The Safe Library

Steve Thomas: Steve, you were on the show back in 2016, so welcome back to the show.

Steve Albrecht: Thanks, Steve. All the really cool guys are named Steve, so we know that for sure.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I gotta get a whole tag on the site of just where people can just find the Steves I’ve talked to over the years. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got started working with libraries in the first place?

Steve Albrecht: Yeah. Back in 2000, I was sitting in my office in San Diego where I used to live, and I got a phone call from some folks called Infopeople, and they were a grant funded library training consortium up in Northern California around the Sacramento area, and they said, you’re a workplace violence guy. You wrote the first big book on workplace violence back in 1994, which I did. I interviewed a double murderer in prison for that book, a guy that killed two people at work and they said, can you help us with things that are going on in the library? And I said, naively, what could possibly be happening in the library where you might need a guy like me? And they said, well, can you come around parts of California and look at some of the issues that library staff are facing?

This was back in 2000, so 23 years ago. So I went to Sacramento, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, Los Angeles city and county libraries, and my own in San Diego, and I got kind of a big eyeful and an earful from staff and the things that I saw they were facing in terms of safety issues, security issues, and then just challenging service concerns. Not so much about all the time problematic people, but just challenging.

I started going around California for Infopeople doing a half-day library security program back then, started in San Francisco at San Francisco Public and went on from there. And then that evolved into a relationship with ALA about 2010, right around there, that was when webinars were really starting to come around. Then they asked me to write a book, which I did. That came out in 2015. That book, Library Security, was kind of an offshoot of a book that they had sort of rallied around for years called the Black Belt Librarian, and that was written by a guy named Warren Graham, and he was sort of the go-to guy until he retired for that subject, and they asked me to kind of take over that space. And so that’s what I did.

And just going to probably 30, 32 states now, thousands of library people and just talk to them all the time about what they’re facing, talk to the administrators and leaders and just say, before I come in, you know, let me spend a little time in the library wandering around before the session starts, which oftentimes come in the day before, especially for places I’ve not been to before, and let me get a kind of feel or a vibe for what’s happening here and talk to the staff.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Well, in that way you can make it more personal when you’re actually giving the talk to the staff that you can say, well, I know you all are dealing with X, Y, Z so here’s how we can deal with that, not going into something that they just don’t ever deal with. Like, it’s a rural library and you’re gonna talk about all the stuff that urban stuff that doesn’t apply.

Steve Albrecht: Exactly, and the things that rural libraries face, which is oftentimes one or two person libraries. There’s a whole security piece, which I have in the book, about how you take care of yourself if you’re just a one-person library, two person staff, and then you have libraries in five story, six story buildings with hundreds of staff members, way different thing and some of the patron behavior issues are kind of geographic and you know, downtown libraries have a lot of issues around drug use and things like that, which you just wouldn’t have at a suburban library. So I try to customize things based on what the staff is facing. So they say this, this guy knows the environment I’m working in.

Steve Thomas: During Covid, did you just have to basically switch to webinars for the most part?

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, that was the thing about Covid is that your industry shifted dramatically to either being closed or curbside only, or minimum contact, just internet only, really a challenging time for you all, and I so appreciate how much library people did during the pandemic to keep the facilities as close to normal as they could, using the health department rules versus what they wanted to do for the patrons, and that part, I really appreciated.

The one thing about training in terms of Zoom, I don’t remember if you remember the old days, we used to use Skype, which was never really a great platform, kind of pixelated and fuzzy, and I’ve always had really good success with Zoom and it’s become really built into the training environment. Now we have choices about it. I can come in and get to a larger chunk of library people because they can call in from anywhere, and so these larger districts that they say we don’t wanna pull staff out for some span of time. So I do things ranging from 90 minutes on Zoom, up to even four or five, six hours.

Steve Thomas: And it seems like now, libraries, just over the time you’ve been doing this are more willing to talk about this kind of stuff. Before it was, just security in general, that’s not something we wanna talk about. We wanna just welcome everybody and everybody’s gonna be nice, but it’s not living in the real world, you have to deal with that kind of thing. You even talk a little bit about the ideal library world. That’s what you’re going for, but that’s not where we live.

