Meetings at the Kenmore Library

Meeting Room at the Kenmore Library

Meetings at the Library

Tuesday I attended the Kenmore Library Advisory Board meeting.  I am a participant in the board as a non-voting member.  My role is to be a liaison between the board and the city council. It has been an active role with addressing concerns about pedestrian safety, lighting and traffic in front of the library.

Tonight we have just four members, myself and the cluster manager, Karen Hardiman.  Our meeting is short because we have another one beginning at 7pm.  The main items on the agenda are the traffic, interviewing for the open positions on the board. We also had a lively discussion on the viewing of internet porn in the library because of the recent incident in Seattle at the Lake City Library.

According to the news, a man in the Lake City Library library was watching “hard core” porn in full view of patrons when a 10 year old girl walked by on her way to the DVD’s.  She was so upset by what she saw she ran and told her mom.  Her mom asked the patron to move to a less visible computer and according to newspaper reports was told “5 more minutes”.  According to the mom, her daughter was crying that night because of what she was exposed to at  the library. In one of the follow up stories on the incident, a reporter went to the same library and reported what he saw; the same man sitting in the library watching porn in full view of the other patrons.  It seems to me that this persons “right” to watch porn interferes with other patrons abilities to freely use the library, especially families with children.

The mission of KCLS is Free, Equal and Open Access to information, according to KCLS Cluster manager, Karen Hardiman. Internet is filtered, but patrons can asked to have the filters removed.  Privacy screens on the computer supposedly help with inadvertent viewing. In Kenmore the computer screens are easy to see when walking by the area.  Patrons are not be permitted to view illegal materials such as child porn, but under the current rules other pornographic content is not restricted.  I asked the question, How would the KCLS staff handle a complaint similar to the Lake City situation?  I was told that the patron would be asked to move to a less visible spot (so the child could not see the screen) and if they refused, the staff could ask them to leave under the Rules of Conduct for not following the staff’s instructions.

After the Kenmore Library Advisory Board meeting, Kathryn McGill from the collections department of KCLS spoke on how books and materials are selected for the library collections.  Kathryn gave a witty informative talk on collections. One of her  big challenges in deciding what to  buy is the explosion of content media. In the face of budget constraints, how many formats does the same content need to be in? Her example was the Twilight series, possible options include: book, paperback, e-book, audiobook, CD, and Dvd.  E-books, libraries and publishers are another area of contention. Some publishers refuse to allow e-books rights to libraries.  KCLS uses a system called overdrive for patrons to download e-books.  According to the Library publication “Insights”, patrons downloaded over 95,000 e-books last year. Members of the Mercer Island Bothell, Kirkland and Redmond Library Advisory boards attended the talk.

One of the most interesting things I learned was how many patron requests it takes to get an item added to the system.  The answer: six.  Other ways items are selected; book reviews, best-sellers, popular topics such as gardening, home DIY, crafts. McGill said that books on crafts and other DIY topics have been especially popular since the economic downturn in 2008.

Readings and Reflections

Screens, Stories,  Homelessness and survival.

Paul Virilio in the “Overexposed City” speaks of the screen becoming the city square and “ the cross roads of all mass media”.  He was quite visionary in the impact of a screen, especially an internet connected computer screen transcending physical space and boundaries.

In  “23^rd and Union”frankly at first I didn’t “get it”.  Then I read the background of the corner having been a site of violence and trouble and how the artist wanted to tell a different story of the corner through the people themselves giving voice to their stories.  It seemed to have some of theme of “taking back” our neighborhood from the negative image portrayed through  news media.

Finally, talking to homeless people about how they themselves would solve homelessness.  What an expose of the failed top down approaches to end homelessness. Daniel Kerr, “We Know What the Problem Is” should be required reading for all policy makers and homeless advocates.

In the Seattle area, Temporary tent cities have been a challenge for local communities.  A few years ago, as a councilmember we had the members of Sharewheel  (the organization for the tent cities) come and talk to us so we could understand the situation better.  One of the camp spokesman  ran the computers in a tent! When we asked for some data on how long people stayed in the camp-he asked if we wanted a spread sheet or pie chart.  The best part was he was wearing a Husky Sweatshirt. I didn’t ask him if he was a college graduate.
In the book by Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games was a chilling story of survival by a young girl in a centrally controlled world. The central part of the story was a massive, national reality game called “Hunger Games”.   She is an unwilling participant with a will to survive.