budget Meeting
Posted January 20, 2005
"After much debate, the board [of commissioners] doled out a 4 percent
cost-of-living adjustment to about 6,000 [Fulton County] employees. The
move will cost about $8 million but will help offset a requirement that
employees begin paying more for health insurance."
--Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 20, 2005
February 4th Update:
At a managers meeting on February 3rd, Interim Library Director Anne
Haimes confirmed that the commissioners' 2005 budget included the ending
of the county-wide hiring freeze. She stated that hiring teams would soon
be formed to begin recruiting for the library's numerous vacant positions.
Branch Budgets for Buying Library Materials:
The Good News and The Bad News
Posted January 13, 2005
Last week branch managers received notices of how much their branches would
be allowed to spend on library materials in 2005, pending the county
commissioners' approval of the proposed budget later this month.
Getting those notices so early in the year was so much better than, say,
in late spring, which often in recent years was how long managers and
selectors had to wait for that information.
With the allocation figures in hand, the managers and their materials
selectors can now proceed to get their wish lists together (or, in the
more proactive branches, finalize the lists they've been building all along)
so they can promptly submit their initial orders as soon as they're
given the go-ahead to do that.
This year the county manager is playing a role in making library purchasing
more efficient. Having taken pity on the post-Hooker disarray the library
system finds itself in, the county manager is allowing the library to
continue buying materials from last year's primary materials vendor without going through
a time-consuming re-bidding process. With ordering accounts already in
place and the need for staff re-training in how to place orders mimimized,
this year the green light for actually submitting orders should come earlier than ever.
Which means those materials will be in the hands of our customers sooner.
That's The Good News.
The Bad News is that it's not at all clear how library administrators
determined this year's allocations. Some managers were pleasantly surprised
at the amounts they'd been given, others were disappointed. Some were
mortified. All were mystified, or at least confused.
The frustrating irony here is that branch budget determinations don't
need to be confusing or mystifying. In a well-managed library, a branch
manager's budget for purchasing library materials should never come as a
surprise. It should be a result of demonstrable variables known to all.
To some extent that budget should depend on relevant empirical data:
collection size, service area population, percentage increase/decrease in
circulation, and so on.
For a long time now, library managers - well, the managers who give a hoot
about collections, anyway - have been begging library administrators to
make the materials budget allocation process less political and more
rational. For a brief shining moment several years ago just before the
board and Hooker ran off the library system's chief financial officer,
library administrators had finally arrived at--and published--a budget
allocation formula. The formula wasn't perfect, but it was something to
start with, and because it was tweakable, the formula would have
theoretically gotten more perfect as managers were given the chance to
decide what's factored into the formula (fluctuations in circulation statistics, new borrower
registrations, age of the collection, what percentage of their buying budget
the branch managed to spend the previous year, etc.). Even more important,
managers could come to consensus on how much weight to assign to each of
the formula's elements.
Months of administrative staff time, energy, and diplomacy were invested in
creating the original budget allocation formula. (The diplomacy part:
explaining the need for a formula to board members who were either
completely indifferent to the process, or who were so heavily armed with hidden agendas that they
tried to rig the formula to make sure their pet branch got more than the
branch's needs or performance deserved.) Unfortunately, and along with so
much else of value in the library, the materials budget allocation formula
was swept away by Hurricane Hooker and the corporate amnesia resulting from
the banishment or loss of key participants from the administrative scene.
With Hooker herself finally swept away last May, and the most notorious
provincialists on the board removed last June, library staff naturally
hoped for a return to better and saner administrative communication on all
fronts - including things like budget allocations. There were reasonable
hopes that the material budget allocation formula could be revived for 2005 and
library administrators would return to a more rational way of dividing up
the library's ever-shrinking budget pie.
Alas, last week's distribution of the 2005 allocation notices was
not preceded by discussions with branch managers of any
allocation formula. Those notices were not accompanied by
an explanation of how these figures had been determined, nor were the
individuals who had determined them identified. Managers were not
even shown the full allocation spreadsheet: they only received the
figure for their particular branch. And the notices contained no
instructions for appealing the allocation should it seem grossly unfair
in light of the branch's past year's performance.
