January 28, 1998 - My Cat and School Videos

I once had a cat named Watson. When both of us were young, I saw her do two things that pretty much define the problems of life, and perhaps of both librarianship and education.

The first case I witnessed when I happened to glance out the kitchen window of my Airstream trailer. I was living in the middle of the Sonoran desert at the time. I saw Watson slinking along, low to the ground. She was obviously hunting. So I scanned ahead of her position to see what she was after. It was a rattlesnake.

"She's doomed!" I thought. I jumped toward the door, but it was too late. Watson pounced. And her teeth closed precisely on the snake's rattle. Fascinated, I froze.

The snake bucked up, clearly in shock. Watson chomped. Chomped. Rallying, the snake whirled around, stretched its jaws, and struck.

With ghastly calm, without even lifting her head, Watson smacked the snake across the face. She didn't even extend her claws. The snake reared back, dazed. Chomp. Chomp. Another attempt at a strike, another smack. A few moments later, the snake was ... gone.

This filled me with new respect for my cat. But it didn't last.

Less than a week later, I was lying at the prow of the trailer, just reading. I became aware that Watson, and her brother Pookalure, were staring intently above me. So I looked up, too.

And there, langorously traversing the arc of the ceiling, was an enormous, very hairy spider. Abruptly, it dropped to the floor.

Desperately afraid that her brother would get it first, Watson made a mad scramble. Gulp. Then she sat back, almost smug.

Then something began to happen. She squirmed. Her eyes widened. Then she opened her mouth as if to say something AND THE SPIDER RAN OUT.

Now what can we learn from these events?

In the first case, sometimes utter boldness is the way to go. We have within us the capacity to triumph over danger, to ingest and even thrive on things that are clearly poisonous.

In the second case, in the name of competition with our peers, we sometimes make grievous errors in judgment. We take into ourselves things that won't stay put.

This pretty well stakes out the issues regarding the Douglas County School Board's recent stand on R-rated movies. The question: are such movies venomous (but edible) snakes? Or harmless (but deeply unsettling) arachnids?

Parents deal with the same issues at home. Will this book be all right for my child? Or will it terrify? If it does terrify, is it a useful lesson?

Books that many people in this country label as poisonous, as leading young people to evil, I found illuminating. Take another school district controversy, the book "Grendel." Grendel seemed to me an utterly tragic figure, the tale of a man who believed that God had rejected him. The book taught me to have compassion for the alienated, to look for the deeper truth.

Other books, "Total Woman" by Mirabelle Morgan, for instance (published around the same time as "Grendel"), seemed utterly innocuous. Morgan recommended that the way for a woman to forge a deep spiritual bond with her mate was to greet him at the door, at day's end, after draping herself only in Saran Wrap.

It was like the spider. It didn't hurt anything, I guess, but my stomach just rebelled.

As always, I take comfort in the fact that neither censorship nor self-righteousness stands a prayer. Some fine films with a powerful educational message get branded with Hollywood's "R." Children (meaning those people who in previous civilizations would already be considered adults, certainly old enough to have children of their own) will probably find these movies anyhow.

Meanwhile, there are many books -- and many teachers, for that matter -- whose bland safety serves only to bore and irritate otherwise fine minds. Our children will probably survive that, too.

January 21, 1998 - Serving on Public Boards

Criticizing our government is one of the most popular spectator sports in America. It's common wisdom that whenever three people get together to represent the public needs, they immediately sell out, become idiots and crooks, or were chowderheads to begin with. (The idea is that anyone who wants a public position should be disqualified on that basis alone.)

And if you never have to serve on a public board yourself, you can probably nurse this opinion your whole life.

But the time may come when you see a way you can contribute to the governance of some public body. You may see it as looking after your own interests, which is certainly true. Immediately, some horrible discoveries are forced on you.

First, you realize that things are sometimes more complex than they appear, and you may have to do some very careful listening and thinking.

