The new City Council agenda is out and hot off the interwebs is an item outlining purchases of new materials for the new Santa Clarita Library system, which the City & LSSI will takeover from the County on July 1.
The item says that, overall, the three County Libraries in the SCV have over-reported how many materials they have on site by almost a quarter of a million items. As a result, the City wants to spend $1.3 million to purchase new materials (separate from the forthcoming purchase of existing materials, which is, as far as I know, under negotiation) in order to bring the entire valley-wide collection up to date and up to par with other regional libraries by opening day. The $1.3 million amount also includes furniture fixtures, technology products, library signage and promotional material.
Anyway, back to the materials (books, DVDs, etc). Here’s text from the item:
On January 27, 2011, collection development specialists from LSSI conducted a comprehensive on-site assessment of the local public library collection. Overall, LSSI’s collection development professionals identified many areas where the collection requires enhancement through the acquisition of additional library materials. In addition, it has been determined the local library materials collection of approximately 287,000 items is much smaller than previously understood based on information from the website of the County Library (which states approximately 524,000 items), in the Newhall facility library needs assessment (which states approximately 431,000 items), and in the library facilities impact fee study prepared two years ago (which states approximately 403,000 items). By comparison, the Burbank Public Library has a library materials collection of approximately 514,000 items, and the Glendale Public Library has approximately 773,000 items. The purchase of additional library materials to enhance the local collection available to customers on opening day, and the continued emphasis on collection development every year through the 22% increase in the annual budget for library materials previously approved by the City Council, will over the next several years raise the quality of our library materials collection to the high standards expected by the library customers of the City of Santa Clarita
And here’s the breakdown of where they want to spend the money on materials (for a total of $900,000 of the $1.3 million):
I think overall this is encouraging news. I like the emphasis on e-book purchases (though I’m a Kindle owner and won’t benefit) and adult books. I’m pleased to see that Twilight will only account for 17% of the purchases, though I bet there’s plenty of Twilight books in the existing collection as is. I think this is a good move and will make the Santa Clarita Libraries better on opening day.
HOWEVER….implicit in this request for more “start up and service enhancement costs” is a sort of backhanded accusation (edit: Darren Hernandez’s comment on that is here)that the County of Los Angeles has over-reported the amount of resources available to existing library patrons. Is that true? I have no idea. I’ll take the City at its word with this one big caveat: it’s LSSI doing the counting and LSSI that’s going to get the $1.3 million order for new materials, furniture and technology products.
This is the way it works in our brave new outsourced, privatized system: the City cuts the check based on LSSI’s recommendation, and LSSI buys the goods.
Something to ponder as we continue to watch this slow-motion story unfold.
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As the writer of the Agenda Report it was not my intention to delivery a backhanded accusation that the County Library has overreported their resources. One cause of the anomolie is the County Library has around 40,000 ebook title that they place into the catalog of each of their branches so when a customer searches for items only at that branch they get the downloadable titles also. That counted for 120,000 of the variance. The balance represents items that are lost/missing, have been removednfrom the collection but not the database, etc. These anomolies were likely picked up by one consultant and then by other consultants relying upon the work of previous consultants studies. The bottom line is that we would like a larger local collection so our customers can benefit from having more and better library materials available quicker (and local collections similar in size to cities like Burbank and Glendale), in addition to those available through the delivery system of the Inland Library Network partnership. This is only about building up the Santa Clarita Public Library and nothing else.
Also, LSSI will be paid for the library materials purchased on a reimbursement basis after presentation of invoices, so there will be full accountability for the library materials purchased before payment is issued.
Thanks for the note Darren; I’ll amend the post with a link to your comment.
Darren –
Has LSSI factored in ‘campaign contributions’ to the council members that voted yes on the library takeover? If they gave the standard $30,000 (like G&L did to Laurie Ender), that would be $120,000. This might throw off their profit model and result in more costs to the taxpayer. Just curious.
Please see Request for Proposal PS-10-11-20 and contract for City documents on this matter.
