A Prelude to Tonight's Board of Trustees Meeting

Tonight's meeting begins at 7 p.m. in the Lewis Auditorium, and as we have for the past four months, we'll be sharing the meeting via a video livestream and through Twitter (you can view the feed on this blog's front page).

The agenda and documents are available online, but in short, the Trustees will be voting on collection policy documents and discussing more about the search for a new executive director (you'll find a draft of the job description at that last link).

In the Department Reports, we learned from Interim Head of Adult Services Mary Towner that the Library sent approximately 8,566 books to Better World Books early this summer. Of these, 2810 were added back to the collection and a nearly equivalent number were officially weeded. Although the bulk of the art and religion collections are now intact, Towner notes that approximately 3,000 volumes were not returned or are otherwise unaccounted for.

The community is still watching what goes on at the Library vigilantly. For instance, on a neighborhood association e-mail list last week, a resident posted about what seemed to be another weeding project. Towner posted a thoughtful blog entry discussing what was really happening - students from GSLIS were undertaking a preliminary evaluation of a portion of the collection - and that librarians from adult services were supervising.

Stay tuned for updates, but we here at Reclaiming Our Library hope to see many local residents come to tonight's meeting (and next month's meeting and the one after that...)

As a parting note, may we all have as much desire to be involved in our communities as this 12-year old Dallas boy, profiled recently in the Washington Post blog. Take a watch!

Notes from Trustees Meeting (10 September)

Last night's meeting was relatively brief - a little less than an hour - but it was packed with information. In fact, it seemed the public learned more from the trustees and staff at Urbana Free Library about the ongoing issues related to #bookgate in last night's meeting than in any other forum to date.

Notably the trustees described the terms negotiated for former director Lissak's terminal contract and some general details about how the search for a new permanent director will proceed.

We learned too from acting head of adult services Mary Towner that 297 boxes of books were probably shipped to Better World Books (BWB) during June. Towner spent 45 minutes on the phone with BWB, but that would have been unnecessary if the employee who has access to the Library's BWB account would simply provide access to it. So it seems that among the ranks of the Library's staff, partisanship and allegiances continue to hold sway.

Another takeaway from the meeting is that the trustees might need refresher courses in Robert's Rules of Order, their own by-laws, and the Illinois Open Meetings Act. Much of the confusion focused on two issues: how to change the meeting time for the regular board meetings and on the chain of command for the search committee (e.g. who chooses who serves on it - the appointed head of the committee or the Trustees).

You can read a brief article about the meeting in the News-Gazette, but be sure to check out some notes provided by Kathryn La Barre who attended the meeting. There is also a recording available of the meeting courtesy of JP Goguen, but the sound quality is hit and miss.

With Friends Like These...

Allow me to call your attention to a brief announcement in the September 2013 Director's Report.

"The August 22-26 book sale raised $7,147. The sale included items from the library collection from the Better World Books shipment that were not returned to the collection after careful re-evaluation by the Adult Services librarians. According to the Friends, of the 145 boxes of books offered to the Friends for the sale, a total of three boxes of books were selected by the public."

Dear Reader, I attended this book sale on Saturday, August 24. Full disclosure: I bought a handful of books that had been returned from Better World Books and not added back to the collection. 

Most of the books that filled the Lewis Auditorium were donations, not discarded library books. The paperback mystery selections—no library copies among them—were lovingly attended and groomed by a circulating clutch of Friends. The romance and fantasy paperbacks were also tenderly tended. 

The Library's former books? The ones at the heart of #bookgate? They were partitioned off in two small rooms, still in boxes, difficult to browse. A few other boxes, even more jumbled, were shoved into a corner of the large room. There were signs pointing the curious to "Former Library Books."

I didn't count the boxes - adorned with the Better World Books logos on their sides - but I would be surprised if there were more than 50 available all told. 

Where were the other 100 boxes? I have no idea. Some were stacked up in the back hallway. A Reclaiming traveler said when s/he inquired about them, s/he was told the boxes contained "crap fiction" that no one would want.

Perhaps, just maybe, the Friends could have sold more than 3 boxes of the returned books if they lovingly groomed and curated even a small portion of them in the same way they did the rows of James Patterson, Sue Grafton, and Lillian Braun.

Of course, the Friends didn't want any of the returned library books to sell, period. As one of the Friends stated during public comment at the June 19 Special Meeting of the Library's Board (you can listen at about 01:26:00 mark in this recording), no one wants to buy old library books anyway. We were told to trust the Friends, that they know better than even the librarians what the community wants to read.

