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AFPLWATCH Stories Posted in November 2006

Say It Ain’t So, John!
Posted November 6, 2006

At the monthly meeting of library managers on November 2nd, AFPL director John Szabo referred rather vaguely to some “changes in materials selection” that would be coming down the pike soon via the library system's Collection Development Librarian.

Before that meeting and afterwards, several of our correspondents heard the rumor that these changes are not minor tinkerings; that, in fact, beginning in January 2007, the current practice of branches selecting 100% of their materials (except bestsellers) will be abandoned and that the great majority of the library system’s budget for materials will be selected by a newly-formed committee of librarians.

We hope this extremely alarming rumor turns out to be false, and for a bunch of reasons:
  1. Remote control is never as effective as hands-on, local control - of anything, including selection of library materials.

    This is true whether you’re talking about trying to rule India from London or whether you’re talking about the effectiveness and efficiency of the county’s Department of Information Technology taking over the library system’s website, or some other county department taking over the library’s printing, or some other department taking over the library’s cable television station.

    The further away from the needs of actual users - rather than theoretical or never-personally-encountered users - of library materials the selectors of those materials are, the greater likelihood of their misjudging those users' different - and constantly morphing - information needs, and therefore ordering the wrong materials. Sure, the materials budget may get spent, but on way too much stuff that’s useless to the people the money was meant to benefit.

  2. Selection by committee runs counter to the notion - repeatedly espoused by Mr. Szabo and other library administrators and enthusiastically supported by branch employees - that branch collections should reflect the needs and preferences of their particular communities.

    The people in the best position to make selection decisions are the people who interact, day in and day out, with their facility’s users. A centralized committee’s wisdom (assuming it has any to work with) is no substitute for staff interactions with patrons, for staff observations of (and conversations with their colleagus about) what their patrons tend to borrow, for what patrons have told the library’s employees they’d like more of, and for first-hand knowledge what types of materials tend to sit unused on a paricular facility's shelves - no matter how much use others, elsewhere, might make of those materials.

  3. Centralized selection works best in an environment of homogenous users - and Fulton County is not one of those environments.

    Staff at AFPL disagree about a lot of things, but one thing most long-time employees would agree on is that no committee member who works day after day at, say, Bowen Homes is in any position to select materials for, say, Northside’s library users - and vice versa!

    Yes, there may be some similarities in the information needs of certain sub-groups of branches, but very few generalizations could be made about the information needs of all 33 different facilities - or even all four or five types of them. As we’ve found out over the past year with the Floating Collection, one cannot even assume that bestsellers will circulate well (or at all) at certain AFPL facilities - no matter how many copies the Floating Collection Committee supplies them with.

    Furthermore, the facility profiles necesssary to making any centralized selection system work even in theory would need to be developed carefully for it to work at AFPL, and there has been no effort - recently, anyway - to obtain such information in enough detail to realistically guide a committee’s choices. And no profile can substitute for or even approximate the very specific knowledge about a library branch’s constituency that’s gleaned by that facility’s staff over time.

  4. There are not currently enough competent subject specialists at AFPL to constitute an effective systemwide selection committee.

    Many of the veteran selection specialists who worked at AFPL in the pre-Hooker/McClure era were replaced by inexperienced (and/or and/or untrained and/or indifferent) individuals. There has been no library-wide training of AFPL selectors for seven years. (Memo to library administrators: Vendors cannot and do not train selectors about the ethics and vagaries of selection, so we hope the library isn’t looking to some vendor to do the training that produces excellent selectors.)

    The disturbingly small number of qualified, properly mentored, and seasoned selectors at AFPL is bad enough news. Putting inexperienced or unqualified people on a committee with authority to choose materials for everyone is a recipe for disaster on a large scale instead of the smaller scale such a situation has already produced.

  5. There is no reason for librarians to trust an AFPL selection committee composed of the individuals who are likely to be appointed to such a committee.

    Regrettably - and avoidably - the naming of AFPL committees is currently a very secretive, political process. In this case, there's been no invitation for qualified or experienced selectors to volunteer for a systemwide selection committee. (Ask yourself how the individuals on the Floating Collection Committee - or any other recently-created systemwide committee - got chosen.) Furthermore, there is also no clear process for new people to join an AFPL committee, or to get off of them to make room for the contributions of others.