The Request for Proposal PS-10-11-20 — LIBRARY COLLECTION REVIEW AND APPRAISAL dated November 10, 2010 read in part:
“There are approximately 450,000 volumes in total. This total consists of approximately 375,000 books, 30,000 audio recordings, 30,000 video recordings and 15,000 periodicals. The selected firm will be provided a copy of the collection listing for the appraisal. The condition of the collection can be assumed to be that as found in the average large, modern public library. The successful proposer will be provided a collection data list of materials to work from. The list should contain the title, publisher, date of acquisition and quantity.”
The RFP provided for a contract award of January 12, 2011 and a project completion date of February 21, 2011—about five weeks to do the review. How did LSSI complete a comprehensive on-site assessment in one day? Please make public the list LSSI provided.
Was this RFP awarded, or was it abandoned in favor of having LSSI do the review? Since LSSI receives five percent of the cost of all acquisitions per contract, [In accounting for the cost of the Library Materials, LSSI shall include a fee of five percent (5%) of the cost of the Library Materials ordered ("Materials Handling Fee")]. Is this not a lot like asking the fox to watch the henhouse and charging for security duties?
The RFP stated that there were 450,000 items in the local collection; you state the County website showed 524,000 items, and LSSI’s one day review came up with 287,000 items. Why was an accurate assessment not done prior to the decision by the City to take over the library? Such details should have been discovered in the City’s attempt to exercise due diligence before awarding a $19,000,000 contract. These “anomalies” should have been reconciled before the City considered taking over the library, so that all costs could be accurately estimated and benefits accurately described.
LCCB: You said “Please make public the list LSSI provided”. Understand that while the California Public Records Act allows for oral requests for documents, with immediate access, you have to show up at the relevant the city department to make the request. In the real world, if you are serious about requesting the list, you need to make a written communication to the City Clerk’s office with your request. One of my favorite judges, now retired, who handled lots of Public Records Act cases said, repeatedly, that he was not going to get into a “he said, she said” over oral Public Records Act requests, and that if one wanted to sue to obtain public records one better have made a written request for them, to the relevant City Clerk first. The judge said that he wanted to see the phrase “This is a California Public Records Act request” in the letter.
So wisdom dictates that if you want the “list” referred to above that you put your request, in writing, to the City Clerk with enough written detail so that she and her staff can figure out what you are asking for. Otherwise, on the judge’s theory, a city/county/public agency’s staff will simply blow you off when you say, in a forum other than a letter to the City Clerk, something like “Please make public the list LSSI provided”.
I’m not writing the above to taunt you or to be mean, but rather to educate you that the city staff understands how the law works and they probably are going to make you jump through every formal hoop to get what you want.
From a practical point of view, the foregoing information applies to every public agency in Santa Clarita (e.g. school districts, water agencies) as well as to L.A. County, so readers please educate your friends who are naive about this topic of access to “public documents and records”.
I got about fifteen written requests in at this point on the library. I know how it works. I was giving Darren an opportunity to do the right thing and back up his statements. (But really, do you think LSSI actually did an onsite survey in one day?)
A PRA request will not be responded to in less than 3 weeks, if experience is a guide. My time line is shorter…
I guarantee you I am not naive regarding PRA requests in this City.
I grew up in Burbank on Orange Grove between 3rd and Glenoaks, literally across the street from the Burbank Library. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to take the red car to the Central Library in downtown LA. History seems to be repeating itself. Earlier this week I took the 757 bus to North Hollywood to renew my LA City library card (keeping all my options open). The LA City collection of books is even more extensive than the counties, and although the LA libraries are only open 5 days a week, 7 ½ hours a day, not nearly the hours planned for our libraries, I believe I can work around that easier the I can work round Ender and McLean telling me what I can read. LA City’s loan policy is not as generous as the counties. Don’t know what CSC’s loan policy will be like, but that is also much more important the hours of operation.
Sylmar Branch is just over the hill from Newhall, and you can
use your LAPL Library card there too!
Dana Eklund, Young Adult Librarian
Sylmar Branch, Los Angeles Public Library
Does lapl still charge for holds and such? My library doesn’t.
