Editorial
County Should Invest Part of Surplus in Its Libraries
Posted September 15, 2005
According to a recent county
press release, Fulton County expects to have $114 million in its
coffers at the end of the year - considerably more than it had projected earlier on.
Perhaps now is the time for AFPL's new library director to ask the county
commissioners to restore to the library system all of the half-dozen D-level
administrative positions that William McClure - in his vindictive envy of their handsome
salaries - and Mary Kaye Hooker - because of her inability to cope with competent
colleagues - systematically abolished from AFPL's budget before the reins of power were
forcibly removed from their exceedingly clumsy paws.
AFPL's new library director is unlikely to get very far very fast in
rehabilitating the shattered library system without some additional help.
McClure's and Hooker's strategy, when it came to stewardship of the
library system's cadre of top administrative positions, was clearly an
apres nous, le deluge approach. Well, they certainly got their way
on that score.
Both Interim Director Anne Haime's efforts to stabilize the library system
after Hooker got the hook and the new library director John Szabo's
efforts since his arrival this past April have been hamstrung not only by
the sheer scope of the system's ten-year-long meltdown, but by the fact
that Haimes and Szabo inherited only a handful of D-level administrators to
help them with the Herculean labors confronting them. With one exception,
these few highest-level administrators are Hooker/Garnes appointees.
The new director seems to be unusually capable, talented, smart, energetic,
thoughtful, discerning, an excellent listener, and a champion of public
libraries, but he's not a wizard or a saint. It's not realistic for the
county's managers to expect a single individual - especially one who
inherited the administrators he has - to handle singlehandedly the many
areas of the library system that need urgent, competent, thorough, and
ongoing administrative attention.
Especially since, compared to the county's post-Hooker library system, the
county's other departments have so many
D-level administrators (not to mention the number of
E-level administrators).
Perhaps the commissioners, if asked, would be willing to invest some of
the county's newly-discovered surplus financial resources into shoring up
the administrative resources of the county's library system?
And Don't Forget the Branch Libraries!
In addition to restoring the library system's deleted D-level positions, it
wouldn't hurt, of course, to create additional A-level, B-level, and
C-level positions to more adequately staff the library's 34 facilities. The
number of people served by the library system has been growing the past few
years, but the library system's budget - in particular its personnel
budget - has not been significantly increased to keep up with this
increased demand, and some facilities have been understaffed from the
day they were opened.
There are numerous negative consequences of trying to operate a library
system without enough staff to do that. To pick a single example:
- The pre-reform board of library trustees decreed that some libraries
would henceforth be open on Sundays, despite the fact that no branch staff
was large enough to adequately staff a seven-day-a-week operation (or, for
that matter, was adequately staffed to support a six-day-a-week operation).
- Because the open-on-Sunday branches don't have enough staff to operate
seven days a week, every employee at every branch is scheduled to drive to
one of those branches (often astonishingly distant from their homes) to
help keep those branches open on Sundays.
- Since county employees work a maximum of 40 hours a week, anyone
helping staff an open-on-Sunday branch (or, for that matter, an
open-on-Saturday branch) can't show up for work at their own branch for
some half-day (or, in the case of Saturdays, some entire day) after
helping out on a Sunday somewhere (or working at their own branch on a
Saturday). These built-in staff absences create repeated staff-shortages
at all branch libraries on various weekdays.
The Byzantine staffing arrangements for open-on-Saturday and open-on-Sunday
branches, besides all the inconvenience, the gasoline-wasting, and the
morale-dampening they generate, are hardly conducive to good library
service. No employee forced to sub at some distant branch every fifth
Sunday can deliver the same level of service as someone familiar with a
branch and its patrons as a result of working there every day.
A more efficient, more customer-friendly, and more humane approach would
be for the county to offer the amount of library service that the county
can afford. If Saturday and Sunday library service are desirable, the
county should budget enough personnel to staff that service.
The county currently operates almost one hundred facilities, and only about
one-third of them are public libraries. Do the commissioners expect the
administrators of the county's other open-on-Saturdays or open-on-Sundays
facilities to use the library system's rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul staffing
mechanisms? We doubt it.
And Don't Forget the Library's Collections!
Another possible excellent use of the county's surplus: a one-time infusion
of additonal funds for purchasing additional materials for the county's
library users. The library system's book budget has more than once absorbed
its share of the county's rounds of budget cuts in recent years. Additional
funding now would help offset those previous cuts.
Naturally, we hope part of the surplus in the county's treasury will
somehow and significantly benefit the
users of the county's currently underfunded and understaffed libraries.
The temptation for the commissioners to pour the extra money into new
projects and facilities will be strong, but we hope they will choose
instead to shore up and more adequately staff the creaky library system
they've already got.
Even More Data Now Available
to Justify Staffing Adjustments
Posted September 14, 2005
If the numbingly-similar monthly circulation statistics weren't enough
to cause The Powers That Be to make some long-needed adjustments in
staffing allocations throughout the libary system, perhaps some recently-released
annual statistics will be.
The library's trustees were recently provided with several sets
of numbers measuring library lending activity over the past twelve months:
Although the patterns shown by the data are obscured by the way the data is
displayed for the trustees - the reports routinely display data alphabetically
by branch names rather than ranking the data - it doesn't take an Einstein
to discern that, among other things:
- some branches are consistently far busier than others.
- some branches are consistently far less busy than others.
- branches with the largest staffs aren't necessarily the busiest ones.
- an astonishingly small number of branches consistently bear the
brunt of the library system's lending business.
- the amount of lending going on throughout the county differs radically -
not just marginally - from branch type to branch type. There is not, however,
a correspondingly radical difference in the staffing of the facility types.
