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AFPLWATCH Stories Posted in May 2005

What a Difference a Year Makes...
Posted May 28, 2005

This month marks the first anniversary of the county manager's firing of former AFPL library director Mary Kaye Hooker.

In some ways, May 19, 2004 seems like yesterday; in other ways, like light-years ago.

In retrospect, it's intriguing to see how things at AFPL just got worse and worse until they finally - almost predictably - climaxed in Hooker's termination. One way to see this is to look back at the articles posted to AFPLWATCH during May 2004 - and to follow the links in those articles to that month's newspaper stories. (Because the items in AFPLWATCH's archive are arranged in reverse chronological order, you'll get the full "time machine" effect only if you scroll down to the bottom of the May 2004 stories and work your way up to the announcement of Hooker's firing. Read the stories.)

Boy, are we glad those days are behind us.

Unfortunately, not everyone on the staff survived Hurricane Hooker. We still mourn the departure of those colleagues who decided to leave AFPL rather than wait Hooker out. The library is poorer for those premature departures and we still miss those people. On the other hand, Garnes, Earl, and McClure, and a couple of other Horribles are also among the Long Gone.

Those of us still on the scene are now in the tedious, heartbreaking process of slowly rebuilding a profoundly diminished library system. The county has finally hired a seemingly-sane and (so far) sensible new library director. Despite the wide wake of Hooker's appallingly destructive regime - the brain drain, the shattered institutional memory, the strip-mined collections, the host of hobbled services, the "disappeared" staff and administrative positions that we desperately need to operate the organization, the pulverized infrastructure, the tarnished reputation, and all the rest of it - a year later, things are looking up.

We look forward not only to the potentially constructive days ahead, but to May 19, 2006, when enough time may have elapsed, enough restoration efforts may have born fruit - and maybe a few more Horribles have left their positions of authority and been replaced by more qualified people - to justify celebrating, on that second anniversary of Hooker's departure, a tangibly rejuvenated library system.

AFPL's New Director in the News Again
Posted May 28, 2005

John Szabo, AFPL's new director since early April, was interviewed by the Alpharetta Revue & News earlier this month.

Read the story.

Editorial

Blaming the Victim
Posted May 6, 2005

In an email sent to library employees earlier this week, Fulton County Information Technology Director Robert Taylor once again demonstrated how uninformed he is about the continuing dysfunctional state of the library system's computer equipment.

Each of the three paragraphs of Taylor's email deserves separate comment.

"IT has almost finished the project for the migration of the computer systems assigned to AFPL Employee’s to the Fulton County network. However, the public access units remain as part of the State network and we are at the mercy of whatever they do, as demonstrated by the problem last week when they pushed out software that impacted all of their network. The state can take the network down without any control, or even awareness of Fulton County’s Department of Information Technology."

Taylor's tone of frustration, annoyance, and helplessness is exquisitely ironic. Helpless, frustrated, and annoyed is precisely is how library staff feel most of the time toward the county's IT department!

And Taylor's reference to the near-completion of the migration of the library system's computers to the county network only reminds us of how bumpy that road had been - and still is - for the library's customers. From the perspective of minimizing viruses entering the county's networks via the library's public access computers, the "migration" may seem like a success to Taylor. But for those of us using the computer equipment that's been "upgraded" and then "migrated" or whatever the proper terms are, we've been confronted with more problems we had before the changes:

Some computers are no longer linking to the printing equipment. (If Taylor thinks this is a minor problem, he obviously doesn't deal on a daily basis with, among others, panicky teenagers with short deadlines for computer-assisted school assignments.)
To get some machines to hook into the computer reservation software, library staff must manually key in an IP address different from the programmed default ones. (If Taylor thinks computers without timers on them is a trivial concern, he's never become embroiled in the all-too-frequent shouting matches among Internet addicts who resent their fellow addicts getting more than their daily dose of library computer time.)
Some supposedly standard software programs (like word processing) don't load on every workstation, and/or the program's icons are missing once the machine boots up. Adobe Acrobat - an absolute staple for users of public library Internet workstations - is no longer a standard default program loading with every boot-up of every Internet terminal, like it was before the "upgrade" and the "migration."
The screensavers that identified certain workstations as dedicated to AFPL catalog-searching somehow vanished during the Great Migration. (Again, not a negligible loss, considering the staff time involved in removing Internet junkies from these terminals so others can locate library materials.) Even the generic Internet Explorer icons that the migration (unsatisfactorily) substituted for the catalog-only screensavers mysteriously vanished on workstations at some post-migration branch libraries. (Meaning that every time a library user exits a library catalog, staff have to stop what they're doing and reconfigure it again before another patron can use it.)
Some post-migration computers just won't, for various reasons, boot up at all, sitting there useless for days, even weeks, on end.

Taylor's next paragraph:

"It has been reported that access to computers and copiers (MFDs) have been restricted because of individual units or even network access being down for extended periods of time. We are requesting your help in rectifying this problem. Anytime you have computer systems or networks down, please notify the IT Help Desk. The helpdesk can be contacted via phone (404-730-7334), email (helpdesk@co.fulton.ga.us ), or fax (404-893-1795)."

Like we haven't been filing even more work orders for malfunctioning computers since the upgrade/migration project began than we were filing before then!

The problem is not library staff reluctance to file work orders with IT's Help Desk. The problem is the IT Department's lack of responsiveness to those work orders. Contrary to the Taylor's implication, library staff have filed dozens (hundreds?) of work orders since the migration project began. At least some of those work orders celebrated their one-month anniversary the same week library staff got their email message from Robert Taylor.

Taylor seems to have completely forgotten that, before the migration project began several months ago, he and his deputy told a room of almost a hundred library managers and administrators that IT's responsiveness to routine work orders would not be affected by the migration project - that, in fact, because of a previous avalanche of computer problems in the library systems (and a subsequent avalanche of complaints about Fulton County IT's poor responsiveness to those problems), additional IT staff had been assigned to clear up the backlog of library work orders. But since the months-long migration began, the backlog of unaddressed work orders has just gotten bigger and IT's so-called response time worse than ever. Why were library staff misled to believe things would be otherwise?

The final paragraph of Taylor's email:

"IT is here to support you in providing service to the public and we will do everything we can to do so, but we must be made aware of the problem. There are processes in place to capture and track problems from when they are reported until they are resolved. I request your assistance by reporting all IT related problems to the helpdesk."

Instead of blaming library staff for creating their computer-related nightmares by not promptly reporting them to IT, how come Taylor didn't simply invite library employees to forward to him a copy of any unresolved Help Desk work order after, say, waiting over a week for IT staff to show up and address it? That would quickly show Taylor where the problem lies. Or Taylor could simply visit a couple of libraries on his way home every day, and see for himself how many "Out of Order" signs are pasted to the public access computer screens in those libraries.

While IT's Mr. Taylor may be feeling proud of the progress being made on the library upgrade project, and may feel comfortable with IT's current level of responsiveness to reported malfunctioning computer equipment, the library's staff - and certainly its customers - are not impressed or amused. We wonder whether the computer technicians in Taylor's far-flung empire are amused either: after all, they're caught between being expected to finish Taylor's "migration" project on time and handling routine work orders simultaneously - and accomplishing this in a county whose computers are located in facilities spread out over a very large area.

To be sure, part of the problem for both the library and for IT is the vacuum that ex-library director Mary Kaye Hooker created when she ran off the library system's technology administrator and then refused to hire someone to replace him. Taylor greatly expanded that vacuum by convincing the county manager to transfer the library system's small cadre of computer technicians and its webmaster from the library's payroll to Taylor's. Since then, the channels of communication and accountability between IT and the library system have been predictably murky.

But in our opinion a bigger part of the problem is how insulated from the end users of computer equipment any centralized technology department (and its complaint-phobic administrators) can quickly get. Any centralized IT department, for all its advantages, inevitably keeps getting further and further removed from the day-to-day equipment patterns and expectations of the people who are actually using the computers - or trying to use them. That happened in state government about thirty years ago when separate departmental computer outfits were consolidated into One Giant IT Outfit and it's been happening in Fulton County from the moment county commissioners and the county manager decided administrative consolidation was the answer to all the county's computer-related problems.

