Libraries are supposed to serve all patrons who walk in the doors. The ones who roll in the doors too, on wheelchairs. We are supposed to provide them books to read. Help everybody find education or entertainment. I volunteer at a library that has spent most of a decade with budget cuts, despite serving a relatively rich area with $500K houses being average for retirement. Rich retired people expect good government services.
The library, to the patron, works. They don't mind all the books unshelved. They don't mind the long delays from reporting a scratched movie to its getting back on the shelf. These are rich people, for the most part. They will order it on Netflix, no big deal. Netflix will send it to them. Overdrive does the same with books. For the cost of overpriced librarians with menopause and paranoia issues, striking out at their coworkers with neurotic random accusations, you can fund an enormous amount of ebook and audiobook download content. For the cost of dealing with a person, you can afford to replace them with 24/7 services that don't wear out, don't require a person to handle or check in materials or inspect or leave weird useless codes they came up with, psychotically without telling anyone.
Yesterday I spent two hours polishing DVDs because the audiobooks I'd like to clear back onto the shelves had 12-19 discs and the same librarian just wrote "polish" on them, not which disc needed it. And its usually one of those dozen plus that needs polishing. So there's audiobooks on that shelf now for nearly two months because the DVDs have a higher payback. The DVDs get borrowed. The audiobooks are less frequent. And once an audiobook gets scratched, they will skip forever. Polishing sometimes works, or reduces the skip duration, but it isn't removed entirely. This is a reason I think all new audiobooks should be recorded, but this isn't my library to run, and archival standards I think are rational aren't happening here.
Last week I learned that the library where I work was using funds to put brand new books into a robot in North San Juan. The robot will take their library cards and drop a book in their hands, and return the book too. Sounds neat right? In North San Juan, everybody is growing dope, and few of them shower more than once a year. Those brand new books are going to get smudged and saturated with dope smoke and worse and will be ruined. Thousands of dollars of books are going into this machine, in a place where paying a local to run room-sized library makes more sense, even with limited hours. They don't have a school. San Juan has a bar, and their market is called Mother Truckers, and its on the dirt road out of town, on the Ridge where the growers are. NSJ is all about comfort zones, and crazy. They have shootings there, and home invasions by jilted Trimmers seeking revenge after an unpaid summer of work, and the results are often deadly and don't get back to the sheriff. Somebody gets shot. Somebody gets buried. That's the kind of place The Ridge is. And they're not going to take well to a robot kiosk.
I know that the county library is a girls club. I know that half the women working there are menopausal, and many of them need retirement. I know that the few men working there are volunteers, like me, and the ONE man paid by the county as a librarian has had his life threatened at the nasty library in Grass Valley, and there are no apologies coming from the head librarian or the police depart that didn't show up for two hours, despite being two literal blocks away. I'd like to say this indicates the library is broken, these mistakes and spending problems... but for patrons it works fine. For patrons this is a good library. As a patron it has excellent books and a good selection to read. It doesn't matter about its management choices or destructive willingness to participate in only partly funded expenditures that divide their time and reduce their job satisfaction, making them lash out against coworkers. The library is fit to be tied, under the surface, but the patrons only see that it has nice books.
So it works and nobody knows it is broken. And they might even get money for hiring employees someday, but I expect that patrons will turn that down. After all, it works. As far as patrons care, it works. For my own sanity I'm there once a week and not getting much appreciation. Unhappy people complain, and you can't have a conversation because they're extremist Liberals despite most donations coming from Conservatives, which is NOT what you'd expect. I think there's a future for a conservative MALE librarian, which is why I continue my education, but I don't think there's a future in this county's library. A single token MALE employee and over 50 paid females? Duh. Of course that's gender bias. It is painfully obvious bias. Radical lesbians and man haters think they can do whatever they want, and with the married librarians unwilling to say anything, you have a hostile work environment. I will never work there because I can see its a hostile work environment and its mismanaged, with unfinished projects everywhere. With contrary and illogical policies meant to attack volunteers and ridiculous bias enforcing attacks on those who do the work by those who don't? Sorry, that just isn't a future I want any part of. This is a shame. I don't think the Friends of the Library want things this way, but that's how it is. This is another example of a no-baby-dirty-bathwater situation. Throw it out? Well, the patrons wouldn't understand there's a problem, and you'd have to build back a working model after tossing out the trash. Sigh. Too much effort. Start over elsewhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment