Everyone loves a good scandal, especially over the summertime when we have more time to gossip over scandals – and hopefully to avoid doing some of these things ourselves!
This is an excerpt from an article by John Hubbard from Medium.com
“Airing dirty laundry is rather frowned upon in the field of librarianship. It ranks right up there with self-promotion as a big faux pas, probably because we don’t want to make ourselves look bad for the outside world, image-conscious bunch that we are. Nevertheless, in my years as a librarian, I’ve heard of many shameful incidents. My first library director thought to keep child pornography on his work computer, for starters. Rather than practice self-shushing about these events, I believe it’s best to view them as learning opportunities.
Hopefully these examples show how at times it’s worth turning our gaze inward to discover how we can do things better. That’s why, although there’s certainly plenty of cases of library patrons behaving badly — from hackers to politicians to exhibitionists (to say nothing about irresponsible authors) — the focus of this list is primarily on librarians, along with the government and vendors that we do business with. So then, in the spirit of those words from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit here by me.”
20. Not While Urine the Library
As the American Library Association puts it, “Volunteers are essential to a successful library program — and at a time when deep budget cuts are the norm, there are many libraries that depend on the help of dedicated volunteers, who do everything from shelving books to covering the phones.” Dealing with volunteers carries a unique set of considerations; ensuring their presence is a net benefit to library operations can be a challenge. In 2006, a public library system in Florida found itself without volunteers after mandating urine drug tests for all workers.
19. Save Browser
The eviction of a cat from a Texas public library by the city council sparked an international outcry in 2016. After petitions and protests, the ruling was reversed. Browser is still there. The councilman who supported his removal, on the other hand, was voted out of office.
18. ProQuest vs. Ebsco
Competition may help keep prices down, but libraries can get caught in the middle when rival companies try to outdo each other. EBSCO and Ex Libris (now a ProQuest company) both offer integrated discovery products. If you want to include records from your EBSCO subscriptions in Ex Libris results, however, it’s not so easy. The Ebsco API excludes metadata which customers pay for access to, because Ebsco says that it would “harm library research were these to be included” — whereas, in Ex Libris’ words, “EBSCO wants to impede clients’ ability to use other discovery solutions and require libraries [to] use the EDS discovery product.”
17. The Library Hotel
Lest you forget that Dewey® is a proprietary classification system, a New York City hotel which figured it was a cute idea to number rooms by the Dewey Decimal System found this out the hard way: they were slapped with a lawsuit for trademark infringement in 2003. The case was settled after the parties reached an agreement for the hotel to continue offering rooms with “a library of books that relate to the room’s specific Dewey Decimal® theme.” Dewey is still used by most (but not all) public libraries in the United States. See also the OCLC policy change.
16. Get Tasered @ Your Library
Before both the pepper-spraying at UC Davis and the original “Don’t tase me bro!” was the UCLA taser incident of 2006. Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a student using the library campus computer lab, did not show his required identification when asked. After a scuffle, he was tasered by campus police while handcuffed. Videos of the event went viral and UCLA agreed to settle an ensuing lawsuit for $220,000.
15. Stealing Library Airwaves
Many public libraries offer free Internet access via wireless networks. There have been at least two cases, from Nantucket to Alaska, of library patrons having run-ins with law enforcement personnel for using the library’s wireless from outside of the building, purportedly committing “theft of signal.” It should be mentioned that not everyone’s a fan of WiFi.
14. Won’t Someone Please Think of the Freshmen?
In 2006, conservative librarian Scott Savage found himself facing formal charges made by two faculty members against him for harassment based on sexual orientation. The reason? His book recommendations for The Ohio State University freshmen class (including a title by Rick Santorum as well as The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom). Scott later resigned and ultimately lost a legal case against the university.”
Read the rest of these scandals in the rest of the article here!