Saturday, June 22, 2013

Urbana Free Library Discards Wrong Books

Urbana Free Library (When it had a lot more books)
In a monumental screw-up...I mean "miscommunication..." the Urbana Free Library (Illinois) recently discarded a whole lot of the wrong books.  Don't you just hate when that happens, Deb Lissak?

According to the Chicago Sun-Times:

“There was a miscommunication,” said Deb Lissak, director of the library for the past six years, who had told her staff to flag all non-fiction books more than 10 years old and consider them for removal.
“I said clearly mark the ones you want to keep, and they said we thought you wanted to get rid of the lot,” she said.
Link to Sun-Times story

4 comments:

  1. How convenient to blame it on temp workers. Disturbing! Sad for the library.

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  2. Just reading about this gives me shivers. You'd think someone working at that library would have noticed and questioned the huge quantities of books disappearing from the shelves, unless there are deeper problems at that library and nobody felt comfortable voicing their concerns. And, um, yes, with a weeding project of that size and a bunch of temporary workers involved, the director should most definitely have been keeping an eye on things, even if only in the beginning. It doesn't speak well of the director that she blames her staff for this.

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  3. I agree, Kayo. Wonder when "the buck stops here" was pushed down to the worker bees.

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  4. Library Girl, I agree with your observations about the remarkable lack of oversight in the Urbana Library. The director screwed up, IMO, and then disgraced herself by absolving herself from blame...just because she can,

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