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1999-03-23 City of Beverly, Massachusetts Public Meeting Minutes Board: Library Trustees Subcommittee: Date: March 23, 1999 7:00 P.M. Place: Beverly Public Library Board members present: Diane Costa, Edward Brindle, Lindsay Diehl, Katherine Fanning, Nell Olson, Joanne Panunzio, and John Young Board members absent: Kevin O'Reilly, Helga Senko Others present: Thomas Scully, Anna Langstaff Recorder: Anna Langstaff John Young presided. Neil Olson made the motion, seconded by Diane Costa, to accept the minutes of February 23, 1999 as read. Motion passed. Public Presentation None Committee Reports Personnel: No report. Administration: Kevin O'Reilly will chair the Administration Committee. Finance: No report. Long Range Planning: Diane Costa will chair Long Range Planning Committee. Report of the Library Director 1 ) Copies of the Library Director's report (on file with these minutes) were mailed to trustees. 2) Salaries for Part-time Employees: Tom Scully proposed several ways to address part-time employees' lack of pay raises. Neil Olson made the motion, seconded by Edward Brindle, to: adjust the high school and college part-time pay scale effective April 1, 1999. FY1999 pay scale will start at $5.25 and increase 50 cents at 6 months, 40 cents at 12 months, and 15 cents at each successive 6 month period up to a maximum of $7.35 at 60 months. FY2000 pay scale will start at $5.75 and increase 50 cents at 6 months, and 15 cents at each successive 6 month period up to a maximum of $7.60 at 60 months. No current employee would receive less money than they would be entitled to under the existing pay scale. Motion passed. Communications 1 ) State Aid: The library will receive $127.10 from the state, the final disbursement of state aid for FY1999. 2) Fund Raising Seminar: John Young and Michele Mann will attend a fundraising seminar on March 27, 1999. Unfinished Business 1) Budget: Edward Brindle inquired about FY2000 budget. Tom Scully has not heard from the Mayor. 2) Repair Deficit: Deficit on repair item is due to flood damage. 3) Trust Funds: Tom Scully is trying to set up a meeting with Commissioners of Trust Funds. 4) Skating Rink: Skating rink has been taken down. New Business 1 ) Book Sale: May 1 and May 2. 2) Board Meeting: June 22nd Board meeting will be held at the Beverly Farms Library. Public Presentation None The next meeting of the Board will be Tuesday, April 27, 1999 at 7:00 P.M. at the Main Library. There being no further business, the meeting was adjoumed at 8:00 P.M. Library Director's Report March 23 1999 Farms Fund Raising - Over the next 3 months, members of the Farms Library Fund Raising Committee will be attending workshops on soliciting major donations. This workshop is a follow up to the workshop last fall attended by Michele Mann and myself and sponsored by the state Board of Library Commissioners. High School Archives - In April, I will be attending a conference sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts on a archive project for Beverly High School. Kevin McGrath, BHS Librarian, Dean Eastman, BHS teacher and Dr. Keith Manville, Assistant Superintendent and I will be making a joint presentation. We hope to coordinate a local history collection at BHS for students taking social studies and literature courses. Trustees Meeting Archives - I have completed entering the entire 144 years of minutes from library trustees meetings into a computer database and they are being loaded onto CD-ROMs. By next year we hope to have them available on the Internet on the City's web page. Since these minutes are keyword searchable, this will help us greatly in locating action taken by the Trustees at past meetings. Poetry Contest - Kathy Keeler, Young Adult Librarian, is preparing our annual Young Adult Poetry Contest to be held in April. Friends of the Library - The Friends Annual Meeting will be Tuesday night, April 13th. News Updates -I have included this month news items from the March issue of American Libraries, the membership journal of the American Library Association. These are articles which talk about current issues in librarianship. If this format proves useful I can include such articles each month to help keep you informed on professional issues. AMERICAN LIBRARIES March 1999 News Fronts Washington Congress Prepares Attack on E-rate New Republican U.S. representative from Colorado, Tom Tancredo, and returning representatives Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) and Ed Royce (R-Calif.) issued a "Dear Colleague" letter January 26 stating their intent to introduce legislation to end e-rate telecommunications; subsidies for libraries and schools. ALA's Washington Office reports that the letter, which is being widely circulated on Capitol Hill, is designed to garner cosponsors for their bill, the E-rate Termination Act. The letter calls the e-rate a "backdoor tax" that is not needed because of existing Department of Education funding earmarked "to improve technological capabilities." In addition, Sen. Conrad Bums (R- Mont,) and Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) plan to reintroduce legislation that would halve the 3% federal excise tax on telephone service and redirect the revenue to fund the e-rate program, phasing out the program's link to phone bills (.