Second, you learn that there really are some differences between public and private business. Often, governmental agencies are formed to solve a problem or perform some necessary service because no business can make a profit on it, or the potential costs to the customers would be ruinous. (Ruination of customers for necessary services is considered "contrary to the public good.")

Further, there is an obligation to be open in a way that many businesses are not, to be more aware of and committed to a process of public review and commentary. This sometimes slows things down. But in America we strive for "the consent of the governed."

On the other hand, there are many similarities between public and private agencies. A budget is a budget. Customer service is customer service. There are sound management principles and unsound. A good private board member follows many of the same rules of conduct as a good public board member.

According to the Colorado Division of Local Government, there are over a hundred special districts right here in Douglas County. Most are governed by public boards. Given so many positions and so few people with the time or inclination to serve, it's a safe bet that many of those board members are new to their positions. Of those, some have not held either governance or management positions before. If they have consciences -- and a conscience is what got them into this fix in the first place -- they realize that they could benefit from some extra training.

To that end, and because good government is predicated on well-informed citizens, the Douglas Public Library District is pleased to announce a special half-day workshop on Saturday, January 24, at the Philip S. Miller Library.

Our key presenter and facilitator is Pat Wagner of Pattern Research. Pat has provided board training sessions in the private, public and non-profit sectors for almost 20 years. Among her topics will be:

* What do you bring to the table?

* Ethics, Conflict of Interest and Personal Preference vs. the Public Good.

* Board Interaction with Staff: Boundaries and Micromanagement.

* Advocacy: Communication with the Public about Key Issues.

I'll also be slipping in a short presentation highlighting free sources of community information, and opining about the pitfalls of institutional arrogance.

If you serve on a board in Douglas County, you should already have gotten a mailing from us about this free workshop, which is open to public board members and executive directors only. But if you have NOT received such a letter and would like to attend, please contact Cindy Murphy, Public Relations Manager, at 841-6942 as soon as possible.

January 14, 1998 - 1997 Statistics

There are lots of ways to measure the performance of a library. The most important ones are deeply personal. Do you like to BE there? Are you well-treated by staff? Do you find interesting and useful materials?

Another kind of measurement is more quantitative. At the end of our fiscal year (end of December), our computer system cranks out all kinds of reports. I thought I’d share some of 1997’s numbers.

The most obvious measure of library activity is “circulation.” Circulation is library talk for “the number of checkouts.” In 1997, the total number of checkouts from all our libraries was 1,289,690, an increase over 1996 of 8.23 percent.

I haven’t seen 1997 figures for other Denver metro libraries, but last year, their average annual circulation increase was 3.5% -- and some libraries actually lost business.

Incidentally, over a five year period (from 1992 through 1996) the Douglas Public Library District leads the state in circulation growth: 74.7%. Our nearest competitor was Denver at 69.3% over the same five years. (Denver remodeled all of its libraries, opened two new branches, and greatly expanded the Main Branch.) After that was Arapahoe Library District at 43.1% (probably a result of their new Koelbel Library). After that, no library rose above a 25% growth in circulation.

In 1997, the number of our “registered patrons” actually dropped. In December, we purged from our files all those patron records that have not been active in the past 3 years. That included some 27,000 people (perhaps a commentary on transiency in Douglas County, or perhaps a reflection of families of many cards issued to a family, but only used by one person). On the other hand, we also issued over 13,000 new cards in 1997.

Incidentally, one of the clear findings was that for every book checked out by a male, four are checked out by females.

Some other interesting notes:

* 145 people work for the library. Together, they checked out 66,852 materials in 1997, over 5% of our entire annual business. That works out to 461 items a piece, or about 8 each week.

* Our 7 Board members checked out 763 items, which means each of them goes through about 109 items in a year, or about 2 items a week.

* Overall, our library patrons checked out about ten-and-a-half items each year. Our staff and governing board are clearly champion library users!

* In descending order, the top 6 categories of materials (together accounting for 96% of our business) are Juvenile fiction (at 34% of all our checkouts), adult non-fiction (at 21%), adult fiction (at 15%), videos (at 10%), juvenile non-fiction at almost 9%, and audiotapes at a little under 7%.