This isn't Better Communication, this is (Bad) Business As Usual.
Library staff are going to find it more difficult to re-invest in a
supposedly saner post-McClure/post-Hooker/post-Garnes institution
as long as processes as fundamental as budget allocations for buying
materials remains murky. What staff need to see from library
administrators right now is a lot more transparency in how crucial
processes like this are conducted, and fewer unexplained decrees.
If library administrators can involve knowledgeable staff in re-examining
the staff dress code and the Sunday staffing rotations -- and get the
excellent results they got from that procedure -- they could certainly
invest some time involving staff in something as important as
determining how much money branches and Central Departments receive to buy
new and missing library materials.
In addition to trusting staff to help devise a plausible allocation formula
and to annually re-examining that formula, the resulting Excel spreadsheet
needs to be published in its entirety. That way, everyone can see how any
given year's pie was divided up, and staff could more clearly figure out
how their branch's performance can influence the formula to maximize
their branch's share of that pie.
Aside from announcing the budget figures earlier than usual, none of this
was done this year, and another opportunity for improving administrative
credibility was wasted. Also missed: an opportunity for showing the
county's taxpayers (and the board) that library administrators have solid,
empirical reasons for divvying up the budget pie among the libraries the
way they do.
AFPLWATCH Editorial
Posted January 7, 2005
“If I Were King of the Forest…”
Word is that the field of those in the running for the directorship here
at good old AFPL has been narrowed down to two. Thus a decision should be
forthcoming shortly, and when it comes, we’ll all be starting a new
chapter here at our favorite beleaguered institution.
Before we turn that page, we gave a little thought to what we would do if
we were the (un?)lucky one who gets that phone call from the county manager.
Fast-forwarding past the part where we immediately stick a samurai sword
in our collective abdomen and perform a ritual self-disembowelment, we
come to the following plan of Things We’d Like to Do:
- We would build some time into our doubtless hectic schedule for
small group meetings with staff. Staff drawn from all levels, all
departments, and all branches. We’d ask attendees to speak frankly about
what they identify as the library’s problems, weaknesses, and strengths,
and then to tell us what - based on their interactions with the library’s
patrons - they believe the library should be doing more of, less of,
better than, or not at all. Sure, it’s the board that does long-term
planning (or will, if it ever grows up and becomes a Real Board), but it’s
the staff that serves the patrons directly.
- We would take a good, close look at the master list of personnel.
(Assuming that there is such a list. Considering the fact that at least 3
times this past year, branch managers have been asked to give administration a
list of their part-time staff, it may be a mistake to assume a
Master List exists.) Talk to managers and committee chairs, listen to comments in
the small group meetings, and generally get a feel for who the next
generation of leaders might be in this institution. The library has driven
off many of those who would have been future leaders. At the same time,
many current managers/leaders (not always the same thing, sad to say) have
retired just as soon as they could, and many more are entering the range
of retirement. The result is a library that is heading towards a leadership
crisis in the face of a missing generation of potential leaders.
Once we came up with a list of employees who are potential leaders in
whatever their respective strengths are, we would make some sort of formal
commitment to mentoring them. Forget the old habit of sending the same 15
people to every conference, workshop or training. Instead, give these
acolytes opportunities to contribute:
- Make sure they’re on committees.
- Push them towards professional development, whether that means
encouraging them to apply for a manager slot, or talking to them about
going to library school.
- Give them some additional responsibility and see how they do.
- Encourage their supervisors to mentor them, and let supervisors
understand that one of their jobs is to grow good people. (Supervisors
should be evaluated on how well they develop their staff. Some supervisors
want to hang on to good people so badly that they deliberately keep those
people under wraps, so that they don’t get the chance to shine in front of
a wider audience.)
- Think about setting up some sort of round table for early career
librarians and paraprofessionals. Let people see that the library has a
career track - if it does.
