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| The $185,000 Shelving Boondoggle |
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The shelving unit that collapsed was loaded with books that had been
returned to the library and were waiting to be sorted. Because of a
chronic shortage of shelving staff on the Central Library’s 3rd floor
caused by Library Director Hooker’s reallocation of staff throughout
the building, more books had been piled onto this set of shelves than
the shelves could handle. This set of shelving on the 3rd floor and a
similar set of shelving units on the 2nd floor were the only sets of
shelves in the building at risk of collapsing. The 3rd floor staff’s
repeated pleas for additional shelving staff had fallen on deaf ears.
While library customers were being denied access to the Central
Library’s collections, Hooker tried to divert attention from the causes
of the shelf collapse by indulging in flights of fancy about the
engineering aspects of library shelving-yet another subject she is
woefully uninformed about. Here’s Hooker’s "explanation" of the
problem to the trustees at their meeting on February 26, 2003:
"Shelves at Central...were found to be problematic....The problem
is the age of the shelving...Secondly the height of the shelving is 94
inches. Even a good-sized basketball player would be challenged by
some of this. That contributes to the weight and balance of these old
bookshelves."
The shelves on the 3rd floor collapsed not because of the age or height
of the shelves but because:
- The renovation and reorganization of the collections and staff on
the 2nd and 3rd floors was planned and managed so poorly that the shelves
were not properly dismantled and reassembled by the renovation
contractors, who were being rushed to finish their job so Hooker could
unveil the "new" Central Library during a national convention of
librarians who met in Atlanta last summer.
- Central Library Administrator Susan Earl and the other Powers That
Be had stubbornly refused to allocate an adequate number of shelving
staff to handle the 3rd floor’s huge book turnover-a problem rooted in
the administration’s determination to strip-mine the Central Library
of the staffing and financial resources needed there.
Library trustees and county commissioners--eager to believe that what
Hooker was telling them made sense--somehow failed to grasp that:
- The age of the shelves was the exactly the same before and after
Hooker spent $185,000 bracing them.
- The height of the shelves was exactly the same before and after
Hooker spent $185,000 bracing them.
- The average height of library staff and patrons has remained
constant between 1980 and 2000.
- The average height of a basketball player is about as relevant
to the problem of overloaded shelves as Hooker's shoe size.
- The Central Library’s shelves had done their job just fine
throughout the 20 years before Hooker arrived as library director and
suddenly pronounced the shelves--rather than her ill-conceived Central
Library reorganization or its ill-managed renovation--to be
"problematic."
- Hooker’s analysis, if it made any sense, would require every
library that’s been around for more than 20 years to immediately
replace all its "old" shelving--and, according to Hooker, especially if
its shelves are 94 inches high (or, God forbid, higher). Astonishingly,
Harvard, Yale, Columbia, etc. have not rushed to close their libraries,
despite engineering expert Mary Kaye Hooker’s recent discoveries.
Another reflection on the "logic" of Hooker's description of the
shelving crisis at Central: If her justification for spending $185,000
to brace the shelves is correct, shouldn’t library customers who
visited the library during all the years before those shelves
collapsed be banding together to sue the county for blithely exposing
them to such terrible risks for so long? (Speaking of lawsuits, if
Hooker is so convinced that the Central Library's shelves are
defective, why isn't Hooker recommending that the county sue the
manufacturer for all those apparently false claims about the safety of
those thousands of shelves the county purchased for the Central
Library back in 1980?)
Hooker claims she needs another $28,000 to, as she puts it,
"remediate" other Central Library shelves. At the May 28, 2003 meeting
of the library trustees, she justified her request for a further
waste of tax dollars this way:
"...The second floor reference shelves...are not adequate for the
oversized volumes now resting on them. Now, apparently, this has been
going on for a long period of time....These reference books, like your
encyclopedias, are like 12-13 inches deep. So they’re just precariously
balanced. And they could easily fall off, especially if they’re higher
in the shelf. So we do need just to replace the shelving....Because we
all need to feel safe."