~L, Sept. 1998, p. 15). E-rate supporters maintain that would endanger the program's future since removing it from the universal service fund would require it to undergo congressional scrutiny each year. Judge Bars Enforcement of Child Protection Act Noting his "personal regret" for "delay[ing] once again the careful protection of our children," U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed issued a preliminary injunction February 1 to block enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act, which requires commercial Web sites to obtain proof of age before delivering material considered harmful to minors. The Justice Department has 60 days to appeal the injunction, issued the day Reed's temporary restraining order (.~L. Jan., p, 13) expired. Affirming the constitutionality of sexually explicit material, Reed wrote that COPA's inability to stop minors from using an adult's credit card to enter a racy commercial site or sample pore on noncommercial or foreign URLs "demonstrates the problems this statute has with efficaciously meeting its goal." As a less-restrictive alternative, he recommended that parents use blocking software. The 17 online content providers who, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, were the plaintiffs in the case had expressed fears of prosecution under the law, and Reed concluded that "such fears were reasonable given the breadth of the statute." He continued, "Such a chilling effect could result in the censoring of constitutionally protected speech, which constitutes an irreparable harm to the plaintiffs." In a joint February 1 statement, House cosponsors Michael Oxley (R-Ohio), Tom Bliley (R-Va.), and James Greenwood (R-Pa.) defended COPA as applying the analog world's "common-sense standards" to the Web. Congress Reintroduces Filtering Mandate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-S.C.) reintroduced a bill January 19 requiring schools and libraries that receive federal e-rate subsidies for Interact connections to install Interact filtering software. The measure, dubbed the Child Interact Protection Act (S, 97), would apply retroactively to schools and libraries that have already received the subsidies. A companion bill, the Safe Schools Interact Act (H.R. 368), was introduced in the House by Rep. Bob Franks (R-N.J.) the same day. "As Intemet use in our schools and libraries continues to grow, children's potential exposure to harmful online content and to those who seek to sexually abuse children will only increase," said Sen. McCain. "Perhaps most important, this legislation will not censor what goes onto the Intemet, nor will it censor what adults may see, but rather filters what comes out of it onto the computers our children use outside the home," Sen. Hollings called the bill "an important step in the baffle to protect children from the dark side of the Internet. Children should be protected from stumbling onto indecent material while using the Web for legitimate purposes, and this bill will go a long way in obtaining that goal." Last year's measure, the Internet School Filtering Act (.4L Apr. 1998, p. 13) failed at the end of the congressional session. Since then, a policy requiring filters on all Internet terminals at the Loudoun County (Va,) Library has been ruled unconstitutional (AL, Jan,, p. 1415). "After the Loudoun County decision, it makes no sense in the library context," Barry Steinhardt, an associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the CNet online news service. "These filtering programs have no place in libraries, especially when they are forced on users." Clinton Budget Proposes National Digital Library President Clinton's budget proposal for fiscal year 2000, released February 1, includes a new $30-million initiative to develop a National Digital Library for Education. The online library, part of the president's Technology Initiative, would include digital images of books, museum artifacts, and paintings. Diane Frankel, director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, noted that "Libraries are on the forefront of using new technology to get people the information they want and need. For museums, this is the first federal program specifically designed to make their collections accessible online." The budget sets Library Services and Technology Act funding under the IMLS at $154.5 million, slightly higher than last year's request, with library grants to states at $138.1 million, Native American and Native Hawaiian Library Services at $2.6 million, and National Leadership Grants for Libraries at $10.6 million. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title VI-Innovative Education Program Strategies State Grants would be zeroed out for the third consecutive year, with the same budget rationale as in the past: no clear measurable goals. The title provides funding for school library and instructional materials as one of the uses of the block grant. Last year, thanks to House support of the program, ESEA VI received $375 million in appropriations. The Reading Excellence Act, passed last year, was funded as part of the FY99 omnibus appropriations bill at $260 million. The FY2000 budget request is $286 million. Other education proposals in the president's budget are detailed on the ALA Washington Office Web site (www.ala.org/washoff/alawon/alwnS012.html). Publisher Challenges Copyright Extension Act An online publisher has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act passed by