- Provide people the chance to get the job skills for promotions. If no
one lets a new librarian do a program or a story time or join a committee,
how is that librarian supposed to get a position that calls for those very
skills?
- Give people some sense of what’s in it for them personally if the
library does well.
- Encourage job swapping or job sharing for set periods of time. Set up
a true transfer list, for people who want new opportunities.
- Work on ways that the staff of the library can get to know each other,
so that we can start sharing information and ideas, and helping each other.
- We would conduct some serious discussions with experienced reference librarians
and senior staff about the current parlous state of reference service
within the library system. Because training in reference and
collection development have been neglected for so long in this institution,
we would want to do something to upgrade the reference abilities of
librarians. How many of the people providing reference help or buying
materials are really qualified to do so?
We need to join the professional discussion about how much and what kind
of information library staff should provide to library users. (All
available information, along with help in critically assessing the worth
of the source, or just “good enough” information?) While other library
systems are arguing that point in light of the public’s touching faith in
Google, this library system is so far behind in reference that we could
hardly even join in that discussion.
So if we were directing the
library, we’d want to provide some serious catch-up in the foundational
skills of our profession: how to provide information and how to develop
collections. Whether it’s something as simple as requiring staff who work
on the reference desk to demonstrate knowledge of current affairs, use of
databases, and search strategies, or sitting with managers and selectors
and hearing them discuss in detail their collections and
their plans for them - addressing the quality of our professional work
would be de rigueur if we ruled our little world.
- We’d address some legal/public relations issues that have been ignored
for the past few years:
- How we allow minors Internet access.
Right now, through our use
of guest cards for anyone without a library card, we let kids use the
Internet with no restrictions. That means they can set up their email
account, and join chat rooms as they please. Given the growing reports of
predators preying on children through chat room and email contact, what
happens when some Fulton County child disappears with someone they
encountered in chat while using library computers? If the child used
his/her card to access that computer, all is well (legally, anyway), since
a parent signed for that card, and therefore has taken responsibility. But
what if the child accessed it because staff used a guest card to put the
child on the computer? Where does that leave the library, should something
bad happen?
When there have been complaints about materials a child checks
out, the library can answer that the parent’s signing for the library card
has relieved it of responsibility for what a child checks out. But the
case of our Internet access may be very different, in that the library, by
using a guest card with children, is taking responsibility upon itself for
that access.
- Public complaints about materials in our collections.
Libraries around the country are
constantly facing this problem, as individuals and groups campaign to have
certain items removed from libraries. AFPL used to have a procedure for
addressing these complaints: a committee was called together, studied the
material under attack, and made a decision, which the library stood behind,
as to the validity of the complaint. Yet Ms. Hooker, in one of her classic
maneuvers at evading the responsibility that came with her job, did away
with this procedure. She pronounced it henceforth the responsibility of each
manager to handle any complaints.
That leaves the library in a very tenuous
legal position. Suppose Manager A and Manager B both received complaints
about an item, and each came to a very different conclusion about whether
the item was appropriate? Suppose a manager was dealing with a complainant
who informed the press? Was that manager supposed to go on TV and describe
her unilateral decision and hope that the library didn’t leave her
dangling out there?
Of course the result of Hooker's simple-minded change in procedure was
predictable: staff will simply pull challenged items from their
collection. We know of one branch where this happened quite recently. Is
that good professional practice? Is it good service to taxpayers? Doesn’t
it leave the library open to the charge of censorship from angry citizens
who have a different opinion on the item?
One victim of Hooker’s scorched-earth policy on all existing AFPL practices and
committees was the library system's Juvenile Selection Committee. Formerly
no item could go into a children’s room collection at AFPL unless it was
vetted as suitable for children by this group. Thanks to Hooker, the
contents of our collections for children are left to the judgment of
individual children’s librarians. But the good judgment of individuals is
not a firm cornerstone in an era when the definition of a “children’s”
movie is very hard to arrive at. So what constitutes “juvenile” material
is all over the map, and leaves the library unnecessarily open to
complaints from parents.