Placing holds is free with the LAPL Library Card,
and it takes about one week for items to be sent
from the Main Library (Richard Riordan Central
Library) or from any branch to the Sylmar branch
(or to Granada Hills branch, for that matter). You
can hold most items just by going to the website,
http://www.lapl.org, and looking up the item in the catalog.
Certain items such as movies and music CD’s, cannot
be held automatically, but you can call the owning
branch and ask them to send it over to your closest
LAPL branch, and again, it takes about a week to
get there in delivery.
Hope this helps!
Dana Eklund, Young Adult Librarian
Sylmar Branch, Los Angeles Public Library
So, approximately half of the “missing” books are ebooks, which the County automatically adds to each branch’s collection.
Is this not something that could have been accounted for, from the beginning? If adding 40,000 ebooks to each branch collection is standard County library practice, why is this news? Why is this something “discovered” by an LSSI audit?
This really looks like sloppy accounting.
I should clarify that the sloppy accounting could very well have been on the County’s side — I should not have implied, or jumped to the conclusion, that the sloppy editing necessarily originated somewhere on our end.
Fact remains that someone messed up, someone was uninformed that the title count included ebooks, and now the taxpayers are going to pay to the tune of over a million extra bucks, unaccounted for in the original contract and budget.
Very telling that one of the leaders of the anti-city library group is actually criticizing the city’s for buying more books. Lori, it doesn’t sound like 120,000 books are now missing from the shelves, it sounds like they were never on the shelves. So that would mean if the folks at the city didn’t spend $900,000 on more books nobody would have noticed because the same number of books would have been on the shelves. You don’t have to like leaving the county system, but at least give the city credit for implementing a plan to make things better.
Right. That is why I put the word “missing” in quotes…because it doesn’t appear that items were ever really “missing.”
More items in the library is a good thing. Spending tax money for an unaccounted expense, when the City has already exceeded its proposed “savings,” for items to which are already available to us through the County system, is the problem.
It is not better for users to have more books on the shelves if they are losing access to the more than 6 million items and services through the County. Especially if those new books are the likes of which Cheryl mentions below.
Did the collection development specialists from LSSI conduct a comprehensive on-site assessment of the Burbank and Glendale library collections? Maybe their library numbers also include ebooks and lost/missing books – we don’t really know, do we.
Having spent the day in the LSSI Temecula Library a few months ago, I am concerned about the new items that will be chosen for us. I spoke to Mark Smith, VP LSSI, after one of our library meetings and told him about the shelves of new audiobooks on CD that were in the Children’s Library at Temecula. They were definitely brand new and I had never heard of or seen any of the titles before. They reminded me of the $5.00 videos that show up at Target and Walmart now and then with strange animation and characters you’ve never seen before. The librarian told me, Oh, those were just a part of their “opening day collection.” Now all the Newbery Award Winners, California Young Reader Medal Winners and classics may have been checked out that day, but seems unlikely. I will only hope that we will get the best of the best for our kids – all the great award winning books in print and on audio CDs. Every library needs to constantly replace classics like Where the Sidewalk Ends, Charlotte’s Web, the Boxcar Children and the Lord of the Rings and Tillerman Family series. Emergent reader series need to be front and center in this new collection as well and I hope to see it all. There seems to be a great budget for making it all happen and I’ll be the first to go and see what our tax dollars have added to the shelves.
You are 100% correct, Cheryl. Let’s hope included in the batch of new books are a lot of classic titles. I agree with Jeff, it’s good to see the current popular titles represent a smallish part of the pie. Popular books can introduce people to the joy of reading, and the joy of reading can introduce them to the classics. At least that’s what happened to me. Now I rarely read current popular books, but I know they serve a purpose (and, anyway, good for those people who enjoy them for the fun of it). Anyway, keep on it, Cheryl!
Cheryl, I agree with your thoughts.
My big complaint about libraries generally, and Valencia library particularly, is that they kept discarding gardening books which had “low circulation”. It was so frustrating to go back to the library, to get a book I had seen 2 years prior, only to discover it had been removed from the Valencia shelves permanently.
