On walking into mpow this morning I was greeted by a printed document with a sticky note on it. The sticky note, in my evening librarian’s handwriting, said “this is what we’re up against.” The document was a print out of a, let’s call it inappropriate, shall we?, story that someone had been reading in the library the night before. Not just inappropriate, though. Illegal stuff. The kind of stuff that makes you glad you don’t have children to worry about. Ya know what I mean? So I call security to see if she put in an incident report, then I call and wake her up to get a more complete story. Turns out, no incident report, no real proof to tie it to any particular person. So what do we do next? I should point out that we are an academic library with no filtering, but a computer policy that says “no inappropriate content blah blah blah,” and that we are open to the public because we get state funding. Our other campuses don’t have quite as much problem with this stuff, but we are right smack dab in the middle of a residential community.
Same evening librarian has been having problems with someone I will call “creepy stalker guy”. She has notified security, and they escort her to her car every night, but he’s always back the next night and no one is trying to stop him from showing up. We’ve been asking for a panic button to be installed in the library for over a year (since long before I started working here), and keep getting the run around. We actually have a button, but it’s not hooked up to anything yet! Fat lot of good that does.
Our administration is unfortunately very lenient with non-students using campus facilities. How do I, a low-totem-pole member of one small department of the overall college (and situated on a peripheral campus), convince the higher-ups that this is a real safety issue? Does someone actually have to get injured before we can get taken seriously?
