So: Let’s recap

Upon this Sunday visit to retrieve the system’s lone copy of Eye, 15 people were waiting in line to check out their books. The line was down to ten by the time I got there, presumably different people. I thought they had only one checkout station working, but there were two. Except the system was down and they were merely scanning barcodes into Microsoft Word. I rather hope they saved the file from time to time.

Staff passed my items around the barrier to me. We had the same bullshit conversation when I showed them my book from another branch. (Just give me the damned book back. Don’t blow smoke up my ass and tell me you have to check it out again. [What if it’s overdue, and what if it’s already from NYCL?] There is zero chance I am stealing a book from the library when I just handed it to a librarian.)

Are we done yet? Of course we aren’t.

Why were there only two checkout stations? Because more than half the former checkout area is under construction. For what? For those accursed, godforsaken RFID self-checkout machines. This will upend the apple cart at North York Central considerably, because by definition you’ll be able to walk right out with your items. To hell with the barrier.

Except:

• Any item with an RFID has its theft bit turned on – and left on, because they just hand the item to you around the barrier.

• Hence when you walk into another branch that uses RFID, its alarm goes off right away.

• On one of the many occasions this happened (at Gladstone), some queen leapt out of his seat and chased me up the stairs. I let him tell me his bullshit story – twice – about how he has to inspect my item. Then I told him I’d heard him the first time, I knew the system quite well, he didn’t have to chase me up the stairs, and we’ll fix it later.

  Upon checkout, there he was again. Proving for the umpteenth time that RFID involves more employees than ever, three other people listened to my conversation. (So now five people were checking out a single book.) Why wasn’t that book desensitized when it left its branch, I asked? Some branches do and some don’t, he told me many times. So you’re saying some branches are incompetent and some aren’t, I politely declined to say. This went back and forth many times.

  Then, after I embarrassed the other three into going away, I told him he had a personal obligation to figure out a better way of talking to library patrons about its own systems’ failure than chasing them through the library like they’d just stolen a sweater from the Gap.

  At St. Clair/Dufferin half an hour later, the bored fashion victim behind the desk (who visibly had absolutely nothing to do) claimed he couldn’t desensitize the book. Really?

• A book I had checked out from North York that day set off the alarm at the new, denuded, gutted, space-profligate Yorkville branch. (Gee, whatever did happen to those priceless solid marble countertops? I had asked well in advance of the renovation and got no answer. Now it’s laminate and green glass. Stay classy, TPL.)

  After the chick behind the desk tried to get rid of me by directing me to the checkout station I had separately already used, she eventually deigned to pay attention long enough to desensitize the book. Except the alarm went off on the way out. (She made a nice, if corny, joke, so it wasn’t all bad.)

  I later talked to a competent person at St. James Town. My item from Yorkville was turned off; the North York book was still on. She fixed it. I made a bet with her that I’d still set off the alarm on the way out. I didn’t.

• Oh, and did you know for a while St. James Town was hiding new DVDs invisibly behind the desk because “people take them”? You can’t do that in an RFID branch. Absolutely everything is open and available and borrowable without staff intervention. (I borrow magazines at RFID branches the minute I see them, not after the date stamped on them, if any.)

• On the (now clearly bullshit) premise of checking out the same number of items or more with unchanged staff complement, every branch, even Todmorden, is to be converted to RFID checkout at great cost. (Every item in the system has to have an RFID tag installed, often n tags for n-piece items.)

• For this system to work:

  • Every item has to be instantly available and self-borrowable. Every item already isn’t.

  • Every item has to be desensitized upon checkout. Every item isn’t.

  • RFID branches sending items to non-RFID branches have to send those items pre-desensitized. They don’t.

The result? False alarms go off all over the place. And I assure you this is gonna start making the papers when it happens to befuddled grannies and grumpy right-leaning taxpayers, not just to me.

RFID: The microfiche of the 21st century. You’re gonna regret it. (And for the fifty billionth time, “RFID” is two syllables, not four: arphid.)

It’s easier to get into and out of North Korea than into and out of a branch while carrying an RFID-tagged item. Where’s that union when you need ’em?

OH HAI. We’re back.

Shall we start with a quick quote from Jaron Lanier?

I have a feeling there’ll be a new life for the library to provide the thinking space for civilization. For instance, my book, you might not know this, but I at one point had the most overdue book contract in New York publishing… it’s over 20 years or something. And the reason is I have such a crazy, busy life and I have so many things going on.

I was actually in London not that long ago, and a friend of mine, who’s a writer, said “The only way you’re going to write a book is in a library” and sat me down in the wonderful, big library, the British Library…. I sat down in that place and actually had the quietude to actually sit down and write a book. So this book wouldn’t exist without a library. [...]

[W]e have no lack of access to material and yet I didn’t have access to my own head until I went to the library.

To me, there’s clearly something missing in the formula that we’re developing for civilization. There’s something missing, and I think that the library will naturally come to fill that gap. And making the library into some sort of alternate Facebook access point is exactly the wrong way to achieve that.

This thing might come back from the dead.

At the outset, TPLFans was billed as a pop-up blog. It would last as long as it needed to.

Aaand this is more or less it. I am just a bit tired of feeling as though I have to act like a journalist every time I go to the library. Plus librarians are watching my every move and trying to pepper me with gossip. I already feel enough like a decadent intellectual parasite.

