[Publib] Adults in children's area

[Dale McNeill]

This has been an interesting discussion.  I'll add, or more reinforce, some
things.

One is that it is very easy to forget that one's own library may be very
different from another, in many ways, including size and options.  In my
career, I've worked in a library that was 2,000 square feet (in a small town
near the Gulf Coast in Texas--and that 2,000 square feet included the staff
workroom and two enormous restrooms because the building had been planned to
be a jail) and in a library that was more than 640,000 square feet
(obviously enough, in an urban area).  Safety considerations are quite
different in such different libraries.

Another is that many, many urban libraries have a practice of, at minimum,
speaking to adults without children in the children's area and letting them
know that staff are aware that they're there.  In many cases this is not the
official policy of the library exactly because of the legal concerns already
raised.  In many others it is the official policy, approved by the
appropriate governing agency and reviewed by staff or funding agency
attorneys.  One must also remember that state and local laws and ordinances
(and legal tradition) vary greatly.  Just one example: many of you can have
"loitering" as an unacceptable behavior.  However, in some cities (and I've
worked in one) there is no such *legal* thing as loitering, and it cannot be
prohibited by city agencies.  Accordingly, any such practice or policy
should be reviewed by whatever legal office would be representing the
library in court if it came to all that.

Yet a third is that whatever the policy of the library, we should all
remember to approach customers/patrons politely.  And it should not be
security staff who first approach a customer who has done nothing more than
wander into the wrong room or floor of the library.  There was a recent
editorial in the Atlanta newspaper from a customer who who first approached
(according to him) by Security and told (again according to the customer) to
leave the children's area.  If things happened as the customer described, I
think he has every right to be offended.  When I've worked in large
libraries with this policy/practice, we always allowed customers who needed
to use children's materials to do just that, and had adult-size furniture
right by the children's reference desk for just that purpose.

The point has been made as well that while we do indeed need to do
everything possible to make our libraries safe, they are by their nature
public places and, therefore, inappropriate, illegal, and unsafe things can
happen at the library.  We need to continue to remind people of this.

Dale

Dale McNeill
who has worked in a town of 10,000 and a county of 2.2 million in his 27
years or so of public library employment)
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