- in terms of the amount of materials being lent out and returned, some
branches are consistently out-performing other branches of a similar size.
If there is any logical connection between the number of staff necessary to
maintain a collection of a certain size, and if there is any logical
connection between the amount of lending (and reshelving) happening and
the number of staff needed to accomplish that turnover, more than a few
adjustments need to be made in the way certain AFPL branches are staffed.
We earnestly hope the most glaringly-needed readjustments will be
implemented long before the board finally completes its (latest) facilities
study, its (latest) strategic plan, and whatever other grand schemes the
trustess (a body that hasn't yet elected its permanent officers, remember)
wants to scrutinize before advising the library director on the library
system's future direction (whatever that phrase means, given the politics
involved and the excruciatingly slow pace of trustee deliberations).
We base that hope on concern for the inadequately-served customers who
patronize the busiest branch libraries, and for the most-chronically-overworked
staff in those busiest branches.
The director and his Branch Services Administrator already have
plenty of pertinent, consistent data on hand to make some long-overdue
staffing changes. They can make other adjustments down the road, but they
needed to make some of them a long time ago.
Editorial
Why Are We Not Surprised?
Posted September 12, 2005
Leave it to Fulton County government not only to fail to provide adequate
security in its courtrooms - a predicted failure that led to several
violent deaths there last March - but also to bungle its alleged efforts
after the fatal shootings to remedy the lax courthouse security problems.
In a story published this past Saturday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
quotes Judge Penny Brown Reynolds:
“Here we are, months later…still talking about the same thing….We have a dead judge. How much
more of a squeaky wheel do we need?”
According to the AJC, “cameras and distress buttons in some
courtrooms don’t work and a secure door has yet to be installed in a key
hallway leading to judges’ chambers.”
Read the depressing story. (Warning: The AJC requires tedious
registration to read its online edition.)
The commissioners' calls for an investigation of the security situation
that led to the murder of a
librarian in the South Fulton Branch in 2002 never did result in any
substantial changes in security for library system employees. (Library
employees don't count as "substantial" the long-delayed installation of
so-called "panic buttons" in some branchs, as these non-silent alarms
would do nothing but further agitate any violent offender who decides to
create mayhem at another library some day).
Unless the commissioners decide the safety of the county's judicial
employees is somehow more important than the safety of its library employees,
we predict that the county's employees working in the courthouse will
eventually stop expecting any actual - as opposed to rhetorical - "remedies"
from our allegedly concerned commissioners.
Busiest Branches Endure Another Year
of SIRSI-Documented Understaffing
Posted September 6, 2005
No major adjustments in branch staffing allocations have been made at AFPL
in the past five years, despite the fact that current library administrators,
with the release of last month's
circulation figures, now have available a full year's worth of
SIRSI-generated workload statistics showing that less than one-third of
AFPL's libraries consistently handle the lion's share of AFPL's lending of
library materials.
Also available but equally ignored by the library system's resource-allocators:
several years worth of pre-SIRSI workload statistics that show the same
patterns of lopsided use among branches patronized by materials-borrowing
customers.
Not very long after a small group of AFPL's former trustees, then chaired
by William McClure, announced that the materials-buying budgets and staffing
allocations for AFPL facilities would henceforth be based on formulas geared
to the type of facility (Regional, Area, Community, and Neighborhood) a branch
had been designated, numerous understaffing - and overstaffing - anomalies
emerged. In subsequent years, administrators tinkered with the materials-buying
budget formula to reflect changes in workloads, but they never made changes
in branch staffing allocations to reflect population shifts in library
service areas throughout the county. (Nor did library administrators make
any changes in their original allocations of computer equipment for branch
libraries, despite the obvious patron demand levels for computers in different
service areas.)
AFPLWATCH is running out of ways to describe this exasperatingly
persistent problem:
We'd like to emphasize that the unjustified allocation of library staff is not a sudden development: the
circulation figures for 2003(!) show the
same twelve libraries handling the bulk of the library's lending activity as are handling it in 2005 -
and in approximately the same order.
Anyone familiar with what library systems do will acknowledge that the
relative importance of branch libraries can't be completely captured by
a single monthly or even annual statistic, including the total circulation
count. On the other hand, it is folly to ignore performance measures
altogether, or to trivialize what a circulation count says about what's
going on - or not going on - in library branches.
If nothing else, the
cost per circulation at low-circulating branch libraries should be of
concern to library administrators responsible for allocating scarce staff
resources - and, presumably, for allocating different kinds of
staff resources to libraries that are clearly functioning very differently
than others.
Rationalizing the continued understaffing of the busiest branch libraries
with a simplistic and long-obsolete model of facility types continues to
unfairly and unnecessarily overwork the staff in those busy branches.
(Administrators tend to forget that not only should they adequately staff
branches to handle the relative levels of borrowing at branches, but should
also adequately staff branches to handle the inevitable reshelving
of those disparately-borrowed-from branches. The chronic backlog of
unshelved materials at AFPL's busiest branches is, all by itself, a serious -
and avoidable - barrier to good customer service.)
No one is claiming that important things aren't being accomplished in the
two-thirds of AFPL's facilities lending the smallest portion of the
library system's materials, but it's clear that staffing patterns
in branch libraries should bear some clearly-apparent, logical relationship
to branch workloads, and that has clearly not been the case for many years
now.
The continued indifference of library administrators to basing resource
allocations at least partly on workload statistics
- is not good stewardship of the county's severely limited human resources;
- continues to create desk-staffing problems in the most-heavily-borrowed-from
branch libraries;
- accounts for much of the low morale throughout the library staff; and
- thwarts library employees' attempts to provide an acceptable level of
service in AFPL's most-heavily-patronized branch libraries.
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