I still plan on reporting from library reopenings for a while, but it’s time to monetize this thing. How terribly crass? Surely every public-library supporter should take a perpetual vow of poverty in order to meet the moral standard of somebody with a steady job?

This thing cost nothing so far (except actually it did), so why should it bring in anything? Well, because. I says to a librarian, I says “Why the hell am I not working for the library?” “Good question.”

Who’s a bigger fan? Listen, companies hire the hackers who break into their systems. Companies hire their worst enemies. I’m the library’s biggest fan. And for the love of God, don’t try the line that I’m way too sarcastic to work for a public institution. I’ve done it before, and besides, have you ever talked to a librarian? I’m a pussycat.

What I have in mind is a program of online and in-person outreach. More exactly, meta-outreach: Training all 99 branches on online and in-person outreach. Or training the trainers. The Web site is about to be relaunched and every branch is getting wifi. We’ve got to stop hiding inside the gated community of “the Facebook.”

There’s a plan here, though I’m sparing you the details. It has nothing to do with usability testing or anything like that. And it’s a time-limited thing – three months tops.

Don’t sit there panicking about it. A cup of coffee would be a good place to start. Then we’d have to deal with how to hire an outsider in a city climate where every consultant is viewed, ante facto, as an AIG-calibre fraudster. The smaller the contract, the worse the scrutiny. What I’m saying is you have a full catalogue of excuses at your disposal.

But if you can’t hire your fans, especially fans with actual legitimate qualifications, then who are you gonna hire? Deskilled staff?

See you at the Thorncliffe reopening.

I walked out of Danse Danse Évolution and saw a couple of guys handing out flyers. Efficient library outreach! I thought. Nope. UNION!

I must say, the library union isn’t doing a very good job of scaremongering.

Unions are great sometimes and lousy other times, and neither of those things some other times. That’s my opinion. It’s probably your opinion. Only right-wing assholes think unions are never a good idea, and not even union stalwarts think they always are. (Be honest.)

I talked to the guy who handed me this leaflet. When I told him I write this blog, he took a quarter-step back and started treating me like I was radioactive. “Yes,” he said warily. “I have heard about it.” Well, good – you shoulda.

The leaflet makes the claim that the TPL Board “wants to… stay open to midnight with no professional librarians and many more part-time staff [and] get rid of reference desks.” I have asked around and concluded this is wilful exaggeration, reiterated in a union blog post.

I was having a hard time imagining Jones, Todmorden, Davenport, and St. Lawrence all staying open till midnight. I was having that trouble because what may be in the cards is keeping the Reference Library and a very few district libraries open to midnight Mondays through Fridays.

Seriously: Every branch open till witching hour seven days a week? Yorkville and the Reference Library, exactly one block apart? The branches inside strip malls? The ones who have problems with crime and gun violence, like Shchuka and Silverthorn? Branches TPL keeps trying to close, like Queen Saulter? Please.

With a city-wide budget deficit of $300 mil next year? Please.

And if the union notes that most TPL staff are women (what exactly is wrong with that?), isn’t it axiomatic that this mostly-female staff will refuse to work till midnight out of safety concerns? (The leaflet and Web site identify their authors as “the women and men” – in that order – “of TPLWU Local 4948.”)

Then there’s the pesky problem of wording and what it reveals about the library’s biases in favour of those who made it through library-school boot camp. The leaflet warns us of “[m]ore deskilled part-time staff with few or no benefits.” Deskilled staff? Staff whose skills have been removed? Is that like deveined shrimp? Dealcoholized beer?

Do we already have too many of these deskilled people? Because who would want more of them, right?

It’s not like you need a master’s in library science (MLS) to check out a back issue of Maxim or a compact disc at 11:30 at night. (Such a task is distinct from the career-path jobs the union has mixed into this discussion.) I know for a fact that some librarians hate checking materials out, or hate doing only that for long periods of time (at, say, Lillian H. Smith). RFID self-checkout is not a bad deal all of the time even if it sucks in other ways.

Parts of Robarts Library at UofT are already open around the clock six days a week. I think it isn’t a huge stretch of the imagination for the biggest library system in the world, in the nation’s biggest city, to open a few branches late at night. The Reference Library, Gladstone, North York – sure. Maybe not all the district branches, since some of them are dumps, like Northern District. Maybe branches in priority neighbourhoods. Sure.

But if we’re talking about expanding hours, here’s my wishlist:

• No branch open fewer than six days a week. Hence no Monday or Friday closings for Saulter and Todmorden.
• Branches open Sundays do so year-round (as was said to be the case, but isn’t, at Malvern), even on the balmiest summer days when the Protestant ethic insists we be outside enjoying the nice weather and not cooped up inside like some nerd.
• No branches close at 6:00. Stay open till 8:00 or 8:30 or don’t bother. (Even Gladstone closes at 6:00 on Fridays in the summer.)
• No branches close early because it’s snowing out (my direct experience on two separate occasions).

The union might aid its cause by providing much less hyperbolic and much more detailed information to the public. Besides, most people aren’t gonna be scared off by the idea of a library that’s open late at night. Even the attempt at scaremongering isn’t working. Please try smarter.