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, I’ve always said that the perfect library world is just another boring day of doing your work and handling patron discussion issues and service concerns and being good information providers and then going home, see you tomorrow. The cops didn’t come. No paramedics, nobody fell down, no issues with kids, and nobody had any kind of behavioral concerns that frightened anybody.

And my part of it is, I’m always driven most of the time by my work by events. Library people don’t call me when things are going great. I’m sort of like the skin doctor. You don’t go to the dermatologist unless you got a rash or some kind of bump you want to look at, and I’m kind of that way, which is, we had an issue, we had an event, we had staff got scared by this person. Sometimes mental health issues, sometimes just threatening issues, domestic violence that may involve a patron or a staff member. Can you help us with those specific things?

 I’m oftentimes driven by what happens in the news media. Stuff that gets put into book drops, like bullets and scary stuff like that. There’ll be a significant event, a homicide at a library, which we’ve had in the last couple of years, which will drive the discussions to me about what can we do to make sure our staff is safe, and that’s kind of really where I get involved.

Steve Thomas: One of the important things that you teach though, is that you shouldn’t wait until something has already happened. You should have plans in place so that you can at least mitigate a situation, if not avoid it all together.

Steve Albrecht: You know, in my perfect library world though, staff would have input into the code of conduct. I like it when staff can have a staff meeting conversation with the library leaders and say, let’s craft a code of conduct that have addresses the issues that we actually face here and, okay. We have to have the lawyers vet it and make sure the language is right and all that, but let’s not have too much lawyer language in there. Let’s have it be connected to what library people do so that they have a sense that they are in control of the code of conduct because it came from them.

I always say that the code of conduct should be looked at once a year, at least, and it should be a staff conversation, and we should fine tune the language and add and subtract as we go. Some stuff doesn’t apply to our library. It doesn’t need to be in there. Other stuff definitely does. And so I think if we look at the backbone of behavior for libraries, it starts with the code of conduct and it goes to the policies and then really the biggest part is that the staff feels, and this is my challenge in the training, feels assertive. Not aggressive, but assertive about applying the policies to create an environment which is good for everybody knowing that we get eccentric people in the library, we get challenging people in the library, we get people that have significant behavioral or mental health issues, sobriety issues, that we’re doing the best we can on behalf of everybody we serve. And it starts with the code of conduct,

Steve Thomas: Assertive behavior can be difficult sometimes because it’s a profession full of introverts who don’t want to confront people who just wanna be nice and help people.

Steve Albrecht: Well, the good news is I’m a charter member of the Introverts Anonymous Club. I’m an introvert trapped in an extrovert’s profession, which is presenting and training and standing in front of total strangers, but I’m an introvert by nature. I write books. That’s what I prefer to do. You can’t make any money doing that, as we all know.

What I say to people is shift from being a situational extrovert, move into a dynamic in terms of talking to people that says, Hey, can I ask you to do more of this or less of that? It’s what I call the negotiated behavioral agreement. Can I get the patron to stop doing something or start doing something different? And we say it in a way that’s, I tell people in the training, stop using the P word, and the P word is policy. Well, that’s just our policy, sir. I don’t write the policies you need to speak to the director about the policies. I use words like guidelines or approach. One of our typical rules, how we usually handle this, sir or ma’am, is could we ask you to do this, this, and this? And just a lighter touch. And I always say, and you know this from your experience, you can always get tougher. You can always get more assertive. But I think sometimes, you look at the code of conduct and it says, you know, no eating in the library. And I would say, Hey, please enjoy your food and beverage outside. It is just a semantic language shift that’s trying to be more positive. We can always get tougher. We can always get more assertive, but we’re shooting for that negotiated behavioral agreement. Will you do this for me, patron, on behalf of the library?

Steve Thomas: And I feel like whenever you use the, “well, that’s just against our policy so you have to do it” is sort of offloading the responsibility.

Steve Albrecht: Sure. We want staff to have some discretion about how they handle stuff and they can be flexible in certain things. And when I say using the p word policy, that’s just our policy, sir, is kind of like saying calm down to somebody, it just pushes buttons for them. I think staff sometimes gets into that situation where they say, I have to be the bad guy or the bad woman in this situation. Instead of just saying, Hey, you know, can I ask you to do more of this or less of that? This idea of getting compliance from people in a way that doesn’t sound like we’re forcing them or ordering them to do it, it’s sort of an agreement that we come to. And I think that’s always the goal.