Congress last year. The law, signed by President Clinton last October (AL, Dec. 1998, p. 13), lengthened the life-plus-50-year copyright term by 20 years. The CNet online news service reported January 12 that Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig filed the suit in the U.S. District Court in Washington on behalf of the Eldritch Press, which posts literary classics on the Internet once they enter the public domain. The publisher argues that although Congress can promote the progress of science and the arts by giving authors and inventors control over their creations, the Constitution provides that copyrights may only be secured for "limited times." "Congress arbitrarily extends the copyright monopoly on them every 20 years, by another 20 years, like clockwork," said co-counsel Jonathan Zittrain. "It's particularly troublesome when the speed and access of the Internet promise a substantial audience for the works that remain locked up." Database- Protection Measure Resurfaces A measure opposed by librarians and researchers that would have given copyright protection to databases even when the individual contents were not protected, and which was dropped when Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act last October (AL, Nov. 1998, p. 16), has been reintroduced in the House. On January 19, Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.), chair of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, reintroduced the Collections of Information Antipiracy Act (H.R. 354). The same day, key members of the Senate took two actions to advance the data base protection debate: - Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) placed a neutral statement on three proposals into the Congressional Record: 1) the text of Rep. Coble's bill, 2) an alternative bill drafted by a coalition of public- and private-sector groups (including ALA and several other major library organizations) who favor a narrowly tailored approach to database protection if any such legislation is to be enacted, and 3) another measure drafted last year by staff of Sen. Hatch. - Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced a new bill (S. 95) intended to protect financial services companies from potentially overbroad database-protection legislation. ALA's Washington Office notes that the bill marks the committee's first involvement in the database-protection debate. CENSORSHIP WATCH Rolling Stone Gathers No Minors. Kettle Moraine High School students who are 17 or younger and interested reading Rolling Stone magazine during their school-day downtime now have to present written parental permission to the school librarian, thanks to a February 3 decision made by the suburban Milwaukee district's Superintendent of schools. By restricting RS, school Superintendent Sarah Jerome overruled an 8-3 vote taken that same day by the Library Materials Review Committee recommending the magazine's retention "I have no materials that I hold back. This will definitely be the first time," librarian Mary Finn told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel February 6 of Jerome's directive to keep RS behind the circulation desk. "It was a compromise I could live with," complainant Gary Vose reacted. A member of the school board whose daughter attends the high school, Vose had formally requested reconsideration of Rolling Stone on January 18, more than a year after he'd first voiced objections to its presence on the school library's shelves (AL, Nov. 1998, p. 23). "Restricting access to material because of its content amounts to censorship," ACLU of Wisconsin executive Director Chris Ahmuty remarked. The newspaper reported that he has asked district officials for a copy of all public records related to the decision. The Right to Blubber. After hearing a seventh grader defended the worth of Judy Blume's 1983 novel Blubber, the Limestone County, Alabama, school board has decided reverse its October 20 removal of is book from school-library shelves district wide. The January 11 reinstatement of a title came a month after 12-year-old Mary Saczawa told trustees that she had found the book so compelling when she first read it as a fourth grader that she sent a copy to a cousin in Missouri; similarly affected, the recipient shared the book with a third cousin in Florida. Superintendent Les Bivens, two school librarians, and other officials also registered protests over the restriction, the Associated Press reported January 13. Blubber is the story of a 5th grader tormented by classmates about her weight until one of the tormentors becomes the object of ridicule. The complainant had disapproved of Blume's use of "damn" twice in the text as well as its referring to a teacher in the story as a "bitch." Livermore Plaintiff to Appeal. On January 13 California superior court Judge George Hemandez dismissed without explanation an amended suit brought against Livermore Public Library by a mother and her 12-year-old son to mandate filtering software for children's-area workstations (AL, Jan., p. 17). Plaintiff attorney Michael Millen told Tech Law Journal he would appeal on behalf of his clients, named in the suit as Kathleen R. and Brandon P., explaining that "this story will not end anytime soon unless Sen. McCain [who has sponsored two bills tying libraries' state entitlement to their use of filters] passes legislation" (see News Fronts Washington, p. 10). "The