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AFPLWATCH Stories Posted in March 2006 |
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"Fulton Commission, Look at Your County"
Posted March 30, 2006
That's the title of a recent editorial in one of the newspapers published
in the far north end of Fulton County. An excerpt:
"Over the last 15 years, Fulton County had a history of defending the
indefensible. It must lead all Georgia counties in lost discrimination
cases. It should be noted that almost all of these involved white victims.
The crowning moment came when, after exhausting pointless appeals, the
county anted up $16 million in damages to white library staff who were
proved to be victims of blatant racial discrimination by the Atlanta-Fulton
Public Library Board of Directors. It took years to clean out that rat's
nest.
A small footnote; the library settlement also involved a second case of
reverse discrimination against some of the same victims, if you can believe
that. But what is another $250,000 among friends?"
Read the entire editorial.
AFPL Patrons Need Mechanism
for Unblocking "Forbidden" Websites
Posted March 28, 2006
A white-supremicist organization whose website is blocked by the Internet
filter used by public libraries in Missouri recently filed a federal
lawsuit claiming that the filter infringes on the organization's
Constitutional right to free speech.
Details of the lawsuit were reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The Internet filter used at AFPL - which seems to focus on blocking out
sexual, gaming, and gambling content instead of hate-speech content -
doesn't block the website involved in the Missouri lawsuit, but there are
plenty of other non-obscene websites AFPL's filter does
block.
Even before AFPL's library board, over the objections of the library's
Electronic Resources Committee, decreed at the beginning of the Hooker
era that filters would be installed at all AFPL Internet workstations,
AFPL reference librarians and managers began asking AFPL administrators
for an effective mechanism for immediately and temporarily unblocking
filtered websites. No such mechanism was forthcoming. When that unblocking
procedure was mandated by a now-several-years-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling,
library reference librarians and managers - and, incidentally, AFPLWATCH,
as long ago as September 2004
and as recently as
April 2005 - periodically repeated their pleas for
the unblocking procedure.
AFPL managers have also asked that uniformly-worded signs be installed at
Internet workstations to alert adult patrons that they have the right to
ask library staff to temporarily unblock a "forbidden" website they'd like
to look at.
Various administrators (as long ago as 2002) promised to provide staff with
the unblocking procedure and with the signs, but no such things have ever
materialized.
We hope the also-repeatedly-begged-for "Internet Use Policy" currently under
review includes or specifically refers to such a procedure. If that part of
the policy takes yet another year to manifest, we can only assume that
library administrators are peculiarly indifferent to the risk of a federal
lawsuit being filed by some litigation-minded library patron here in Atlanta.
We suspect a federal judge may not be very sympathetic to the currently
used "sorry, we can't do a thing about it" response that staff have been
forced to give all these years to adult patrons mystified and/or annoyed by those
unexplained "forbidden" messages that periodically confront patrons using
AFPL's Internet machines.
Latest Garnes Sighting(s)
Posted March 20, 2006
Undaunted by
her failure to be re-elected last year to ALA Council, ex-Deputy
Director Carolyn Garnes has joined two dozen others from around the country
who petitioned ALA to have their names added to the Council ballot this year.
Garnes
describes herself to ALA voters as someone whose tenure at AFPL not
only "improved customer service" and "increased usage" but resulted in
better "staff morale"! Garnes omits from her resume that she abruptly resigned from AFPL
in the wake of a federal lawsuit
filed by two AFPL employees. And although she mentions a certificate
of commendation given to her by a former AFPL director, Garnes leaves out
the part of her career that involved being terminated as a library employee;
it was later, after getting reinstated (another interesting story she
doesn't refer to), that Garnes was around to be chosen as Deputy Director
by former library board chair (and friend of Garnes and, later, a plaintiff
in a previous federal lawsuit)
William McClure.
Garnes lists her current position as a "retired/literacy and reading
consultant [in] Fairburn, Georgia." Her protégé (and Garnes' former
administrative assistant) Michelle Carnes is manager of AFPL's Fairburn
Branch, and AFPLWATCH has heard that Garnes has been hanging out at the
Fairburn Branch quite a bit lately. So that may explain Garnes' "Fairburn"
reference. Interestingly, Garnes doesn't specify in her resume for ALA
whether she is serving as a "volunteer" consultant, or, God forbid, is
actually being paid for her services.