* Holds (requests placed on materials that are either checked out or at another one of our libraries) account for about 10% of all our checkouts.

* Ten percent of these holds, in turn, are initiated by patrons from home or work, either through our library modem, or over the Internet.

* District-wide, we handle about 83 checkout sessions (where a session is one person checking out any number of materials) every hour we’re open. In that same hour, we check out about 380 items, or average of 4 items per session.

* Over 60,000 new items were added to our holdings in 1997.

* Last year we offered 1,571 children’s programs, with a total attendance count of 28,793 kids. Eleven young adult programs brought in 164 young people. Our 173 adult programs fetched 1,943 people. Another way to look at this is that among our full service libraries (Highlands Ranch, Oakes Mill, Parker, and Philip S. Miller), we get an average weekly program count of 8 for each location, and an average weekly attendance count of almost 150 people.

Overall then, it has been yet another year of growth for the Douglas Public Library District.

January 7, 1998 - Library Returns Lost Bibles

I used to work at a place that had eight Xerox machines. Because the machines were getting old and temperamental, we saw four of the local technicians fairly regularly. One year, within the space of a few days, three of the tech people announced that their wives were pregnant. When I commented on the odds against that, one technician looked me straight in the eye and said, “Reproduction is our business.”

I have several more stories with a slightly different message.

It happens that two folks from California -- one from Salinas, one from Vista -- lost their personal Bibles at the airport. One left it on an United Airlines flight from Florida to Denver, and had been frantically looking for it ever since. The other had been reading at DIA while waiting for a flight to Cleveland.

United Airlines rounds up the stray books regularly. About twice a month, we get a box of donations.

Most of the time, there’s no clue as to where the books came from. So we add them to our shelves, or pass them on to the Friends of the Library for their booksales. But on occasion, people (or institutions) have stamped, scrawled or otherwise marked their names and addresses. In that case, we try to route the books home.

That’s precisely what happened with the two California Bibles. And while we send a fair number of items back to their owners, few people write back to thank us. The folks who got their Bibles were the exceptions.

The Salinas resident wrote, “I cannot tell you how filled with joy I was upon receiving my Bible back from you! Thank you! It is my most cherished posession. I have been scribbling notes in it for 20+ years.”

The Vista resident began, “Dear Good Samaritan,” and soon confessed, “I ... don't really know how I left His Word behind ... a guide for my life and something that encourages, directs and helps me to help others.”

People don't misplace only their Bibles, of course. We get school text books from Hawaii. We get books on Interlibrary Loan from Tennessee. We find business manuals and historical romances and murder mysteries and you name it.

Books don't come to us just from airlines, either. Last fall, one of our patrons was driving along I-80 in Nebraska. He stopped at an automobile rest area to find a library book sitting on one of the tables, with no one else around. He returned it to us. We, in turn, passed it back to the Iowa library where it came from.

There are two lessons here. First, if you really value a book, and particularly if you intend to be traveling with it, make sure you have indicated where to send it. Be proud of your books! Claim them! Book plates are available from all the better book stores. Buy them and use them. And again, before you travel, make sure you’ve kept your address information current.

Second, if you do mark your book, and should misplace it, and it should be forwarded to a public library, you shouldn't be too surprised when you get it back. After all, matching up the right book to the right person is our business.

December 24, 1997 - Excursion Train Program

My son Perry is crazy about trains. He always has been. So for us, Christmas will be (again) a snarl of tracks and steam engines and train books and videos.

But it turns out that you don’t have to be three-and-a-half years old to be a train buff.

Johanna Harden, Archivist of our Local History Collection, recently presented me with an information folder on the Royal Gorge/Tennessee Pass Steam Excursion. You might have seen the historic train come puffing through Douglas County this past June. It left Denver and passed through the Royal Gorge and Tennessee Pass on its way to the National Railway Historical Society’s annual meeting in Salt Lake City. The excursion train slowed traffic on I-25 for miles, as people pulled over and waved at the proud Union Pacific #844 steam engine.

