Not true says the County Migell Acosta the County of Los Angeles Public Library Interim Assistant Director of Information Systems. In a letter posted at the Save Santa Clarita Libraries website Ms. Acosta responded promptly to an inquiry regarding these allegations. Her leeter stated the following:
Migell Acosta
County of Los Angeles Public Library
Interim Assistant Director, Information Systems
My name is Migell Acosta and I am the Assistant Director for Information Systems for the Library. My duties include the administration of the Integrated Library System (online catalog), which is the system for managing the Library’s inventory. The County Librarian, Margaret Donnellan Todd, has asked me to respond to your questions since all the statistics in question come from my system.
I want to address the discrepancy between the 524K items reported on our website and the inventory of 287K items reported to the City under the Public Records Act request of September 17, 2010. The record counts on our website are for use by our customers so they can review the relative size of our collections and get a sense of the breakdown between audiovisual materials, books, DVDs, childrens materials, etc. The statistics cited are not meant as an inventory of the collection, which changes on a daily basis due to new purchases, reassigning materials to other libraries, and withdrawing little-used materials from the collection.
Nevertheless, here are some reasons for the difference in numbers. First, County Library customers have access to over 40K ebook and downloadable audiobook titles. We place a virtual ”copy” of these titles in each of the libraries for searching convenience. If a customer restricts a search of the online catalog to the holdings of one library, they will still retrieve all the appropriate results from our digital collections too. Adding these digital “copies” to the libraries adds 120K items to the statistics.
The second source of the discrepancy is that during the last reporting year, Library staff were busy shifting materials out of the collection that were no longer appropriate because of the age of the material or low use. Nearly 40K items were shifted out of the collection during this time.
Finally, during this reporting year we added a new feature to the system that helps us track individual magazine issues. The higher count from our web site included an estimate of the total magazine holdings. The inventory turned over to the City only included magazine issues received since the implementation of the new module. For example, we may carry one year’s worth of a weekly magazine. The count on the website would estimate that we had 52 copies of this title. However, we may have only checked in 10 issues when we reported the inventory to the City, so the count would be 10 instead of 52.
Please let me know if there is any other issue I can clarify for you or any additional information I can provide. Thank you for your strong support of the County Library, we all take pride and consider it a privilege to serve you.
Migell Acosta
This explanation further confirms that City staff are not doing their total due diligence on issues that they are dealing with on a regular basis. A thorough and complete dialogue with the County Library would have shed light on exactly what library assets would be included in any transfer to the City of Santa Clarita should the proposed privatization proceed.
Do not let the City leadership attempt to use baseless statements as an excuse to “borrow” money for their library scheme. Let the facts speak for themselves! For more information on the local library issues please go to: http://savesantaclaritalibraries.wordpress.com/