Steve Thomas: A lot of times you’re just enforcing consequences.

Steve Albrecht: Yeah. For patron behavior, we look at the sort of end stages where we’re banning people and kicking people out and things like that. That’s usually the 12th or 15th step, not the first. We give people in the library world lots of opportunities to comply and lots of opportunities to go along with the program. You can be eccentric and still enjoy the library. You can be loud and still enjoy the library. You can have all kinds of things going on in your life that sort of impact your behavior, but it doesn’t bother other people and hurt the library business then come on in. And I think we’re oftentimes pretty patient with library behavior as to get to the point where we’re trespassing people and kicking ’em out and things, that’s been going on for a while.

Steve Thomas: A lot of times if there’s harassment going on, one of the points you make is that the staff member needs to let someone know about that because we’re just not gonna know automatically, even if we’re observing the interaction, we don’t know exactly what’s being said or how it’s being taken or anything like that. What is it that a staff member can do in that moment before they report it to shut it down if they’re feeling harassed?

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, I devoted a whole chapter to harassment in the Safe Library book because it’s kind of a shadow issue that keeps coming to my attention. Oftentimes female staffers will pull me aside and say, can I tell you about this guy has boundary issues, asks inappropriate questions, makes physical contact with me, and I don’t know who to talk to.

One of the things I oftentimes discuss is that we should and need to have multiple channels of reporting in the library world, which is, I can speak to my boss or my boss’s boss or the library director, or even go outside the library system to the human resources person, or the legal representative, city attorneys, county council, something like that, even the state EEO offices, things like that to get some consequences for this person’s actions that I’m gonna report to somebody who can do something about it. So I think sometimes staff a doesn’t know who to report to or feels embarrassed that somehow, it’s their fault, or that somehow, they gave this person mixed messages, which is not the truth, right? It’s a boundary issue.

The other part is that they can be assertive about saying, I don’t answer personal questions and I’m gonna step away and I’m gonna go help somebody else, or I’m gonna go do another part of my job. Instead of saying I have to stand there and have these awkward conversations with these people cuz I’m in a service business. My thing is yes, but you have a right to personal boundaries as well and professional boundaries. It really surprises me that this issue sometimes comes up, and when I talk to staff members who have been targeted by this, and I use that phrase specifically, Steve, I don’t say victims, I say targets, is that they wait a pretty long time before they have somebody address it, and by that time it’s a pretty serious issue.

The other part is, we should, and most libraries do have a set of consequences for these types of patrons, which is, guess what? You get to do business with a supervisor. Guess what? You’re only going to engage with this staff member and not these other ones. Or guess what? You get to do business with us over the phone or by mail or by internet. Your, your behavior’s not welcome in the library, and I think that needs to be enforced as soon as it comes to that point so that there are consequences for that behavior. Otherwise the message is that can happen to our staff anytime you want to, patron perpetrator, and it’s not reasonable. Yeah.

Steve Thomas: And like you said, they’re targeting them and a lot of times they’re waiting until the right moment to get in cuz it’s like, oh, well they’re standing over there in a group, I’m not gonna go over there. I’m gonna wait till he or she is by themselves and then I’m gonna go over there and do it. Mostly when we’re talking about harassment, it’s sexual harassment, but it can be for anything.

Steve Albrecht: I mean, if you look at the ALA numbers by employee ratio, it’s about 70 / 30, female to male, maybe the same in your library as well. I’ve seen different versions, but pretty close. It’s gender harassment, sexual orientation harassment, race harassment, things like that.

I’m always trying to address it by saying, you’ve gotta tell somebody in a responsible position who can help you deal with this in a way that makes you feel comfortable that you don’t have to address problematic people over and over again. I told this guy to stop and he continued.

