Why Isn't Auburn Avenue Research Library
Being Considered as Potential Home for King's Papers?
Posted June 26, 2006; postscript added June 29, 2006
Atlanta's mayor has secured a loan to buy at least part of Martin Luther
King, Jr.'s personal papers, which the King family put on the auction
block earlier this month.
Nowhere in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's
article this past weekend about the "civil rights museum" Franklin
envisions housing the papers - or in the Sunday AJC
article about the frantic behind-the-scenes maneuverings to obtain the
papers - is the possibility of placing them at AFPL's Auburn Avenue
Research Library mentioned.
Why is that?
- Is it because AFPL still has no Public Information Officer to help
keep AFPL's resources (including Auburn Avenue's) in the forefront of the
minds of the city's power-brokers?
- Does it have something to do with Auburn Avenue's reputation or
current (or previous) Auburn Avenue administrators' relationships with
city officials?
- Is it because, in all the years that Auburn has been in
existence, no sizeable endowment was created to purchase the sort of
collection that the unexpected sale of King's papers represented?
- Could the county commissioners' preoccupation with with its dwindling
revenue sources explain why county commissioners didn't pony up
to bid on King's papers so they could be placed at Auburn Avenue Research
Library, a county-operated archival facility?
- Are the sometimes prickly lines of communication and recurring turf-wars
between city and county officials part of this problem as they have been
for so many others?
- Is the library system still paying for the fallout from a finally-fired
director and a finally-replaced board who had managed to alienate every
powerful ally in the community and to erode the public's and local
politicians' trust in the institution? Did the opportunity that the sale
of the King papers represents come along before the library system's
new director had the time to repair the numerous broken bridges with local
fundraisers and politicians - the key decision-makers who otherwise might
make the obvious connection between the need to permanently house the King
papers and the library system's operation of a facility ideal for doing so?
Whatever the reasons, the Auburn Avenue Research Library wasn't immediately
and widely perceived as a contender for the role of permanent steward of
King's personal papers. That fact, and the puzzling absence of Auburn from
the continuing public and behind-the-scenes discussions about the fate of
King's papers seems to signal how far AFPL still has to go before people
with money and vision naturally look to AFPL for leadership - or at least
partnership - on matters that seem to fall logically and naturally into its mission and
priorities.
Is it too late, we wonder, for AFPL to pull up a chair at the tables where
the permanent home of the King papers is being discussed? Is it really necessary for
the taxpayers of Atlanta and the local Deep Pockets to pay for yet another
zillion-dollar structure to house and showcase King's papers that's bound
to be within walking distance of AFPL's Auburn Avenue Research Library?
June 29th Postscript: An
article in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution mentions that
those who brokered the $32 million deal for purchasing the King papers
have included the Auburn Avenue Research Library (along with the Atlanta
History Center) on a list of "pre-approved" local venues where the parts of
the collection will eventually be exhibited. For the moment, it
looks as though the papers will be permanently housed at Morehouse College.
Something's Wrong With This Picture
Posted June 19, 2006
The library system's circulation totals
for last month provide more evidence that the staffing allocations for
AFPL's dozens of libraries need an overhaul.
Staff at a very few libraries are handling the lion's share of the library
system's lending (and reshelving) activity, and some libraries with
roughly the same number of employees handle appreciably more business
than their counterparts.
The "facility type" designations that a previous set of library
administrators and a few trustees dreamed up many years ago continue to
determine how many employees work at a given facility. Service populations
and lending activity patterns have changed since then, and yet library
administrators have failed to devise a reasonable, empirically-based
formula for putting staff resources where they are most needed - and have
been needed
for quite a while now.
The failure of library administrators to match staff allocations to
persistent circulation figures has resulted in some facilities
even within the same "facility type" handling significantly different
workloads. And it seems clear from examining the historical data that some
facilities have always been mis-assigned their "facility type" in terms of
the portion of the library system's business their staffs actually handle
every month.
AFPL has many major unresolved problems that need administrative attention,
but it's difficult to imagine a good reason for library administrators to
continue, month after month and year after year, overburdening staff at the
busiest libraries while there are other facilities consistently less busy -
some of them astonishingly less busy - lending out and reshelving library
materials. Staff allocation formulas will always include more factors than
total circulation, but ignoring circulation when determining staff size is
both unfair, unjustified, and unnecessary.
Progress Made on AFPL's Internet Filtering Practices
Posted June 6, 2006
First, the Good News.
