Books or Shiny Objects

I have a bumper sticker on my car that says,

Vote for Libraries

and I wonder these days if I should cover it over till November.  Because I don't want people to think that voting for the upcoming building referendum is the same thing as voting for your library.  Au contraire.

The library has been a heart-rending subject for me over the past several years, as many of you know, since the current director took over and began to run our wonderful Charleston County Public Library into the ground.  After years of cruel and insane state budget cuts, and the retirement of a long-time director and the death of her successor, I believe the board must have been feeling a bit shell-shocked.  And vulnerable to the candidate that told them what they wanted to hear:  "I can make your library better and save you money."  If that sounds familiar, it is because it is the song of the political south.  Long story short, they hired this guy who was once director of the hot-shot Louden County, Virginia, library system, over the acting director, whose smarts and dedication to our library should have made her the natural choice.

He demonstrated his snake-oil charm when he came in to visit the various branches.  He has the ability to make you think he is listening and agreeing, except if you actually think about it afterwards, you can't pinpoint a single point that you made that he agrees with (unless he agreed with it to begin with).  He has used that ability well since he has been here.  He hired a group of consultants and paid them to tell us exactly what he wanted them to; that is, that the library needed to downsize its collection.

In a manner befitting a tyrant, he instructed supervisors that their annual employee reviews were too generous and unacceptable, so that those who were already living far below a reasonable wage were now forced to endure reviews that were obsessively critical.  He instituted an employee chat site, which he could monitor, telling us employees that its purpose was really to bring us together as a group, or some such nonsense.

His coup de grace was the fulfillment of his promise to downsize our collection.  Books that had not been circulated in one year were to be tossed ("weeded").  Further, different branches did not "own" certain holdings based on their size and needs, but instead, books were kept at whichever branch they were returned.  Main Branch is no longer Main Branch in the sense that that is where you once went if you wanted to browse Charleston County's collection.  Smaller branches had to contend with overcrowded shelves and were encouraged to just keep weeding.

Books, music CD's, newspapers and periodicals are being cut, and we are being sold a not-ready-for-prime-time electronic collection in their place.  The bizarre "floating collection" in combination with the severe weeding policy has led to half filled shelves with multiple copies of lesser known newer books and the loss of older titles that are either not "hot" titles, or that just take up too much space.

So I am a fervent library supporter who cannot support what they are jokingly referring to as a library "expansion."

And neither is the Charleston Chamber of Commerce.  Ironically, we are opposing the referendum for totally different reasons, but they come down to the same thing.

It may be important to have more public computers, more meeting rooms and more programs, but in the end that is not what people will be willing to fund.  Without the books, the library will be a community center, and therein lies its vulnerability.  If we no longer need to keep our libraries open so the public can come in to browse and check out its collection, the funding is not going to be there for more and larger buildings.  Libraries experienced phenomenal growth throughout good times and bad (until recently) because they gave people the ability to expand their horizons.  As convenient as it is to place items on hold and then run in and pick them up, when we lose the desire to browse we are losing our ability to discover new things.  When you are reading your newspaper online, you aren't going into the reading room.

It is true that many people use the meeting rooms and computers and attend the programs.  But many more people do not.  We have virtually nothing to show for those big new buildings.  In fact, our virtual library is a shadow of what our once great libraries were.  So when it comes to funding, the public pressure just won't be there.  And that means that the funding we have will continue to erode.

The many thousands of volumes that we have lost in the past several years will not be replaced.  I will not vote for more shiny new buildings without a real commitment to return our library to a growing collection of books, wherein there is depth: older books, important books, classics, books on a range of subjects that may be hard to find.  Libraries were not built to house merely the popular, but the books that we might not ever read without our libraries.

Mark Sanford and Me

Do you remember with some fondness, as I do, those years with W. in the White House and Mark Sanford in Columbia?  Yes, fondness.  Each Christmas I bought my son a 365-day calendar with a quote from our president -- who knew one man could say so many dumb things?