Garnes' literacy credentials are also unclear, but
an example of her writing skills from her disastrous tenure as AFPL
Deputy Director bodes ill for whoever she's being allowed to advise - and
for ALA if its voting members elect Garnes again to its Council.
The biggest surprise of all, though, is that Garnes was able to somehow
obtain 25 ALA members' signatures to qualify for the 2006 Council ballot.
Voting for ALA Councilors began last week and ends April 24th. Voting
results will be announced May 1st.
Earth Crater:
Moon Crater:
Mars Crater:
Atlanta-Fulton County Library Crater:
Happy Birthday to the AFPL Crater!*
*Why not just put a building around the damn thing and start charging admission?
Recent Transfer Sends Disturbing Signal
Posted March 10, 2006
We were rather taken aback with the recent news of a C51 being transferred
from a branch library to Technical Services. The employee has cataloging
experience, and Tech Services - laid waste by the depredations of the
Hooker/McClure era - is sorely in need of assistance. So the official line
is that this transfer is in the best interests of the organization.
What alarms us about this transfer is that we hear it was instigated by the
employee. Does this mean that the long-discussed mechanism for employees
requesting transfers has been put in place? If so, can we get the
particulars pronto, so that all who want to can request the job assignments
of their dreams?
If, on the other hand, there is no official transfer mechanism, why has
this one employee been given special treatment? There are other library
employees who were involuntarily transferred out of Tech Services who
might want to get back there; indeed, who have specifically asked to be
sent back there - why aren’t their job-location preferences likewise being
accommodated?
And what about those Tech Services employees Left Behind after the Great
Decimation of their department - the folks who have labored heroically in
the shell that was all that remained of that department, continuing to
order, process, catalog, etc. all those library materials our vendors
couldn't handle themselves? Was it unreasonable for those employees to
expect that, after the years they've been working out of class, their
positions might be upgraded or that some vacant positions would be
imported into Tech Services so they could apply for them? Instead, someone
at a higher paygrade is suddenly brought in over them, and the doors to
upgrades or promotions are slammed in these other employees' faces. Nice
way to rebuild morale in an already morale-shattered department.
And how about all the other library employees in public service jobs who -
because it would mean no more weekends or evenings spent at AFPL - would
like to have interviewed for a posted, vacant job opening in Tech Services?
Most disturbing of all, what about AFPL administrators' repeated assurances
that that all jobs in the post-Hooker/post-Garnes AFPL would be routinely
posted and open for fair competition according to civil service rules? Are
merit system principles to be honored in "the new AFPL" only - like they
were in "the old AFPL" - when it's convenient?
Bad show all round, we say, and low marks to those who green-lighted this
recent transfer. We had hoped this kind of stuff was gone for good.
Latest Circ Stats Show What They Always Show:
A Few Facilities Serving Most of AFPL's Borrowers
Posted March 6, 2006; note inserted March 20, 2006
Last month's circulation totals,
translated into percentages of total AFPL circulation and then ranked from
highest to lowest, show once again what these figures have shown for
many years:
- Some branches are being far more intensely borrowed-from than
others.
- The busiest branches aren't necessarily the largest ones, and some
branches have long-since outstripped the resources allocated to them -
resources based on their "facility type" designation.
- Certain branches markedly outperform other branches that have the same
or roughly similar numbers of staff working in them.
The only surprise in the February 2006 set of circ statistics is Southwest
Regional's sudden jump from 10th-busiest to 4th-busiest AFPL facility.
[Webmaster's Note: According to an email received
March 19th from an AFPLWATCH reader, "the circulation stats for February, particularly
those far out of line from previous months, seem to have been caused by a SIRSI error." If this is
the case, we certainly hope AFPL administrators will distribute a corrected set of circ totals for
February soon.] Otherwise, the ranking of facilities circulating AFPL
materials remains remarkedly constant from month to month and year to year.
Addressing library use patterns by shifting more library employees out of
low-circulation branches and into the busier ones is long overdue. Library
administrators haven't attempted to match branch staffing allocations to
current circulation counts for over five years.
Continue reading previously-posted AFPLWATCH articles
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