With Friends like these, who needs enemies?

JP Goguen looks back on #bookgate

JP Goguen, who helped bring the news of June's massive and misguided weeding project at Urbana Free Library to light, has written a summary of the past two month's events.

As we wait for a response from the Library's Board of Trustees to the open letter mailed to them this week, we hope you'll read JP's article and explore this blog to help catch up on what you missed and why it matters.

On the Library's site, you can also find results of a recent parking and transportation study (see Planning Studies) it commissioned.

A Little News

The Library's June 2013 statistical report was posted this weekend, making available a more complete view of changes in collections and circulation over the past several years. You can view a compilation spreadsheet of data points since 2007 and offer your comments / questions as well.

Interestingly the June 2013 report DOES NOT include accurate information about the extensive weeding of a portion of the adult nonfiction collection (#bookgate) that precipitated public concern. If you examine the report, you will not that it states 161 adult nonfiction and 9231 adult fiction books were removed from the collection. In actuality more than 9,000 nonfiction books were shipped to Better World Books. I

Many of the weeded books have been returned to the Library from Better World Books, and adult services librarians  are now re-evaluating these materials. A large number of these previously weeded books will likely be returned to the collection, but it may be several weeks before more accurate collection figures are available.

Director Lissak has provided some information about strategic planning in response to FOIA requests, but much of what she has returned is fairly minimal and consists primarily of documents recently made available on the Library's website. In the near future, we will compile documents from the FOIA requests and make them publicly available on this website.

In the News-Gazette, you can read librarian Amber Casten's tribute to recently retired head of adult services Anne Phillips  and a thoughtful commentary on library governance and public oversight by Barbara Wysocki.

The next meeting of the Urbana Free Library's Board of Trustees is Tuesday, August 13. If you are a local resident, we hope you will attend. We have much to learn from the Board about plans for an interim director,  how the public will be allowed to participate in strategic planning, and more. There are many questions that remain unanswered too. This blog will offer more information about the meeting closer to its occurrence.

Trustee Bill Brown speaks about the crisis at Urbana Free Library

In today's News-Gazette (Sunday, July 7), Trustee Bill Brown - the newest member of the Library's Board - presents his thoughts on recent events and actions.

Here's are excerpts of Brown's comments:

The public comments at board meetings on June 11 and 19, as well as the city council meeting June 17, and the dedicated research and other materials provided by interested members of the public, will make it possible for the board to begin to address the many concerns library patrons have brought forward...

The library director recently put detailed statistics on the library website showing the sections that were weeded with this process. She also put board packets for previous meetings on the site along with the minutes that were already there. While this is a start to greater transparency, the board obviously would benefit from more public scrutiny. Not only was our adjournment late into the night on the 19th a violation of the Open Meetings Act, three of the first five meetings this year also adjourned after closing hours. If a member of the public wants to come to see the last five minutes of a meeting, they should be able to do that. Meeting rooms must remain open and meetings should be video recorded and archived...

In all of this, I'd like to remind folks that our library is more than a building and books and media and meeting space. The library has achieved excellence and respect through the work of people — directors, trustees and employees. There is no point in trashing reputations, but it's perfectly acceptable to be professionally critical of those who can respond in public — the director and the board. 

There is no excuse for shifting blame to employees or criticizing them in public. One of the first priorities of the board should be establishing effective grievance procedures and protections to help alleviate tension in the workplace. 

Thank you, Trustee Brown, for standing up against the status quo. We must discourage 'blamesplaining and voice our concerns. Let's put the public back in our public library.

The Director Responds to the Past Month's Controversies

Please read the Director's report to the Board of Trustees in advance of next Tuesday's meeting: you can find it here.

Here's part of what Lissak said about the problematic Strategic Planning and process:

"I would strongly discourage any rewrite of the Strategic Plan. We had an especially strong community committee that was very representative of Urbana. The plan includes concrete measures of our efforts and a method for the Board to evaluate and revise the plan annually" (p. 3)

 And here's a selection from her comments on weeding:

"The non-fiction weeding controversy surfaced mid-month. The controversy began with false allegations sent in a letter to City Council and Board, and the false statements then spread through social media" (p. 4)

If you find her response satisfactory, then consider your / our work done. But if you find yourself outraged—as many of us who have been working closely on this issue do—then I hope you will come to the Trustees meeting on Tuesday, July 9, in the Library's Auditorium. It's scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m.