And as for our governor, before we learned of his hikes across the Appalachian Trail, even then he gave us much cause to feel superior.  I recall tales of his quirkiness, and there is one that comes to mind today:  in his frugality, he insisted that staff use the backs of post-it notes before they could throw them out.

I can identify with that, to a point.  I am also frugal.  Not only have I had to live on a shoe-string much of my life, but I've been able to do it.  And without stealing funds from the government, I add proudly.  Admittedly, using the back side of a post-it note is ridiculous, and a testament to our former governor's bad judgment.  If I don't need to stick a little piece of paper on something, I won't use a post-it note, but instead a scrap of paper.  And I do mean scrap.  It would pain me enormously to use a whole piece of paper when a scrap of formerly used paper would do.

It's not just financial considerations.  I know that part of living in the style to which we Americans have become accustomed requires waste.  Plastic utensils at fast food places.  Old computers and iPods.  Snail mail.  But I do believe it is our responsibility to measure that waste against need.  To me it is unconscionable to use a marker when a pen will do, or a pen when a pencil will work.  Who would buy plastic single serving containers when so many foods sold in groceries and take-out restaurants serve the same purpose?  And yet we waste where we need not every day, every one of us.  Small amounts that add up.

One of the great things about libraries has always been that they maximize use:  of books, DVD's, computers, magazines.  And our own Charleston County Public Library lately contends that the reasons they are pushing for electronic borrowing are financial and environmental.  And yet.

And yet they throw away books that have only sat unread for one year.  Throw them out.  And when voracious readers like myself are looking back even a few years for popular authors like Terry Pratchett or important biographies of say Clarence Thomas, our library no longer owns them.  One of our options is then to have the library search outside of Charleston County, which is called Interlibrary Loan.  It's an amazing program which has always stretched a library's holdings by virtue of exchanging with other libraries.

A few years ago, the free ILL service imposed a fee of $2, in order to partially cover the cost of transporting items.  Given the things our library system spends money on, and how relatively infrequently ILL was used at the time, I grumbled.  But now, with our collection shrinking (which is happily promoted by the director as a good thing), we can either pay the two bucks or skip the book.

Then there are date due cards which were formally date due slips, another blast from the past.  Librarians (like Marian the Librarian) spent hours stamping the dates due into books being checked out.  And then came the mixed blessing of date due receipts, printed slips that listed all the items being checked out at one time.  Waste of paper, harder to use than a card that could be stamped many times, and which would inform us of the date due just by opening the book.  But given the volume of check-outs, maybe a necessary evil.

So the other day I checked out some items.  When I got home, I pulled out the slip that lists the check-outs and due dates in order to throw it out, as do many of you who follow your record online or have developed other ways of keeping track of items to be returned.

Imagine my surprise when I saw, at the bottom of the slip, the following:

Shameless, indeed.

So each time each person checks out one item or many, they will learn that:  "Charleston County Public Library connects our diverse community to information, fosters lifelong learning and enriches lives."

I had no idea.

For every wasteful government project, there is a salesperson who has reeled someone in.  And in this case, someone at our library was convinced that adding the empty blurb to the bottom of each date due slip would... what?  Presumably if you're checking an item out, you use the library.  I would like to meet the person that reads that blurb and says, "Aha, I had no idea."

Actually, I'd like to meet the person that reads the blurb.  I actually showed a friend two slips, one I dug up from 2012, and the one I got last week (I have no idea when they started adding the blurb because I never read the damned things).  I asked her to tell me what was different.  She looked carefully and couldn't come up with anything better than different due dates and different items.  Even when we read the slip, we don't read the blurb.

So please, please, if you have any influence at the Charleston County Public Library, of which I have none, please convince them that this is a waste of money, paper and ink.

And maybe you can suggest that, with the money they save from printing "the blurb" they can remove the Interlibrary Loan Fee.