I tell you one that I have a lot of struggles with, which is staring, and then the staring one is sometimes be related to Asperger’s or autism spectrum patrons, but it’s also sort of a non-verbal harassment thing, which really makes a lot of female staff uncomfortable. It’s tough to address because it keeps going on even though you tell ’em to stop and sometimes it’s time to say, I’ve asked you not to do this and stop doing it. You and I may think, well, what’s the guideline in terms of intentional behavior versus unintentional behavior? I think it’s mostly intentional behavior that these guys are doing that kind of stuff.

 The parallel I always think about is what does your intuition tell you? I talk about intuition in safety and security discussions all the time. If you say, I wonder if I should get my boss; get your boss. I wonder if I should go call the cops; go call the cops. I wonder if I should disengage and go to the back room and shut the door and get on the phone to my supervisor or something like that; then do that. I think sometimes staff members know what the answer is. They just need intuitive permission to do that. And I’m trying to give them intuitive permission to do the right thing on their own behalf.

Steve Thomas: One of the difficult things with harassment also is that you don’t get into the book as much so much, cuz you’re talking about patrons, but staff can harass other staff and that turns into an HR kind of thing. But that’s hard sometimes to figure out too of what do I do with a staff member who’s harassing me, bullying me, how do I deal with that one?

Steve Albrecht: The challenge I think, with bullying, whether it comes from staff members, is that we don’t follow the model that we should be following in terms of like a school model. There’s no national protocol for how bullying is handled in the workplace. We’ve got it for schools, but we don’t follow that model in the United States in businesses, which is a head scratcher to me.

Steve Thomas: You do have a chapter on working with patrons who are experiencing homelessness. I don’t wanna go into it too much because I have already had an episode with Ryan Dowd where we go into it in great detail but basically, I mean, you’re kind of on the same page as Ryan, I think, that it’s empathy-driven enforcement of the rules. This is an extra layer on their life that they’re having to deal with. So you have to put that into consideration if there’s a code of conduct violation, how you’re gonna work with them.

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, I’m a big fan of Ryan’s and I think because he has come from a background in homeless shelter operations for 20, 25 years, I listen to guys like him and people that have worked in that environment quite carefully because they know what they know in terms of how he handles that population with empathy and with dignity, but also with boundaries.

The part of the thing I always got from Ryan, I think is really interesting is how long people have been homeless tells you what their issues are. If they’ve been homeless for a very short time and are getting off the streets, it’s usually they don’t have the major life issues of substance abuse and mental health. If they’ve been on the streets for 20 years, and we know this from interactions with them and see them over and over again, and their behavior is oftentimes driven by untreated mental illness and untreated substance abuse, it is really difficult to get behavioral compliance. Certainly not all of ’em are dangerous, and certainly not all of ’em are problematic, but we get this frequent flyer kind of model of certain types of homeless people in the library that just can make staff, just try their patience.

It’s about boundaries and it’s about enforcing the code of conduct and it’s also, how can I be patient and empathic, but also enforce the code of conduct knowing that these people are dealing with things that you and I just would not consider? All of our life possessions in a pillow case carried around.

And one of the things I got from Ryan too, and I’ve really tried to change my modality many years ago was, make eye contact with this population when you see ’em in the streets. He says, everybody looks down on them physically. I pull up a light and the guy’s standing there, I roll down the window, go, “Hey, you having a good day?” I just try to be as humane as possible for people that are struggling. But I also get from the library people, it’s one of their biggest challenges. It’s that sort of collection of the person that is homeless with mental health and substance abuse can be really, really trying the patience of the staff.

Steve Thomas: We go to Florida on vacation cause that’s where grandparents and stuff live, but the last trip at one of the gas stations, there was a guy there that was obviously experiencing homelessness, with the cardboard sign asking for stuff. And my daughter just was feeling very empathetic and was like, “We gotta give him some money!” I was like, “Oh, I don’t wanna give him any money, but let’s go in the store.” And so she picked him out a couple bottles of water, a sandwich, some chips, and all this kind of stuff. She went over and gave it to him and he was very thankful. And I think it’s just, that’s how you deal with people with that kindness and understanding.