Unfortunately, it's in the county's libraries where more citizens use county computers than anywhere else. Any flaws in the county's routine support of its computer equipment are going to surface first and/or most intensely in those libraries.

Just because most library patrons haven't yet figured out how to directly complain to Mr. Taylor about the unreliable support of the county's computers doesn't mean they aren't yelling at library staff about that problem. We don't know how swimmingly things may be going, computer-wise, in other county departments, but emails from Taylor like this one don't help the library and its users one bit.

What's more troubling than the daily frustration with inadequate computer support for libraries is the damage being done by that lack of support to what's left of the library system's reputation among Fulton County citizens.

Five long years of Mary Kaye Hooker's disastrous leadership - including, among other things, her selection of a horribly user-unfriendly circulation sytem - squandered quite a bit of whatever good feelings people had about their libraries. Then came the wave of public disgust at the $18,000,000 worth of legal fees the county had to pay when its officials got caught discriminating against a group of library employees. Then came the outrage over a second lawsuit - resulting in another $250,000 settlement from county coffers - that got filed when the county allowed Hooker to retailiate against two of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The lawsuits came on top of several years of the county's hiring freeze that seriously compromised the library's ability to provide decent library service. Then, after Hooker was finally fired and the library's micromanaging board was finally abolished, it took the county almost a year to hire a new library director.

The library staff's efforts to restore public confidence in the county's libraries after so much mismanagement has been, to put it mildly, an uphill battle.

Now library staff find themselves lamely trying to defend to the public the county's inadequate maintenance of its computer equipment. In fact, it's probably not an overstatement to claim that the single biggest threat to the public's once-positive disposition towards public libraries is the daily malfunctioning of its computers and/or computer software.

We hope Taylor and the library system's recently-hired director can get together soon and start exchanging some accurate information about - and come to some workable understandings about accountability for - addressing library computer malfunctions in a timely manner. Surely both the library department and the IT department want the same thing: reliable computer service for Fulton County taxpayers. Since Taylor has taken away the library staff who used to supply that reliability, the only thing library staff can do now is report problems; it's totally up to Taylor & Co. to do something about the complaints.

Finding a way for IT to be, and to be perceived as, genuinely supportive of the library department's mission, will result in what we all want: more satisfied customers. Genuine support from IT would also allow the library's staff to get back to their job of delivering library services to the public instead of wasting so much energy on riot control of that portion of the local Internet addict community that so avidly patronizes Fulton County libraries.

Same Story, 9th Verse...
Posted May 5, 2005

For the ninth straight month, monthly circulation data, when ranked from highest number of items circulated to lowest, shows that the same small group of branch libraries - about a third of them - shoulder the lion's share of the library's workload, while branches doing a fraction of the work continue to enjoy inordinately large staffs, book budgets, and assignments of computer equipment.

AFPL's circulation data for April 2005, released this week, show no striking differences from previous months, and imbalances between resources available at some branches vs. the amount of work they handle have persisted for several years.

The chronically overworked employees at the busiest branches can only hope that AFPL's new director will, before waiting too much longer, turn his attention to making some long-needed adjustments to branch budgets, staffing, equipment allocations, and the hours certain libraries are open.

Update to ALA Member Alert

Garnes Loses ALA Council Re-election Bid
Posted May 3, 2005

ALA members have chosen not to re-elect former AFPL Deputy Director Carolyn Garnes to the association's governing body.

ALA announced the results of its 2005 Council elections yesterday.

Although 1,472 ALA members voted for Garnes, she did not receive enough votes to win another seat on the Council. (This year, with 10,490 ballots cast in the Council elections and 91 candidates running for the 36 vacant seats, those who won seats garnered at least 2,025 votes.)

Only 7 of the 91 candidates running for ALA Council this year got fewer votes than Garnes.

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