- AFPL's policy of filtering Internet access for adults.
We’d establish the procedure by which unfiltered access is made available
to patrons who request it, and make sure library and IT staff take this
mandated unfiltered access seriously.
- We would make fundraising a top priority. Because the county
is not going to be increasing its funding for the library any time soon,
we need to look elsewhere for the funds to rebuild the library. If we’re
ever going to catch up to the rest of America’s public libraries, it’s
going to take the kind of money that can only come from private sources.
Yet we’ve lagged behind in development for years. Too many of our grants
have come from the state’s Office of Public Library Services, and too few
have come from local foundations or individual donors. Isn’t the library a
part of more people’s lives than the Atlanta Symphony? Yet the symphony
gets millions of dollars from the philanthropic community for its
operating and capital campaigns, while the library gets a few thousand, if
that, annually. There’s something radically wrong with that picture, and
we need to fix it.
- We'd experiment with creative solutions to some of AFPL's unique
problems:
- How about flex time, both to stretch staffing and to
address the problem of employees who can’t contemplate applying for
positions that are on the opposite side of the county?
- How about recruiting retired staff to fill part-time positions, or as
a pool of temps?
- How about re-examining how the materials budget is allocated to
branches?
- Why not review our rule that only branches with Friends groups can
have book sales (which could be a great source of revenue for branches
with small budgets)?
Looking back at the list of things we think we’d do reminds us of one
essential quality in the next director: courage. Courage to
change the old dysfunctional system by working with Karen Handel to remap
the relationship with the library board. Courage to stand up for the
library down at county headquarters. Courage to try new things, to
experiment, to throw out the experiments that don’t work and start again,
to acknowledge failures, to accept criticism without responding with
defensiveness, to deal with political realities without making moral
compromises.
Dorothy: Your Majesty, If you were King, you wouldn't be afraid of anything?
Lion: Not nobody, not nohow!
Tin Man: Not even a rhinocerous?
Lion: Imposserous!
Dorothy: How about a hippopotamus?
Lion: Why, I'd trash him from top to bottomamus!
Dorothy: Supposin' you met an elephant?
Lion: I'd wrap him up in cellophant!
Scarecrow: What if it were a brontosaurus?
Lion: I'd show him who was King of the Forest!
--Lyrics to “Courage” from The Wizard of Oz
Another Month Passes with Chronic Imbalances
in Staff, Budget Investments among AFPL Branches
Posted January 5, 2005
The year 2004 ended without any adjustments being made in the number of
staff assigned to the library systems' various branch libraries, despite
copious data showing that too many employees are working at some facilities
while too few are working at others--and have been for many years now.
There are similar longstanding imbalances in the differing amounts of
money allocated to certain branches and to Central for purchasing materials,
due to the fact that facility designations ("Regional," "Central,
"Area," "Community," and "Neighborhood") don't always reflect the relative
workloads handled by the various library facilities.
In terms of which libraries are handling the lion's share of AFPL's primary
function--lending materials to card-owning residents--the library system's
December 2004 circulation statistics continue the pattern
set in previous months.
The only surprise in last month's circ statistics was Roswell's
rank as the busiest branch. Most employees assumed the Ocee branch, opened
in late November, would immediately replace Northeast as the busiest AFPL
facility. Instead, Ocee ranked as the third-busiest branch: two
percentage points behind top-ranking Roswell and a single percentage point
behind second-ranking Northeast.
As we've said before, we hope the Interim Library Director will move ahead
soon with scrutinizing staff and budget allocations and making some
long-overdue changes--without waiting for the board to get its
parliamentary act together, a process that could take many (more) months.
And there is certainly no reason that branch materials allocations for 2005
shouldn't reflect the branches' current materials budget needs, and that
the allocation formula be based primarily on current circulation
patterns. There is also no reason why those allocations couldn't
be determined before February 1st, when, theoretically, the
branches should be able to resume ordering materials.
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