At its May 24th meeting, the library board approved an "Internet and
Computer Use Policy" drafted by a staff committee, and a copy of the
approved policy was distributed at last week's monthly meeting of
library managers. That policy (among other things):
- authorizes staff to temporarily remove (upon the request by an adult library
user) the filter that blocks access to certain websites considered by the
filter-maker to be unsuitable for children.
- allows library staff to impose time limits on Internet sessions to
maximize the number of people given access to a given building’s
workstations.
- forbids a library patron to use somebody else's library cards to gain
access to computers or to “engage in any activity that is deliberately
offensive or creates an intimidating or hostile environment.”
- authorizes staff to interrupt a policy-violator's Internet session
and/or suspend a policy-violator's library card and/or library privileges,
and/or ask a policy-violator to leave the library, and/or notify the police
of a patron's violating an Internet-viewing-related law.
Library staff have been begging for these regulations - and a series of
library officials (starting with Mary Kaye Hooker, under whose "leadership"
selective website-blocking software was installed at AFPL workstations) had
repeatedly promised to provide them - which is why the fact that an official policy finally
includes these regulations is such Good News.
The Not-So-Good News:
- It took how many years to get this policy drafted, reviewed, and
approved? In The Perfect Library, this policy (and the specific provisions
mentioned above) would've been in place before the filtering
sofware was installed on AFPL workstations, and certainly within a few weeks (at
the latest) of the U.S. courts decreeing that libraries are obligated to
provide unrestricted access to the Internet for adults who request it.
That it took so long to get this policy approved doesn't seem so much like
evidence that the policy was carefully crafted as it proves that AFPL
still has a long way to go when it comes to efficiently extruding written
regulations needed for consistently delivering routine library services.
- Written, specific procedures for removing the Internet filter used
at AFPL Internet workstations are still nonexistent. We fail to understand
why these procedures weren't devised while the policy that requires them
was wending its tortured way through the official channels all these years.
Once news of this policy gets out to the library-using public (and library
staff do have an obligation to share the news of its policies with library
users), some adult users will be expecting staff to remove filtering from
their Internet sessions. Right then. Every time. And staff are going to
do what? Tell these patrons that we don't know how to comply with our
employer's own policy?
- What does "activity that is deliberately offensive or creates an
intimidating or hostile environment" mean, exactly? Or, rather, what
shall these phrases be construed to mean at this particular 33-facility
institution?
If library staff throughout the library system are to even-handedly and
consistently enforce AFPL's Internet viewing and filtering-removal
regulations, they're going to need clear guidance on:
- Whose claims that an Internet screen is "offensive" will be addressed
and whose (if anyone's) will be ignored. Are staff obliged to deal with
only complaints from offended patrons? Does a staff
member's feeling offended or intimidated count? Will branch
managers be expected to adjudicate differences of opinion - say, between
the Internet user and the complainer, or between two staff members with
different offendedness or intimidation thresholds? Will someone's claim to
being "offended" or "intimidated" by an Internet patron's viewing of
graphic photos of violence be dealt with the same way as someone's claim
of being offended or intimidated by a screen depicting naked humans?
- Whether the mere claim of (somebody) being offended is sufficient to
warrant interrupting someone's viewing of that screen (or being told to
leave the building, or whatever). Unless library administrators are ready
to cope with this policy's being enforced differently at different locations
and differently depending on who's on duty at a given moment, these
guidelines on defining "offensiveness" will need to be extremely specific.
There's just to enormous a range among staff and among patrons in their
thresholds of being offended, "harrassed," etc.
- How staff can be fair and consistent in applying negative consequences
when someone violates the policy. It hardly seems desirable for some patrons
in some libraries to be asked to leave the building when violating an
Internet use provision when a patron violating the identical regulation at
another facility has his/her library card blocked or revoked. That's going
to happen, though, in the absence of clear, written guidelines for enforcing
this long-awaited policy.
No one is claiming that promptly and effectively addressing these various
concerns will be a no-brainer. On the other hand, AFPL staff members who
knew all along that hammering out useful guidelines for Internet use would
be complex and time-consuming did begin calling for that effort long ago -
in fact, as long ago as the beginning of the graphical Internet era at
AFPL. That was in 1997. And other library systems managed to craft
policies and procedures for Internet users years ago.
For the sake of library employees working with the public, as well as for
the members of the public accessing the Internet at AFPL libraries, we hope
the written staff guidelines for implementing this policy are in place
before the policy hits the library system's website; that
the guidelines are clear, comprehensive, and sensible; and that the clear,
comprehensive, and sensible guidelines don't take as long to create as it
took the policy to reach the trustees.
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