Fixing the Browsery

(UPDATED) The Browsery at the Toronto Reference Library is the highest-profile piece of real estate in the entire Toronto Public Library system. It’s as mediocre as the rest of this city is – and that really hurts because the only other Browsery, at North York Central, is fabulous.

I’ll get to that parallel-universe Browsery in a moment. But let me run through the problems first. (I talked these over with the head of the entire ground floor a couple of weeks ago, a sour meeting neither of us enjoyed. The following statement, uttered at 10:24, sums it up: “Are we almost done? I have a meeting at 10:30.”)

Duelling DVD due dates

I am having what is rapidly becoming an argument with TPL managers over due dates for multi-feature DVD sets. I mean things like entire television seasons or 10-DVD Glenn Gould retrospectives. (I’m not talking about something like a feature film with a second DVD of extras and so on. I mean more than one feature in a single package.)

I maintain what is actually true: In practice, you cannot watch everything contained in one of these sets in a single week. Yet the library acts dumb as a mule and assigns seven-day loan periods to every standalone DVD, no matter what it might contain or how many discs are in the package.

Shall we look at In Treatment?

• Season 1: 1,290 min. (21½ hours)
• Season 2: 870 min. (17½ hours)
• Season 3: 840 min. (14 hours)

To enjoy the full series and return these items on the seventh day, you’d have to watch two to five hours a night for six nights straight. (Did you pick up the discs after work? Then you’ve got five nights.) For Season 3, we managed it, but only by doing absolutely nothing else and gobbling dinner Simpsons-style with the show playing.

My suggestion is straightforward: DVD series (as we could call them) get three-week loan periods. What does the library say?

• We used to break up sets like these into individual discs, but people had to wait forever for them (and sometimes got them out of order). (Since we don’t do this anymore, why are we talking about it?)

• If we did what you asked, people would have to wait ever so long for their holds to be filled. (Yeah, and their patience would be rewarded by actually being able to finish them.)

This is a library system that lends 70-minute compact discs, 30-page children’s books, and pedometers for three full weeks. The library already distinguishes DVDs from language-learning DVDs, which indeed get three-week loan periods. If you’re a fast reader, you can borrow a Best Bet and burn through it in a week.

But if you’re a normal person attempting to watch exactly what the library lends you, not only will the library not give you enough time to do so but will ding you a buck a day for returning the item late.

Which is worse, then? Terrible, awful, burdensome waiting periods or having 90% of library patrons frustrated and dissatisfied because it isn’t humanly possible to watch a full TV series in less than a week?

Why can’t the library survey users of these DVD sets and ask them the following?

• Do you usually/always/sometimes fail to finish everything in the DVD set before you have to return it?

• Do you return DVD sets late because it’s more important to you to finish the contents than to pay a fine?

• Which would you be willing to accept – waiting longer on hold for an item but having three weeks to watch it, or getting it sooner but having to watch the whole thing in a single week?

Aren’t those really the issues? And don’t we already know the answers?

Exceptions that prove the rule

I gave up on Call Me Fitz and Spartacus in under five minutes each. Those went right back.

The wrong fate for Glad Day

Back dans la journée, I had suggested that the library buy out Glad Day Books, the customer-hostile, musty, superannuated, perennially failing gay bookstore.

The owner put it up for sale this year, and I spent a while trying to think up a way to present the idea to TPL for real. (I did dash off a quick mail, summarily ignored.) I decided it would have to be a joint venture among TPL, probably Robarts, and the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives. The whole shebang could be bought for 50 grand tops, I figured. TPL and Robarts could split the book collection, TPL would get all the videos, and CLGA would trot away with the porn, giggling all the while.

But, sadly, Glad Day has been “saved” by a group of investors that overlaps considerably with the “LGBTQQI2S*” contingent that is systematically eviscerating gay Toronto. Glad Day will cease to be a gay men’s bookstore with significant lesbian content and will become some kind of amorphously defined multicultural community hub that will help blacks, Muslims, and trannies feel better about themselves.

Frankly, if that was the option on the table, the store should simply have closed. And the best form of closure would in fact have been the complete buyout I envisioned, which, an article in the current Fab suggests, could have been done for at most $20,000.

Glad Day was a store with great inventory that you could barely stand to enter, let alone shop in, because of obnoxious management and staff. It will now devolve into a store with a political ideology that will denude the stock of anything male and repel what amounts to its core customer base. Had TPL and partners bought out this failing business, it would have been possible to place a hold on wonderful and hard-to-find gay and lesbian books and movies from anywhere in town and enjoy them in the comfort and privacy of your home – without being ignored by staff listening to John Scythes holler his half of a conversation from the back room or having Michael Went or El-Farouk Khaki offer a quick re-education course on how you are actually the oppressor.