Steve Albrecht: One of the things that I’ve talked about for a long time in this book and in the ALA book, the Library Security book, is how do we do kind of a task force approach to homelessness? How do we bring the thought leaders together where the library is the hub, and then the spokes could be homeless advocacy groups, homeless shelters, St. Vincent de Paul, Catholic Charities, church groups, grant funded programs, county social services, behavioral health, drug and alcohol counselors, law enforcement, LA Sheriffs has a homeless outreach support team or HOST, San Diego PD Homeless Outreach Team. Some larger cities have cops that are empathic and trained with psychiatric nurses and social workers to respond to these situations, get these people off the streets. My perfect library world is we bring them together in this task force cohort sort of thing, maybe once a quarter if we could, in a perfect world where we’d say, let’s not only talk about what we do about homelessness in our particular part of the community, but also educate library staff. How can they trickle some of their knowledge and resources down to these patrons? You know, here’s access to hygiene kits, here’s access to places to store your stuff here. Here’s access to new shelters or new church groups that are opening up to provide services. The library becomes kind of the hub for that. I’ve seen that model work.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, the local police department here does have a behavioral health unit, it’s a specific unit that has psychiatric nurses and doctors and therapists that will go out with officers on certain calls because certain calls don’t need somebody coming with guns ready to go cuz something’s happening. Police are not trained to deal with certain things, like librarians are not trained to deal with certain things. That’s not the right tool, that situation is not what a police officer is good at.

Steve Albrecht: Yeah. A lot of communities call those PERT or psychiatric emergency response teams, and so it’s a psych nurse and a psych technician, go along with a cop.

You know, Steve, the biggest issue that law enforcement faces with dealing with people with mental health concerns is that, and maybe this sounds weird, but cops don’t like being embarrassed in public. Oftentimes these guys don’t comply and that you say, come on buddy, you gotta go. And they’re like, I’m not gonna leave. Or you say, come on buddy, you’re under arrest for whatever it is, warrants or being high on drugs or whatever, and they won’t comply, and it turns into a “yes you will, no I won’t” kind of a thing, and cops hate being embarrassed in that sort of situation, well, you can guess what happens there. They go to hands-on and it looks bad. The optics with the community, with library people, with staff is that they jumped on this poor person, and it really goes back to this idea that they want this person to comply and that the person doesn’t want to, and you know that when people don’t wanna go along with things, it usually has to go to hands-on. It doesn’t look good.

So part of the issue with social workers and these city ambassadors or whatever we have that people come out that are trained in de-escalation and have some skills in talking to mental health, population or homeless population can be that resource that the cops don’t need to go to put hands-on all the time.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and I do wanna talk about that a little bit that leads I think, well into that conversation of not wanting to look embarrassed, feel embarrassed. When you’re talking about that, I immediately thought of like, you don’t wanna be Bugs Bunny and Duffy Duck going “Yes, I did. No I didn’t. Yes, I did. No I didn’t.” back and forth with a crowd around you watching it and just like, I look ridiculous right now doing this.

Steve Albrecht: How about crowd around you filming it as well?

Steve Thomas: Correct. But you do talk about, I think it’s important, of the relationship between libraries and police officers. You talk about that there’s culture in libraries, but there’s a culture in law enforcement that maybe librarians don’t understand, and that’s why there’s some of the friction that there is sometimes.

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, I wrote a piece for a police magazine many years ago that said, “Hey cops, here’s what goes on in the library. Here’s some things that you may not know about how the library functions, and here’s some of the challenges that, issues that they deal with.” The other part I’ve tried to say in the Safe Library book and in other spaces is, we’re always gonna need the police in the library, but we don’t always need the police in the library.

So having cops in the library, this is an issue, there was a stabbing of fatal stabbing in Winnipeg, Canada, and they have metal detectors and cops in the library now as a response. Part of the community is really upset about this. They don’t want metal detectors or cops and some of the staff and some of the community’s, like, we need them here and this is very important. So there’s this balance.

What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think we need cops in the library all the time. I do get the sense that it raises a sense of tension and things like that, but I also want the relationship between the staff and the leaders in the library and the police to be cordial enough to say, Hey, if we call you, will you come over and help us with certain really problematic, trying dangerous, threatening situations, not coming over and hassling patrons or kicking people out or doing things that they don’t need to be doing. But we got active shooters, we have armed people in the library, you’re gonna need the police. I’ve had people, very small numbers of staff members said, well, we’ll never call the police. We don’t want them coming to the library. I said, well, that’s a mistake for those staff members who do expect police services like they would expect if it’s happening in your front yard at your house.