library did not want to be in a position of telling anyone what they can read, see, or hear," LPL Director Susan Gallinger said in a prepared statement issued after the ruling. "The library's policy is sensitive both to First Amendment concerns and the concerns of parents," ACLU attorney Ann Brick stated. The ACLU had filed a friend of the court brief in favor of the library December 23. Replaying Video Restrictions. The 4-3 January 19 decision of the St. Tammany Parish (La.) Library board not to restrict R and NC-17 videos from minors was overruled January 21 by a unanimous vote of the local governing body, the Parish Police Jury. As a result, STPL is forced to follow the same policy as local video stores: Users under 17 cannot check out an R-rated movie without their parents' consent. The January 22 New Orleans Times Picayune reported that legal counsel advised parish officials that the new policy could not be construed as censorship. Nonetheless, newly elected library board president Mark Johnson warned, "There's going to be litigation and there's going to be a suit filed." The decision ends months of deliberation by the parish library board about 354 titles in STPL'S 12,044 movie collection, which began last September when trustees ordered library staff to pull the mature audience films (AL, Dec. 1998, p. 17). Volumes Fine-tunes Its Filter Policy. The Volumes County (Fla.) Council voted February 4 to install Intemet filters only on children's computers at the county's libraries rather than on all terminals, rescinding an earlier decision (AL, Jan., p. 17). In December the council voted to filter all public-access machines, stating their willingness to risk a First Amendment lawsuit in the wake of Loudoun County (Va.) Library's having a similar filtering policy declared unconstitutional (AL, Jan. p. 14-15). Since then, however, two newly elected council members indicated they would take a more moderate position. The Orlando Sentinel reported February 5 the library will try placing adult computers in out-of-the-way areas to prevent children from walking by and seeing objectionable material. "By putting a filtered system in, if they think it will help the children, that's absolutely free by us," trustee Eva Williams told the newspaper. "But since the problem never emanated from the children's section in the first place, I think that's a little ironic." BRIEFS Amid Plenty, Branches Are Shut Although DeKalb County, Georgia, sitting on $80 million in sales-tax money and plans to slash homeowner property taxes by up to 38%, its Library has shut down two branches and has ended Sunday hours system wide. The reason, according to the February 7 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is that the banked sales tax money which came from a 1% sales tax approved over in March with the stipulation that most of it would go to roll back homeowner property taxes can only be legally used on public-improvement projects or to buy equipment. Compounding the budget crisis in the county, part of metropolitan Atlanta, are 558 positions, most in law enforcement, added since 1997 and $20 million spent on year-2000 compliance. The county has also been forced to close several recreational facilities. "It's a shame these reductions are necessary, especially when the economy is doing so well," Library Board Chair Bebe Joyner told the newspaper February 4, adding that the library "provides extremely high service levels with minimal staffing compared to other library systems, and we just don't have any fat to trim." Anthrax Threat Closes Oreg. Library Following a spate of anthrax hoaxes that hit Southern California recently, an anonymous phone threat January 13 that anthrax had been released in the Tualatin (Oreg.) Public Library closed the library and other city hall offices in the same building in the Portland suburb. Director Ruth Kratochvil told American Libraries that about 50 people were evacuated from the library at 3 p.m., including children attending a story hour. An unidentified substance was removed from the public restroom in the lobby between the library and city offices by the Tualatin Valley Fire and Rescue hazardous material team. The police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation sealed off the building January 14. The FBI is examining phone records but there were few leads since the call was not traced when it was received. Police reported the next day that the unidentified substance tested negative for anthrax and other biohazards. The building reopened January 15. Blind Author Threatens to Sue NYPL A blind writer is threatening to sue the New York Public Library for discrimination, claiming the library has denied him the use of a private office because he is blind, reported the New York Times January 11. A library spokesperson said the Center for Scholars and Writers apportions private rooms for specific study projects. Ved Mehta, the author of 22 books, applied for one of the rooms after being told he will lose the office he has retained at the New Yorker when the magazine moves to new quarters this summer. Mehta was a staff writer there from 1961 to 1994. Mehta, the recipient of a MacArthur grant and two Guggenheim fellowships, charged that the library has given work space to other writers of his stature. He met with NYPL President Paul LeClerc but said the meeting had little result, although LeClerc was "sympathetic."