None of this is hypothetical

I wrote this after perusing Querelle: The Film Book at Reference.

The library is a place that knows what freedom to read really means. It would have stewarded Glad Day’s collection responsibly and for the common good. The new owners view the collection, like gay men, as problems to be solved.

Swaperoo

I have been going around promoting one idea in two guises. The idea is for branches with subject-matter collections that are collecting dust to swap them out with branches where they would be in high demand.

• The Reference Library Browsery DVD collection contains dozens of classic Hollywood movies from the early and mid-20th century. I’ve been flipping through these same titles, in almost the same order, for something like two years. They never move. The TRL Browsery audience is top-heavy with transients, students, and ESL learners, with a few inside-baseball types like me who mine it for items they can keep for three loan periods. The Browsery simply does not attract the seniors and near-seniors with a hunger for old movies.

  But Beaches does, and the previous branch head had complained to me that no matter what they do, they cannot request classic Hollywood movies from central processing. After sitting on the idea (for no good reason!) for ages, I finally filed a request via Answerline to simply send all those unused Browsery DVDs to Beaches. Answerline responded, but neither the Browsery nor the Beaches branch head has done so. (Actually, Elizabeth at TRL and I really need to talk in general.)

• For manga books and anime DVDs, the situation is different. Some branches attract next to no interest (e.g., Beaches). At others, teens and other enthusiasts “devour” the entire collection and are left with no meat on the bones. But the same thing happens at other branches’ respective collections.

  The answer, then, is for branches to do a big swaperoo of each other’s manga and anime collections. This turns out not to be straightforward. And it’s a lot of work rejigging the owning branch in the database, applying and removing stickers on the items, and dicking around with RFID tags. Nonetheless, I hope a samizdat pilot project in this regard will get underway shortly.

I note that one of the subject-matter experts (there are at least two) shot down my theories that the library overbought anime DVDs and that the fans are so heavily divided into silos (Neon Genesis Evangelion fans will never watch Hikaru-no-go) that there’s no crossover. False in both cases, I’m told.

Also, Neon Genesis Evangelion has to be the strangest Japlish title ever. Doesn’t it take five or ten minutes just to enunciate the last word? And there sure were a lot of manga paperbacks suddenly added to mini–Bookmobile Two this week.

Kooky fun fact: Years ago I found two perfect Sailor Moon VHS tapes left out in somebody’s recycling. These are now living out their days on the bottom shelf of the video étagère at Jones if you want ’em.

A spirit of caring and sharing and open dialogue with critics

I wrote to the Toronto Public Library board of directors calling for a moratorium on the gutting and defacement of old branches to install godforsaken RFID self-checkout systems, which do not actually work.

In a display of TPL technical acumen I have come to expect, Director of Branch Libraries Anne Bailey sent along a response – in the form of a scanned-image PDF. I assume this was a deliberate choice given that I am a journalist and an accessibility expert (in fact, I know a great deal about accessible PDF). I assume it was meant to frustrate reading of, quotation from, and distribution of their actual response. Let’s set that aside for a moment.

Bailey trots out various statistics that show most people use self-checkout (they have no choice) and most people like it. The latter says nothing about the endemic failures of the system, nor anything about staff who sit behind a desk and ignore you, or get angry at you when you bring a book near the antenna, or who initially tell you to go use that terminal over there instead of listening to your question, or yell at you from behind the desk when a book you’re carrying sets off their alarm, or chase you up the stairs when that latter thing happens.

Bailey is one of two people this week to insist the old Yorkville desk was not marble. Pictures or it didn’t happen, as the kids say. Neither of these people made a case as to why its replacement had to be MDF and so badly designed that staff can’t actually sit behind it or store a returned book there. Other than that, she pretty much ignores my objections and attested experience. She says nothing about gutting historic library branches, for example, just to convert its entire collection into miniature radio transmitters.

Bailey also promises that improvements to the user interface are coming. Someone else told me that to my face recently, in an actually helpful and informative way. Agincourt branch is the testbed, I was told, a fact TPL has been at pains not to publicize. Language choice on the system is better, there are fewer steps to take, and the crucial deactivation of security bit happens earlier in the process.

I am willing to accept these reports are accurate. But let’s refresh our memories here.