San Franciscans love their libraries. In June 1994 they approved Proposition E with 70 percent of the vote; November 2007 they approved Proposition D with 74.5 percent of the vote; November 2022 they approved Proposition F with 82.5 percent of the vote. In 2018 we were voted ALA’s Library of the Year. The City Controller has measured the Library as the top ranked city department.
These past achievements came at a better time when the Library was still “dedicated to free and equal access to information, knowledge, independent learning and the joys of reading for our diverse community.”
After attaining this excellence and recognition, the City Librarian and Commission felt the necessity to remake the library through a radical strategic plan.
Vinsel and Russell, in their 2021 book The Innovation Delusion, argue that much of what passes for innovation is only change for its own sake.
“Genuine innovation is quite distinct from innovation-speak, a breathless dialect of word salad that trumpets the importance of innovation.” Project 2030 is a textbook example of word salad.
“Innovation-speak is fundamentally dishonest. While it is often cast in terms of optimism, talking of opportunity and creativity and a boundless future, it is in fact the rhetoric of fear. It plays on our fear that we will be left behind.”
The City Librarian advocates experiential library service while denigrating “merely” transactional service. Programming is emphasized over answering the daily needs of our diverse community.
Branch librarians tell me that they are pressured to present more and more programs but that they never receive staffing assistance to provide basic public service during these events (Ruben Juarez has told you of this). Instead the public is shown this cute sign - The Librarian Is Out. Nobody is here to help you, phone or text the Main Library. That assumes that they have a phone, the patience to make the call, and that the person at the Main can assist them from miles away.
Someone has taken the time to come to the branch in person with an urgent need that goes unmet. You all have noted the importance of metrics like the NPS - Net Promoter Score. That score here is zero.
You can see during every City Librarian’s report endless example of flashy promotion and programming. Nonetheless, a large number of people who work here remain dedicated to the lowly “transactional” work of maintaining an infrastructure to serve the public’s daily needs.
These maintainers are often introverted and don’t seek or receive recognition - [quoting Vinsel and Russell] "maintainers often work quietly in the background, keeping things chugging along while the “innovators” get the glory. Our society tends to ignore such people and neither recognizes nor rewards them.”
This demoralizes the staff and does not serve the public. Nobody asked for experiential community centers without bookshelves or with mostly empty “right sized” bookshelves. The City Librarian wants us to fear the future if we continue our earlier successful mission. The public and our staff love that mission and will fight to keep it.
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