    AFPL committees are apparently (and unfortunately) created based on the advice of people often not in a position to know the best candidates. Why should any administrator - none of whom have daily contact with the library systems’ hundred or so selectors - be relied upon for recommendations for committee members? What if the best selectors at AFPL are unknown to administrators or happen to be busy serving on other committees?

    Given AFPL's recent history, limiting a centralized materials selection committee to library managers is fraught with problems. Employees are well aware that certain managers got their jobs through dubious appointments rather than by merit, proven experience, or because of the esteem of their colleagues. Those colleagues are often reminded of how unobjective, self-serving, and uninformed the decisions and work habits of those managers can be. Why should something as important as the library collections be entrusted to individuals who have proven themselves to be untrustworthy or whose selection expertise is not incontestable?

    Given the available talent pool and the likelihood that unqualified and unrespected individuals, along with (if we're lucky) a few qualified and respected ones, would be appointed to such a committee, how could there even be a workable level of mutual trust among the committee's members, apart from the respect or lack of it among librarians not on the committee and yet beholden to their decisions?

    Until the committee-creating process becomes more rational and more transparent at AFPL, there is no reason to expect another systemwide committee would be composed of the most qualified members - and for this particular task, it should ONLY be composed of qualified people - whether or not they happen to be favored by this or that library administrator.

    The only way to get a decent, trustworthy centralized selection committee is to identify the selection strengths that currently exist throughout the entire organization. So far, we’ve heard of zero plans to canvass the work force to obtain and then analyze this information objectively before forming the committee.

    Librarians who have not demonstrated beyond dispute their competence and interest in selecting materials should certainly not have their influence on collections be deliberately expanded beyond their immediate work sites. Substituting the judgment of a non-credible committee for the qualified, experienced judgment of individual facility selectors would be a tragic waste of talent in the facilities where that talent exists and a terrible, unnecessary waste of tax dollars.

  6. There is substantial empirical evidence against trusting a committee or others outside a facility with selection decisions.

    Ask anyone at any branch library for their opinion about books and other materials that have come to them in recent years that branch selectors themselves did not order. The scorn you’re likely to detect in their horror stories are based on painful, embarrassing episodes of being inundated with unwanted, useless items paid for with various pots of money and selected by library administrators. These periodic wastes of money should not be institutionalized by sanctioning a selection mechanism that relies on more selection-from-afar.

  7. There’s not enough money available for library materials to gamble even part of it on items chosen by individuals not intimately familiar with a particular collection's needs.

    If the library system’s collection budget were much, much larger, setting aside, say 20% of it for branches to fill gaps created by a centralized selection committee's oversights and biases might be sufficient to keep a branch collection viable. But 20% of most branch budgets will barely be enough to order replacement copies of lost items, much less be sufficient for implementing collection goals developed by the branch staff in response to actual (and often changing) collection needs expressed by branch users.

    And forget the gradual expansion of any branch's special collections or the filling of any glaring gaps in its non-special collections. The chances of those special needs and those particular gaps being acknowledged and remembered and addressed by off-site selectors are nil.

  8. Centralized selection increases the chances of creating collections that institutionalize certain biases.

    Like members of every profession, librarians often share common political, ethnic, gender, etc. points of view. One of the chief advantages of decentralized selection in a large system like AFPL lies precisely in the diversity of its selectors' choices - a situation that counteracts the tendency toward homogeneity. In a group of 50 selectors, the majority may share certain biases/points of view, but the law of chance ensures that some of the others will not: they will have different biases that are reflected in their ordering and that, in turn, reflect at least a few of the diverse voices and information needs in the communities the library system serves.

    The spreading of the selection process over many individual selectors automatically minimizes bias in the library system’s collections; the oversights and mistakes that different selectors make sort of cancel out each other. The library system's patrons benefit from this arrangement, since they can use Holds to draw upon the entire system's collection, each part of which has been determined by different selectors with different biases. No committee can replicate this randomness, because randomness is a function of a large number of selectors.