So I think, in the terms of the relationship, the police need to say, we’re not here to tell you how to operate the library. We’re not here to interfere with your interactions with every patron that you come across. But we are the resource of last resort sometimes for violence and things that happen, which are crimes, things that happen against kids. We don’t want sexual exposure or kids being taken outta the library, kidnapped, domestic violence. We wanna be your resource for that, but we’re not gonna be in your library space all the time, and I think that’s the balance that a lot of libraries and PDs are trying to get to, and that’s what I’m aiming for as well.

Steve Thomas: On the other side of that, I was thinking when you started, 20 years ago working with libraries, was there stuff, misconceptions or stereotypes that you had about libraries? How has your work over the last 20 years changed your view of libraries since you started from the law enforcement side?

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, when I was in the cops back in the day, I mean, I worked in the PD in San Diego from 84 to 99, so I’ve been out for a long, long time, is I just didn’t see the library as having that many issues. I mean, it couldn’t possibly be, it’s a place with books and it’s all peaceful and everyone’s sitting around reading. That’s sort of the mindset that a lot of people have, especially in the cops as well. The problem is, especially downtown, more urban libraries, whether it’s kids or homeless or gang members and things like that, then they become a magnet for the library for certain behaviors.

And then we get into this how much police presence is enough and how much is too much. And so, I don’t always need to see three cops in the library like they have at Los Angeles City Library, they have a contract with LAPD for that but I want the sense that if you call that we’re gonna come for you in terms of the 9 1 1 response, and that the response is gonna be empathic to the people that we’re dealing with and not designed to scare people out of going to the library and also not designed to scare staff about their approach.

The relationship between the public and the police in this country is under scrutiny and it should be, and this continues today based on a number of things that have happened in the last four or five years for sure. But I don’t want this, and this is my goal all the time, I don’t want this sense that the police are the enemy in the library. I think they should be partners as necessary and not when they don’t need to be.

You know, there’s a cliche that cops say, which is absolutely true: nobody hates bad cops more than good cops. They don’t want anybody who’s staining the profession with their horrible behavior, mistreatment of people by race or any other reason, but I also want the sense that the 911 response is for things that you say, well, we called but actually the person left and you know, we’re sorry we bothered you. It’s not, we’re bothering you. That’s their job. In my perfect library world, the cops would come by on an irregular, occasional basis, say hello, kind of check everybody, make sure they’re okay, and then not come back again for two weeks or a month, unless necessary.

The running joke is if you want the cops to come to your library, give them the key code or the password to the staff bathroom. They want to go to potty in peace so if you, if you let ’em use the staff restroom once in a while, they’ll be your friend for life.

You know, the message I always say is, does this person’s behavior as a patron, does it hurt the business of the library? If it doesn’t, then do your thing, and if they’re sleeping in the corner, not bugging anybody, I don’t care. And if they’re taking off all their clothes and running around screaming at everybody with a knife, I care. And so what’s the impact on the business? If it’s a low impact, then go do other things. If it’s a high impact and it threatens the safety of the facility and the patrons and the collection and our materials and stuff being stolen, things like that, then you gotta call the police, and for those libraries that have security as a function, if we have really good security people, they’ve got good customer service skills and can engage with people, I think they’re worth their weight than gold as well.

Most people use contract security guards, and the benefit of that is they’re not employees for the library or the city or the county. You can say, I want that person out, I want somebody else better in the place. If they’re working for the city or the county, sometimes they’re sheriff security officers or they’re security that works for the city or county, you don’t have that same discretion. Sometimes it’s harder to do.

One of the things I wanted to mention, Steve, is something that really came to me as I was writing the book, which after all my career, never really dawned on me, is the need for a plan, a written event plan for types of events that happen in libraries.