Thank you.

Dumbing Down the Library

The government is embarrassed of itself; we're ashamed that we exist, and so we have become beggars.  Libraries have been doing it for years.  The right wing in this country has found an easy target, politicians have grabbed the pitchforks and led the charge.  And government services, and especially libraries, are cowering in the corner saying, "Please don't hurt me."


Look at what libraries have done to prove that they really aren't going to be trouble.  Cut hours, cut staff, cut materials.


There are other neat things library directors are doing to make libraries more palatable to those who control the purse strings.


Computers.  Not only do we have public computers, and free wi-fi, but it's now okay for people to bring their coffee and soda to the library, because we don't want Starbucks taking business away from us.  And bring your cell phone, and don't be shy -- talk as loud as you like, because we don't want you to stay out of the library because you feel inhibited by its rules.


And because we need more space for computers, and for the  bistro-like atmosphere we are trying to develop, and of course to save money, we will cut our book budget.  No, no not the bestsellers, we'll still get plenty of those, hundreds of copies so you don't have to wait for them.  But those books not too many of you read, that literature type fiction and those non-fiction books.


And because we don't want you to think we are old fashioned, we are going to spend more on e-books and downloadable audiobooks, but not too much, because, of course, we don't want you to think we are wasting money.  So we won't get those esoteric kinds of books that most of you don't read.


And if we haven't yet convinced you that we are the library of the future, the library that all you taxpayers will want to fund, we are going to carry DVD's -- lots and lots of DVD's.


Our director boasted that our circulation statistics have gone up some ridiculous number, like 45%, since changes he put in place in September.  Well, I'll tell you, in September, we went from limiting DVD checkouts from five to unlimited.  So ask the librarian about the increased checkouts.


When people check out 10, 15, or more DVD's and are back before the week is up, when a parent stocks up on DVD's to keep the kids quiet in the car, we have to ask ourselves -- we really have to ask ourselves, is this what we want our libraries to become?


Count libraries in in the race to the bottom.

Choosing to Pay

It occurred to me, as I was listening to the ongoing harangue by America's politicians, that this is an absurd debate that we are having.


We are able to keep taxes low by voting out of office anyone who suggests we might need to pay more for government services.


We don't get to vote for price increases for anything else.  Would you agree to pay more for, say, homeowner's insurance?  (The ever popular dumping ground of South Carolina was chosen to have a rate increase this year, my policy increasing by 18%!)  How about airfares -- how would you vote on doubling fares on the Sunday after Thanksgiving?  And don't forget the cost of food; would raising food costs get your vote?


Yet the service that has always given the most bang for the buck continues to get squeezed, to the point of failure.  Take schools, or the postal service.  And my own personal favorite, public libraries.


Why do we continue to think that we should get to vote down the cost of government services, while paying top dollar for everything else?


Let's take a look at this fallacy, and let's figure out a way to give it the fresh air it needs.

Overextending Babies and Libraries

Apparently, a sales team similar to the one that sold all the libraries in America on the need to install defibrillators in every branch has come up with another brilliant scheme.  It is called Babygarten.  Apparently it has been around for a couple of years.  It's the kind of deal that voters can't say no to, and that library administrators can force on a workforce that is already stretched too thin in the interest of good PR.


Not to be completely negative, there is a place for a program like Babygarten.  It is, apparently, an early learning program.  To be real, it is ridiculous.  It is smart marketing, is what it is.


Babygarten invites parents to come to the library with their "0 to 18 month old" and begin preliteracy training because it is "the emotional bond that is nurtured by a reading ritual".


In other words, it teaches parents to interact with their infants.


As a retired psychologist, I am suspect of "programs" that use big educational words and constructs (see, I just did it) to try to impress people.  Interacting with an infant does not necessarily come easy to a new parent.  But call it what it is:  it is teaching parents to look at, talk to, sing to, and touch their new baby.  If a parent does this from birth, that child will be likely to be more attentive, alert, content, and yeah, all those good things that are likely to make a child want to learn to read at an early age.


But not 0 to 18 months.


So why are libraries being reeled in like eager trout?


Because the government is scared.  We are begging our funding sources to please, please like us.  And we do that with children -- and the big library buzzword: programs.


And it works.  Tell the public you are going to increase children's anything in a library and they will love it, sight unseen.  Uncritically.


But the payback comes in the cost.  Staff is minimally trained and stretched even thinner.  Adult "programs" and materials, i.e. books, are cut to make room for more stuff for children.


This is what happens:


Our library director, who loves children, and all things children, has increased the purchasing of children's books, and decreased the purchasing in the adult collection.  This, despite the fact that circulating children's books now have to be "weeded" to make room for new children's books, far more than a good, growing library needs.  Ask the public, would you like more children's books in the library, and find one person who says no.


Additionally, because our director loves children so much, he has decided to drop fines on children's books on children's library cards.  Sound good?


Except that if you have an overdue children's book, you are no longer allowed to check out another children's book until that one is returned.


Oh, and it turns out that we now have experienced a precipitous drop in fine collection, for which our director has decided he will raise adult fines by $.05 up to $.20 per day.


Overextended?  Maybe, but don't you like us?

Libraries in America

I was moved by the essay in The Nation by William Scott about his experience in building and rebuilding the Occupy Wall Street Library.  In those words I read the struggle I am having with my own small job within what was once a wonderful and growing public library.


Our director blew in like a hurricane a year and a half ago, with a prestigious career (so he says) as director of the public library system in the wealthiest community in the country.  He is well read, not so much in literature and the sciences, but in library trends and innovations.  He is also a politician, and he has found, in our community, people who trust him.  With their library.


I am small potatoes in this job, a retired psychologist tickled to be working in a place where I can do good without having to battle big business (i.e. the health insurance industry).  Libraries have been my life, from my first library card at age 6, through volunteering in every library I could from junior high through college through my children's school years.


And now I am saddened to hear patrons with the same breath, tell me how much they love libraries, and how they remember their first librarian, and how wonderful it is that we are cutting costs with self-check-out.


Our director is bringing us into the 21st century, for better or worse.


So it was with less surprise and more the feeling of another shovelful tossed on the coffin that I learned that we are weeding our collection.  And not just weeding, but extreme weeding.  Because the consultants that were paid to come up with a five-year plan that pretty much endorses what our director has planned since he walked in the door, have said that our collection is too large.


They know because they used the scientific method.  They compared our library to libraries in neighboring states with neighboring demographics.  So, I guess libraries that are underfunded and facing severe budget cuts and have to prove that they are serious about cutting out "waste" in order to continue to get barely adequate funding.


What this means, and what our director is good at, is building up the programs that look wonderful to the public.  Programs is the catchword.  Children's programs is the winner.  Increasing the children's book collection while decreasing adult books, particularly the less popular non-fiction titles.  "Floating" our collection.  This means that books are not sent out to an owning branch, but all belong to the county library, and wherever a book is returned is where it stays until it is checked out again.  Or until it is thrown out to make space.


Because not all branches are the same.  We have small branches (that are called "large branches" much like Starbucks sizes its coffee), that should be made larger, as circulation has multiplied.  People tend to go to the larger regional branches where there is more selection to check books out, and return them to the smaller branch in their neighborhood.  And now that is where they stay.  So that we have, on our slower moving non-fiction shelves, three copies of a book, while we are throwing away a single copy of another because it hasn't circulated in a year.  Yes, one year.


So we are throwing out books. With abandon.  After several months of weeding like crazy, I read that the director has recently announced to his branch managers that he is now reading to really get to weeding.  I couldn't read another sentence.


