Staff Shortages Stymie Service Stability in Philly

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By Beverly Goldberg

Attrition, layoffs, and budget cuts have been plaguing the Free Library of Philadelphia’s 54 branches since the fall, making it difficult for the system’s reduced workforce to maintain five-day-a-week service in the neighborhoods. “The library is critically short-staffed,” Friends Director Amy Dougherty said in the December 14 Philadelphia Daily News. “Librarians [are] completely stressed out. They wake up not knowing what branches they’re going to that day.”

The crisis is the latest to hit FLP since the state legislature approved an 11th-hour reprieve in September that enabled Mayor Michael Nutter to temporarily hike the city sales tax as well as defer payments for two years to the municipal workers’ pension fund in order to avert the indefinite closure of the entire library system and the layoff of 3,000 city employees.

Despite that victory, service cuts have become a harsh reality. Patrons never know whether their branch will be open despite a posted schedule at each facility of Monday–Friday or Tuesday–Saturday hours. Branches have become subject to unannounced one-day closings whenever the requisite number of three library workers and one security guard are unavailable to open a given facility on a scheduled service day. December 3 was a particularly difficult day for FLP, the Daily News reported; 10 libraries were either closed or needed to shorten their hours.

Library President and Director Siobhan Reardon told the Daily News that the loss of $8 million in city funding at the beginning of 2009, coupled with a $2-million reduction in state support, forced the library to eliminate 115 jobs, 47 of them through layoffs. The result is a workforce stretched so thin that more than a few people taking sick days simultaneously wreak havoc on FLP’s carefully crafted schedule.

“The bottom line is that 650 library staff is not sufficient,” Dougherty told the newspaper, adding that no matter how “selectively and creatively library management deploys them throughout the system, the library needs a minimum of 750.”

Programming and the wait for popular materials have also suffered. Computer classes are disrupted by the sudden closings, and a 40% reduction in the acquisitions budget has increased wait time for some popular materials by as much as six months. Nevertheless circulation continues to rise and there has been a 37% increase in demand for career training at the library, Reardon said.

Library officials are hopeful that the staffing crisis will ease somewhat once eight new library security guards are hired and trained within the next few months.

American Libraries, Tue, 12/15/2009 - 22:11