Or maybe you missed it. That’s too bad, especially since the Royal Gorge/Tennessee pass route was officially closed on August 23, 1997. No trains are now running on the former D&RGW tracks.

But do not despair. You can step back into time and relive the whole trip -- through video, slides, and human memory -- simply by attending a program on January 11, 1998, at 2 p.m., at the Commissioner’s Hearing Room in the Philip S. Miller Administration Building at 100 Third Street, Castle Rock.

Entitled “Riding the Cushions,” the multi-media presentation is part of our Local History Collection program series 1997-98 (see below for the list of remaining programs). So far, all of our programs have been blessed with extraordinary speakers. “Riding the Cushions” boasts three such speakers, each with a very different view of the excursion. Steve Patterson BNSF locomotive engineer on the Joint Line (which runs just west of the Philip S. Miller Library), was a passenger on the excursion train.

Our second speaker is Stephen A. Lee, Union Pacific Railroad, Manager of Train Operating Practices, is one of two steam locomotive experts in the United States. I’ve read his article “So, you want to run a steam locomotive” (in “Trains,” July 1989) in which he shows the fifty-six (yes,56) valves, gears and switches that make up the nerve center of a steam locomotive. He’ll be discussing the technical side of the trip.

Our third speaker is Eric Sondeen, a lieutenant of the Littleton Fire Department, who worked as a car attendant on the excursion. Lt. Sondeen, like our other two speakers, is also a member of Operation Lifesaver, which seeks to prevent train collisions. The Douglas Public Library District is thus far the only public library in Colorado to invite Operation Lifesaver to give public presentations.

You can bet Perry and I will be there.

Here’s a list of the 3 other Local History Collection programs (also held at 2 p.m. in the same location):

February 8 - “History by Mail:” Douglas County & Colorado Postal History, featuring James Ozment, and Erwin Engert.

March 8 - “Letters Home:” Love Letters to Baby Doe, a soldier’s words to his parents, Lizzie Smith’s first Christmas on West Plum Creek 1872, and more.

May 17 - National Historic Preservation Week 1998 Celebration, A Concert of Civil War Era Music, featuring the Fourth Artillery Regimental Band, For D.A. Russell, Wyoming Territory.

All the programs, sponsored by the Douglas Public Library District’s Local History Collection, are free and open to the public.

For more information, called Johanna Harden at 303-814-0795.

December 17, 1997 - Cults and New Faiths

I recently received a written complaint about a book called Cults and New Faiths. Published in 1981, it was written by one John Butterworth, editor of a newspaper in Northern England.

For the very first time since I have received such a complaint, I am going to remove the book from our collection. Let me tell you why.

The nature of the complaint was that the information in the book about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was incorrect. The book labeled Mormonism a "cult" and cast aspersions on both its origins and its theology. Also branded cults were Christian Science, Eckankar, Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology, and others. The term "cult" was never defined. The "new faiths" (also undefined) included Bahai'i, Freemasonry, Rastafarianism, and Transcendental Meditation!

In my formal response, I said that the issue was not whether the views of the author are true. The way I see it, most of what's in print these days is slanted in one direction or another. But the public library is in the business of collecting books, largely the offerings of mainstream publishing houses; it is not in the business of either editing those books or endorsing their contents. We do try, however, to achieve some balance in our coverage of various issues.

An example is the topic of abortion. Some support a woman's right to choose. Others believe that abortion is murder. Hence there are books both for and against abortion, both of which may be found in our collection. The same situation exists for a host of sometimes controversial topics: environmentalism, homosexuality, welfare, evolution, and on and on. In other words, our materials reflect some of the views and biases of the authors now writing on the subjects. The library has neither the means nor the wisdom to "correct" those views. Again, the mission of the public library is not to decide who is right. We reflect the views of our culture, and provide a place for members of the public to examine those views, and make up their own minds.