  9. Building a useful library collection is an organic process. Current - and sometimes radically different - collection needs cannot be captured by good intentions, an unwieldy committee, and large sets of cumbersome-to-update and difficult-to-assimilate "user profiles."

    Collections evolve out of continuous - and sometimes complex rather than no-brainer - choices. Anyone who visits a branch and examines its collection is exploring the choices made by previous selectors over many years. Selection is just too tricky for committees. (Should one choose to order the newest Susan Albert Wittig title to add to the others one owns, or do you order instead a mystery by an author totally new to the collection?)

    When you deliberately narrow the number of selectors, you’re choking off the possible choices, and you begin to strangle the life out of a library collection.

  10. The announcement of centralized selection would be a huge blow to the morale of conscientious AFPL librarians.

    Several dozen diligent selectors - some of whom are not managers and may never be managers - rightly regard selection as the sole surviving library task that involves a substantial degree of intellectual challenge and responsibility. The public’s access to and use of the Internet has eliminated virtually all reference work from the librarian’s day, and for many librarians, the thoughtful stocking of a relevant collection is their most important task. Take this away, and you’ve further demoralized an already demoralized but hard-working and effective group of employees.

    Losing, by administrative fiat, the ability to improve, in a very concrete ways (buying particular needed titles and working on collection projects that require several years of concerted effort to accomplish) would, we think, be the most demoralizing thing to happen to AFPL since, six years ago, Mary Kaye Hooker’s massive reassignment of staff resulted in the destruction of the subject specialist network at Central and the decimation of the Technical Services Division.

    Worst case scenario: AFPL's best selectors - the ones with specialized educational backgrounds or subject expertise and/or those with the longest practical selection experience and/or with the highest personal standards for customer service and/or possessing the most enthusiasm or proven aptitude for materials selection (as distinguished from, say, planning library programs) - are forced to spend less time carefully improving their respective collections. Instead, they find themselves spending more and more of their time and energy trying to rid their collections of the now-more-numerous expensive, useless items chosen by less able, less experienced, less professional collegues, some of which they hold in the lowest esteem and whose selection skills they are repeatedly given evidence to deplore. More librarians at AFPL end up ashamed of their collections rather than being proud of them, and of their heretofore ample opportunities to improve those collections.

    We cannot imagine a work environment more dispiriting than this one. To stand helplessly by while a library collection one has strived for years to steadily improve is taken hostage by people who one may not even know, and whose individual and collective judgment one has no evidence for respecting is a horrific, debilitating prospect.
We’ve heard that the reason centralized selection is being pursued at all at AFL is that, despite taking home their hefty paychecks year after year, certain branch managers still cannot manage to spend out their share of the library system’s materials budget.

If that’s the case - and it's no secret that it is the case - then there are safer, saner ways to address that problem. In fact, we don’t understand why, other than keeping their doors open for business, it’s not a manager’s most important job to spend out his/her facility’s budget. We also fail to understand why, if a manager is consistently failing to accomplish this obviously important task, there are zero personal consequences for that manager. Embarking on centralized materials selection as a way to address a personnel problem would be a spectacularly disastrous instance of throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.

Besides, why punish the people who are doing their selecting jobs by diminishing their already ill-funded opportunities to directly serve their users, whose information needs they are in the best position to determine? Even more important, why jeopardize the usefulness of library collections to the library’s users because a few incompetent or indifferent managers aren’t earning their salaries by routinely spending out their materials budgets?

Decentralized selection at AFPL, while imperfect, has resulted, here and there throughout the library system, in a few pockets of excellent service (in the form of improved collections) in an institution otherwise characterized by massive mediocrity. Centralized selection would wipe out these oases of excellent librarianship and spread even more mediocrity throughout the system. In fact, continuing AFPL’s decentralized selection practices could be one of the keys to preventing further deterioration of the institution’s effectiveness and provide a basis for excellence in at least one one aspect of the library system's mission.

Instituting centralized selection at AFPL would be a tragic mistake - tragic for the library’s users and tragic for the library’s competent selectors. We hope the rumor we’ve heard about centralized selection being instituted next year just isn’t true, or that the decision to pursue it at this juncture in AFPL’s recovery from the institutional decay and disintegration of the past ten years or so will be thoroughly re-examined.

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