Then I read this from William Scott's narrative:

Then at 7:30 pm on November 16, the People's Library

was again raided and thrown in the trash--this time by a

combination of police and Brookfield Properties'

sanitation team. The NYPD first barricaded the library

by lining up in front of it, forming an impenetrable

wall of cops. An officer then announced through a

bullhorn that we should come and collect our books, or

they would be confiscated and removed. Seconds later,

they began dumping books into trash bins that they had

wheeled into the park for that purpose. As they were

throwing out the books, a fellow OWS librarian asked

one of the NYPD patrolmen why they were doing this. His

answer: "I don't know."

At my library, I feel like that NYPD patrolmen who, when asked why he is dumping books from the People's Library, can only say, "I don't know."

Talking to Ourselves

Last week I sent a letter to the editor to the Charleston Post and Courier, in response to their editorial regarding the ad I made for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, addressing Senator Lindsey Graham's comment that he would look at increasing the Social Security retirement age.

Then I thought, suppose they don't publish it?  After all, it is critical of the thoughts of one of their editors.  I copied it into a blog posting, but that wasn't enough.

So I have been thinking about freedom of speech, and our ability to actually speak out.  The ad by PCCC certainly upset people like the editor who responded (which editor was it anyway?), and he had the means to respond.  Whether his response made sense was irrelevant; he had the podium.  He also has the attention of the many people who read the Post and Courier editorial page, more I think, than read the news.

We do, today, have more options than we did a decade ago.  I can make a You Tube video.  That is probably the most universal and immediate way to be heard by people who don't know you, who are interested in the topic, who will hear you whether or not they agree (and then possibly respond with a thoughtful idea or maybe something obscene).  And where else can an individual go to respond to an attack, or argue an unfair proposal by an organization bigger than they are?

For the most part, on issues, we end up talking to ourselves.  I don't watch FOX, my coworkers don't watch MSNBC.  We meet on Facebook with like-minded friends.  We read bloggers whose interests are like our own.  There is no place to go to debate amongst ourselves, to argue all points and feel we have listened and have been heard.

And suppose we want to let people know we are going to get together?  I am thinking specifically about how long it took me to connect with fellow Democrats in my neighborhood.  Do we place notices in the Post and Courier?  Or the City Paper?  We need a website these days for certain.

Where in our neighborhood can we post notices?  The library has a policy which is adhered to based pretty much on the motivation of the individual branch manager, which does not allow religious, business or political notices to be displayed.

Yet the library is now displaying brochures regarding religious support for communities, because our governor believes it is cost effective to use churches instead of tax dollars.  And we smile on businesses who throw us a few dollars to help support the Summer Reading Program or a less formal relationship by letting them post on a library community bulletin board.

What the library doesn't do is allow groups to post notices of meetings.  Let me clarify, if you are in a knitting group, it's okay to post.  But if you are in a group meeting to talk about politics, whether it be a formal meeting of a democratic or republican group, or just meeting to talk about, say, how to lobby for peace in Afghanistan or increasing library funding, you can't advertise it on the library's community bulletin board.   I think that's interesting.

People read that thing.  They look to see what's for sale, and what's going on in their community.  And yet there are meetings going on in their community, of varying levels of importance, that cannot be advertised, pretty much because they might be controversial.

A number of years ago, one of the branches allowed a giant poster to be displayed advertising a meeting at a church, at which a national republican figure was speaking.  I made some quiet noise until some good people complained and it was taken down.  It was blatantly political, and the community bulletin board at the library was not the place for it.

But notices of meetings?  It seems strange that a small notice of the monthly meeting of the local Democrats/Republicans/Tea Party/Progressives with a time and place can't be posted at what is really the most logical place to communicate:  the local library.  The big guys, the newspapers and television stations in a community will never be a mouthpiece for any but their own political views, even if they try hard to print or run opposing views.  And we are a culture that does not gather in the street to inform or debate the issues of the day.  So that pretty much leaves us, individuals or partisan groups, talking to ourselves.