In the area of religion, it is even more difficult to get at the "truth." Butterworth, an English newspaper editor, holds up various faiths to his own yardstick -- some form of Christianity, although he never says which denomination. According to that yardstick, every other faith is found wanting. Such a view might be extremely offensive not only to Christian Scientists and Mormons, but also to the Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim reader.

But just because a view is offensive doesn't mean that it's wrong. It doesn't mean that it's right, either. It is simply the viewpoint of the author, whose name appears right there on the cover, and whose statements can be considered, further investigated, adopted in whole or in part, or utterly rejected.

So I do not believe the book should be removed on the basis of its content, however superficial. (And it is superficial. Most faiths get two-to-four pages of coverage, with lots of sidebars and photographs.) Moreover, the book has some historical value. It captures a certain perspective from the late 1970's. Such data is of potential interest to the social historian. The topic of cults is of undeniable interest to our patrons, who have checked out this book at least three times a year for many years in a row.

The problem is that the Douglas Public Library District is not an academic institution, determined to preserve historical records on all topics. We seek to maintain a relatively current collection. By our standards, the book Cults and New Faiths is in poor physical condition and very dated. It is not generally acknowledged as a key work in the field. In fact, we should have "weeded" it from our shelves some time ago. ("Weeding" is librarian shorthand for the part of collection management that removes older items to make way for new ones.)

So although the library must resist adopting the role of public censor, it would be contrarian to keep a book just because someone complained about it, when our standard procedures should have removed it for other reasons.

My decision, therefore, was to remove the book. We will, however, replace it with a more current title or titles on the same topic.

December 10, 1997 - Video Loan Periods

Every now and then, we get a patron suggestion for a basic change in how we do business. One of the more recent suggestions was to change the loan period for all videos to one week.

This notion came to us by way of a written comment card (you’ll see them scattered around our libraries). Every other week our library managers get together to keep apprised of each other’s activities, and to kick around any issues that have surfaced. The library manager who received the suggestion (Holly Deni at the Philip S. Miller Library in Castle Rock) then raised the suggestion at the managers meeting.

We have a bias about patron suggestions: we prefer to take them. The loan period for our videos started out as 2 days, mostly because we didn’t have very many of them, and wanted to keep them moving. Then, back in 1996, we moved the non-instructional videos to the way it is right now.

We have two different video loan periods. One of them is for 4 days. This applies to the basic non-instructional video. The other is for 7 days, which applies to how-to videos and educational videos.

But there’s something decidedly inconsistent about this. It’s confusing for staff AND for our patrons to have to keep track of two different due dates for what seems to be the same kind of material. In short, the patron had a good idea.

So it passed the manager review. Then we ran it past front line staff to see if they could think of any problems with it.

The most significant staff concern had to with “holds.” Right now, we usually buy an extra copy of something (except for the big blockbusters) for every four requests. Would the fact that videos checked out longer mean longer waits, and therefore more holds, and therefore more purchases of videos?

So we took a look at what winds up on hold. And we learned that while we do a fairly brisk business in videos, they don’t account for many of the holds. People tend to check out what they find on the shelves.

As it happens, all of our video shelves are getting a little crowded, and in some of our libraries, we’re running out of new room to put extra shelving. This is particularly so at Highlands Ranch and the Philip S. Miller Library in Castle Rock: our building expansions at these locations are still a ways off. So the longer long period meant that we should be able to display a few more videos in less space.

In sum? The change made our procedures more consistent and therefore easier to remember, and gave us a little more breathing space.

Our only other issue was statistics. We track all kinds of materials uses, and it’s tidier to change loan periods at the beginning of the year.

So effective January 1, 1998, all our videos will check out for 1 week. Until then, it’s business as usual.

Our other limits on video use remain: there is no grace period for video checkouts. Overdue videos will be charged at fifty cents a day, up to $5.00. (That’s so you remember that even if they’re overdue, it’s cheaper to bring them back than to have to pay for their replacement.)

So there it is. Thanks to our patron for a good idea, and to our staff for giving it thoughtful consideration.