My colleague Chet Price is the security manager for Jacksonville Library. He said, here’s a plan when we bring in an author. Here’s a plan when we bring in 150 kids off of school buses. Here’s a plan when we bring in a bunch of seniors that are here for some kind of program. And I had never thought in my whole career, we have to have a specific evacuation and do we need extra security because this person’s controversial author, and right when I was thinking about that, Salman Rushdie gets stabbed in upstate New York at the presentation he was doing. So that’s really something I’m asking library leaders to look at is say if we’re bringing in groups of people, whether it’s an author or politician, elected officials from our own town, there’s some kind of book event or some sort of media’s gonna be there or there’s gonna be a population that could be vulnerable like little kids or the elderly, you gotta have a plan. I thought we’ve always kind of done that by the seat of our pants and what Chet Price did, and I just copied his exact plan and put it in the appendix of the book and I said, follow this, is if you’re gonna do that, these are things you have to think about. I think he’s genius there.

I’ll give you a parallel. I teach run-hide-fight an active shooter and things for the rare possibility that ever happens in the library. And I say, give your key card to the first responders as you leave. If you’re evacuating the library, give your key card to them. They’re gonna get stuck in a hallway they can’t get through. So this idea of, why didn’t I think about that when I was writing all these security plans over the years? It’s more than just your hard key. It’s the key card this person needs to get into the rest of the library.

That’s the kind of thing I think about and say, let’s create a plan for those types of events. Maybe we have one once a year that’s a big deal. It’s some gala that we have at seven o’clock at night where a bunch of people are coming in in tuxedos and evening gowns. We have to have a security plan for that, a safety plan for that, and I think that was Chet Price’s genius and that’s why I put it in the book.

Steve Thomas: You’ve got several things in there of like, how to format certain things of like incident reports and policies for letting anybody, visitors or vendors, into staff-only areas and things like that.

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, a fair amount of checklists and things. My relationship for marketing my programs is through Library 2.0 and Steve Hargadon, another Steve, all the cool Steves are all together. Hargadon is such a great guy because he gives me a format, a couple of podcasts a month, a couple of blogs a month. I just did one on closing time. Here’s a checklist for the things that you need to think about when you close up the facility so you don’t leave little Johnny who’s eight years old in the bathroom cuz no one checked and those types of things, I kind of go by what surgeons and pilots do. There’s a checklist for everything, and even though you’ve done it a million times in the library and we always close up and there’s no issues, we don’t find some kid hiding in the break room or something like that.

So Steve Hargadon at Library 2.0 gives me that forum to talk about those things, which are kind of connected to the book and the training programs, but I’m always thinking about, and oftentimes come from folks in the library world who go, Hey, you know, we have this issue here and you know, can we address it? And I try to.

Steve Thomas: Well, to wrap up, is there anything like one big obstacle that you see in libraries, like when you’re doing your trainings that is blocking them from thinking about this kind of thing? What’s the hardest thing you have to kind of break through in, in thinking for librarians?

Steve Albrecht: I think the issue that I see the most with library people is they look at patron behavior and it’s been going on for a long time, and so by the time I get there, sometimes they want a restraining order, they want the guy kicked out or banned or trespassed. I go, well, gimme the file. And it’s two inches thick on this guy’s behavior over the past three years of this stuff. So I think the concern is sometimes we wait for problematic patrons to self-correct or self-cure themselves, and they oftentimes don’t. We need to enforce consequences earlier on than we do because oftentimes when a guy like me gets involved, it’s been going on for a long time and it’s much more difficult to deal with. So this assertiveness, this enforcing of code of conduct, this negotiated behavior agreement thing, I think can really get in front of these things early before it gets to the stage where it’s much more difficult to deal with.

Steve Thomas: All right. Well, Steve, thank you so much for being a great Steve and for coming back on the podcast to talk about your book, which again is called The Safe Library: Keeping Users, Staff, and Collections Secure. If you want more details, obviously Steve goes into much more detail on a lot of the stuff that we talked about here but lots of good advice in here.

Steve Albrecht: People can get a hold of me a couple ways. One is http://www.drstevealbrecht.com, send me an email there, or I’m at Library 2.0, askdrsteve@library20.com.

Steve Thomas: Thanks again, Steve, for coming on, and thanks for all your work.

Steve Albrecht: I appreciate it, Steve. Thanks to everybody in the library world as well.