--Everybody but the taxpayers, apparently. Some questions the trustees--
allegedly the stewards of the taxpayers’ money--might have asked
in response to Hooker’s latest analysis of the "problem":
- Why are these shelves suddenly inadequate for the library’s
collections? Like their counterparts on the Central Library's 3rd floor,
they also did their job for over 20 years without any safety incidents.
- Have reference encyclopedias actually gotten heavier over the past 20
years? Have they actually gotten any larger? (Memo to Hooker: current
encyclopedias range from 7.5 to 8.5 inches in width--not "12-13 inches."
Even the gargantuan volumes of the Thomas Register of Manufacturers
measure only 9 inches wide.)
- Central Library shelves come in two depths: one for circulating
books, another, deeper size for reference tomes and coffee-table-sized
art books. Why weren’t the two types of shelves re-distributed when
the collections on the 2nd and 3rd floor were rearranged?
- What happened to all the batches of extra shelving that were stored
on the Central Library’s 8th floor? Could it be that no one wants to
admit to the trustees that all the extra shelving was destroyed during
one of the administration’s manic 8th-floor clean-up campaigns?
- Why wasn’t the shelving capacity issue--if there ever was one to
begin with--addressed BEFORE the decision was made to move all the
reference materials to one floor, and all the circulating materials to
another? Could it be that these time- and labor-intensive moves were
simply too crucial to the director’s scheme to appear to be introducing
"innovations" at the Central Library while her real aim was to reduce
staffing at the Central Library?
The much-hyped and totally-overreacted-to Great Shelving Collapse of
2002--apart from the unprecedented denial of patron access to the
Central Library's collections for three months--is uninteresting in
itself. Even the $185,000 wasted is minor compared to the overall costs
of bad management practices (not to mention lawsuit damage awards) that
Hooker has brought to Atlanta's public library system. What is
interesting about the shelving collapse and how Hooker responded to it
is how this trumped-up "crisis" so perfectly illustrates the m.o. of
Mary Kaye Hooker. Eventually even the amazingly dense board of trustees
may realize that:
- Hooker is always asking for more tax dollars--or asking for
Board support of tangential "new" services and "initiatives"--to cover
up her profound lack of leadership and her lack of commitment to
providing a high level of basic library services.
- Hooker will say absolutely anything (especially to her employers,
the trustees) to divert attention from the real problems facing the
library system--not the least of which is the fact that the director
of the library system has been found guilty of racial discrimination
and yet continues to be employed as director.
- Hooker's plausible-sounding noises, if examined, often
turn out to be illogical, irrelevant, or contrary to verifiable facts.
- Hooker's has an astonishingly pathetic grasp of even the most
elementary details of library work, such as the average dimensions of
library reference materials.
- Hooker never takes responsibility for failing to address any
problem or ill-managed process--like the Central Library’s renovation--
that embarrasses the library or results in a reduced level of service
to library customers.
- Hooker is quick to suggest expensive, irrelevant technological fixes
for problems that she has invariably created by imprudently allocating
library staff or by ignoring staff advice or warnings.
- Hooker typically "discovers" a problem only after bringing in
self-serving consultants to validate a problem seasoned library staff
have long ago identified but have been forced to endure longer than
necessary because of Hooker's indifference to real problems and
hostility toward any news that a problem might be headed toward her
desk for resolution.
- Hooker simply cannot resist implying with every desperate breath
that all of her predecessors were ignorant baboons, and that the
trustees ought to count themselves lucky to have hired her as soon as
they did.
Fortunately for taxpayers, the county commissioners turned down the
library administration’s recent request for the extra $28,000 to brace
more of the Central Library’s "aging" shelves. Tax dollars should be
spent addressing real problems, not thrown at pseudo-problems that
have more to do with the library director’s Messiah Complex and
diversionary tactics than with improving the safety of library customers
or employees.
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