WAL-MARTIZED?????

[Pat Wallace <DENWALL@AOL.COM>]

Forwarded by Patricia Wallace , Chair of the Hawaii Working Group
(ALA/SRRT/AIP)
The term "Wal-martized" was actually coined by Bart Kane, Head Librarian of
the
Hawaii Public Library System" to describe his vision of the "reengineered
public
library."
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From The Honolulu Advertiser
February 9, 1997, p. B4

"STATE PUBLIC LIBRARY SYSTEM
BECOMING WAL-MARTIZED,"

by Sue Cowing,
Editor of  "Fire in the Sea: An Anthology of Poetry & Art."

We in Hawaii have long had an excellent free public library system.

Until the budget crisis, our library was like a state version of the
Library of Congress, where you could find almost any book, magazine
or resource you could think of.  We apparently now no longer have the
luxury of  "doing it all," so we need to do better with less.

All the current controversy centers on the definition of "better."

State Librarian Bart Kane's idea of better is "more books for lower cost,"
so he engineered a five-year $11.1 million contract with commercial
book wholesaler Baker & Taylor to select,  purchase, catalog and process
books for all of Hawaii's public libraries, and sent librarians who were
performing these services out to the circulation desks to maintain library
open-hours.

Problems have surfaced quickly.  Most obvious have been the thousands
of dollars worth of inappropriate and duplicated titles included in the
shipments from Baker & Taylor since July.

At a hearing in January, Baker & Taylor representatives appeared with
Kane before the Board of Education to answer questions about the
problems.  It soon became clear that this contract, now six months old,
was so poorly written and scrutinized that it defines "performance"
solely in terms of cost and numbers (units) of books.

Baker & Taylor could, if they chose, simply send us anything they
wanted to get rid of and not  be in default.

The answer is not to spell out "performance" better, as Kane and
Baker & Taylor are belatedly attempting to do, or even to get a better
book supplier.  No wholesaler, however conscientious, can adequately
substitute for the informed judgment of Hawaii-based professional
librarians in selecting books for Hawaii's libraries.

Bring in the pros.
Another, wiser definition of   "better with less" would be to strive for
even more careful selection of books with the limited funds, and
consult our professional librarians on how that might be accomplished.

Since Kane is determined to maintain the policy of outsourcing book
selection, it seems likely that our collections will become Wal-Martized;
that is, we will indeed get more "units" at lower cost, but what we get will
be generic, some expert's idea of what  anyone/anywhere would want to
read, a kind of homogenized national taste.

There is a subtle but fatal shift here from asking people what they want
to read to telling them.

I'm concerned about this potential Wal-Martization of our state library
collections from three perspectives:

One is as the editor of an anthology of Hawaii, Pacific and world poetry,
"Fire in the Sea," that is amply illustrated with art from the Honolulu
Academy and is necessarily more expensive than the average book.

I have consoled myself that those who could not afford the book could
find it at the library, but there is currently only one circulating copy in
the
state.

I'm also concerned as a regular library user and browser who reads
many more books than she buys, because there is a real difference
between buying books for readers and buying for buyers.  Often the
most interesting and useful book I find at the library is one I discover
 by accident.

These "finds" are a serendipity.  I trust professional, book-reviewing,
 book-reading librarians to provide far better than book dealers.

Finally, my deepest concern is for what will happen to new readers,
young and old, as the quality of the collections declines and the
professional training and experience of librarians is bypassed or
under-utilized.

For the past several years, I have been an adult literacy tutor with
Hawaii Literacy's "Reading with Children" program.  Often the most
difficult and most valuable thing I do in these workshops is to get
people over their reluctance to use or even enter the library.

What can make all the difference in this effort is the welcome and
help the students receive from the librarians when we visit, and the
discovery that the collection includes things they can read for
themselves and to their children that acknowledge their backgrounds.

Many of my students are local high school dropouts or foreign-born
parents and grandparents, so when they find well-chosen books
about Hawaii or Micronesia or Samoa or the Philippines among
the others, suddenly going to the library is more than something you
"ought" to do.

Can we count on Baker & Taylor and Booklines to include such books
in their data bases?  Are they qualified to select them?Librarians are.

The responsibility for the book-selection crisis doesn't begin or end
with Bart Kane.  He is only doing well what many state agency heads
have been asked to do over the last two years - cut costs at all costs.

So Kane has had to make some hard choices, but they were not, as he
believes and would have us believe, the only choices that could have
been made.

It isn't the function of a public library system to make or save money
for the state.  Andrew Carnegie, who founded over 1,700 free public
libraries across the nation, was one of history's shrewdest
businessmen.  But he never intended that these Carnegie libraries
(of which our state library is one) imitate business.  Rather, he saw
them as a kind of antidote to the bottom line, a way of leveling the
playing field.

Those who could afford personal and subscription libraries would
not have more access than you.

Carnegie gave only buildings and did not subsidize collections.
He counted on communities to show their commitment to the value
of free public libraries by building, supporting and sustaining worthy
collections.  One of those communities is ours.

If the quality of our library holdings declines, some of us can go to the
bookstores to fill in the gaps or download information on our home
computers.  But what about those who can't afford books and computers
and on-line services?  To allow libraries to decline is a sure way to widen
the opportunity gap and limit hope.

This is still a fixable problem, starting at the top:

-The governor and Legislature must revalue and fund our library system.


-The Board of Education must scrutinize library policy-making and
 provide better for public input.

-The library administration must put the selection of books back in
the hands of our professional librarians and include them in the
decision-making process.

-And we as individuals and groups must let the library administration,
the Board of Education, the Legislature and even Booklines and
Baker & Taylor know what we want in our libraries, even if they don't ask.
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