If circulation of an important reference (e.g. Color for the Landscape in Southern California by UCLA Prof. Mildred Mathias) has a time limitation, then of course those who use the book are going to return it. Just because the book is only used by a few people a year doesn’t mean that it’s a “useless book” or one that should be thrown away.
This is exactly why so many were upset when Laurie Ender was so shocked that nearly 50% of Valencia’s collection was not constantly in circulation. On the Library Committee each month we talk about what our priorities are and what services are a must for this library. One of the categories is: To Satisfy Curiosity: Lifelong Learning – that should include, in my mind, a huge amount of non-fiction information books on diverse topics, like local landscaping. Will these books be checked out constantly – probably not – but they need to be there for people just like you. There are so many people involved in the decision making phase of this library mess that have no idea what a library really is suppose to be. I will quote a great definition in hopes that the right eyes will read it:
“Libraries exist because our society values the free flow of ideas and opinion. They are not about profit. They promote access, equity and diversity. America’s public libraries are the building blocks of democracy, valued for their comprehensiveness, currency, openness, and multiplicity of viewpoints.
America’s libraries have a trust: they are both the first source and the ultimate repository of knowledge. Their core value is to deliver the materials and services that undergird the public’s right to information. That is why public libraries are geared to choosing quality, equity and effectiveness over ‘efficiency.’ That is why most of the collection of a good library is not in circulation; it is a resource for those whose interests extend beyond what is in vogue. It is this “inefficiency” that distinguishes libraries from bookstores.
Library services are not designed to generate a profit but rather to provide vital services to the public.”
I think we all agree and should push the point that a popularity metric for the purchase and retention of books is not a good thing. Were you able to get those books on an inter-library loan request at least?
I would prefer that they purchase copies of the Constitution and Declaration and hand them out to each patron at the checkout desk.
A great number of the books I read are not new or classics. Frequently there is a single copy in the COLA or LA city collections. To expect the CSC to buy these books would be unrealistic. For the city to buy them would be irresponsible.
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I agree with Cheryl, I hope the purchases aren’t wasteful but quality materials for emerging readers and books that will be useful to our home school families.
If you look on page 18 of the LSSI contract with the City, LSSI gets to charge the city (I mean us) a 5% material handling fee for all purchases. Is that normal?
Are they going to show receipts? Or are they going to list the books at retail price, and make a profit selling them to us at retail, and…ad 5% for the materials handling fee. This could be pretty lucrative. If they can do an “on site comprehensive assessment”, apparently in one day, and they already have a standard list of what they think should be in the libraries, how long will it take to get this order dropped shipped. Maybe they can get volunteers to help shelve them and put in the RFID chips, and save a little more.
Library Startup costs now equals $9.2 million plus another $1.3 million equals $10.5 million?
Bye, Bye Santa Clarita reserve fund and there still is more to come.
So LSSI is already asking for more money, and blaming the County to boot?
First of what will doubtless be a series of blame-fixing as they ask for more money, and alleged “savings” claimed at the outset evaporate.
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I just want to point out that there has been total silence, after 2/28/11, about who the City and County have jointly appointed, as required by the Education Code, to appraise the value of the two pieces of library real estate and three libraries’ contents. There’s nothing in the Education Code saying that this information may be kept confidential. If the City and County are stonewalling eachother on the appoint-the-appraiser issue, then the tax paying public has a right to know, especially if the book inventory and valuation is being manipulated in a manner which will increase LSSI’s cash flow.
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So the county already had 40,000 ebooks? How many will we have from lssi for such a small percentage? 100? 500? 17% for popular titles is ridiculous. Only 11% for dvds, the most popular items in almost every library? It’s only a matter of time before LSSI will eventually charge us to check out dvds.
On top of that, LSSI gets to steal 5% of however much they order!
http://westranchbeacon.com/2011/03/city-excuses-on-library-collection-don%E2%80%99t-match-facts/
Read the article, then attend tonight’s meeting, and let the Council know how you feel.
I remember looking at the valencia library website a few months ago. The county library was offering like 15-20 special programs a month on all sorts of different things. Is the city council stupid enough to believe that LSSI will do the same? Let me guess, they expect us to do our own programs as free volunteers.