The Hawaiian Punch
By Lillian N. Gerhardt, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 2/1/1997
I've visited Hawaii twice on vacations. The islands are as wonderful as the travel agents claim, but each time I've come home with the conviction that prolonged exposure to ukelele music can make you crazy. I thought the natives and long-term residents might be immune to brain damage caused by monotonous plinks. When I learned that book selection for the state's public libraries had been turned over to Baker & Taylor, the book wholesaler, I decided it was proof: ukelele music rots the brain. Details from the outsourcing arrangement are now drifting stateside. It is a vendor's dream of giving orders to librarians rather than taking orders from them.
Consider how the contract pummels the book budgets for young readers. Baker & Taylor is to be paid a flat $20.95 each, for all titles, which are to be delivered shelf-ready--whether these are for adult, children's or young adult collections. The suggested retail price of new adult fiction is climbing toward an average of $25 in hardcover. Adult nonfiction in hardcover is heading past $30. Adult nonfiction titles in the specialized subject areas carry suggested prices that start at $35 and go way up over that.
In contrast, the average suggested list prices of new general trade books in hardcover for children and young adults now hover around only $15 per title. Purchased in quantity at institutional discount, these should cost considerably less, even with shelf-ready fees tacked on.
The book budgets allocated to youth services collections thus became poker chips to sweeten the deal to the advantage of adult book budgets. Hawaiian youth services librarians who have complained about this and other aspects of the contract have been told by the state library administrators to quit complaining, but they haven't. Long may they rave.
Librarians in every specialty of library service in Hawaii are complaining about another contractual detail. None of the books Baker & Taylor selects, readies, and ships can be returned for any reason--not for poor quality, inappropriateness to reader interests, bad cataloging, or spine labels plastered on front covers. These are just a few of the problems that surfaced after the first shipments.
Baker & Taylor told Hawaiian newspapers these glitches would soon be smoothed out. But, the newspapers noted a high number of mass market cheapos among the children's books delivered at $20.95 a pop. Some children's librarians are refusing to shelve them. Baker & Taylor told reporters that any lapses in selection trace to the branch librarians' failure to provide reader profiles in sufficient depth to allow for better, more appropriate selections. (What's Polynesian for "ship no junk"?)
Hawaii's State Library runs its public libraries. The islands' economy is in a downswing. The governor's budget slashed library funds to the disappearing point. The state librarian, Bart Kane, claims that handing library selection and collection development to a vendor saved library jobs, kept libraries open, and permits staff to concentrate on public service.
What the contract tells the world is that stocking an adult collection with popular titles is not brain surgery. Any vendor can do it and any adult library customer can pick and choose. It isn't selection. It isn't collection development, either. It's just stocking for a shifting, impermanent collection, a growing trend in public library adult collections intent on circulation gains rather than educational or cultural purposes.
Driven by workload increases, librarians serving young readers have relaxed into the use of selection aids that used to be frowned upon -- standing orders for nonfiction series and library book club subscriptions. Trusted lines of genre fiction in paperback are purchased in bulk. These all represent ventures into the outsourcing of selection chores. However, built into these arrangements is the ability to reject and return unwanted titles for credit and to cancel the services at will. That is a necessary check on sleaze creep.
Purchasing oversight is time-consuming and certainly a cost factor in the provision of library services. But it produces a degree of quality control that no library collection for young readers should have to do without.
In manufacturing and in business, purchasing agents are the first rank in the assurance of quality control. They'd never agree to a contract that refused them credit for unwanted or unworthy materials or withheld the ability to cancel a service supplier for cause. Librarians don't describe themselves as purchasing agents, but when you come right down to it, that's what selection and collection development work would be called in a private profit center's context.
Hawaii's public library contract for stocking is no more of a model for public library service than the ukelele is for serious music on stringed instruments. But watch the happy wholesalers' offers. In a country where insurance companies can dictate types and levels of your health care, any professionals in the public service sector can be deprofessionalized faster than you can sigh, "Aloha."
Renée Olson
Editor-in-Chief
rolson@slj.cahners.com
