Patience, Fortitude, Vicious Infighting

This week in the NY Times' City Room blog, New York Public Library President Paul LeClerc will be answering readers' questions about, presumably, the NYPL. (The article itself is a bio of Dr. LeClerc, but no one seems to be interpreting this as an invitation to inquire about his "contributions to French culture".)

As of 8:30 PM Tuesday, the post has logged 79 comments, with queries ranging from the prosaic to the insightful to the truly bizarre. As expected, there are plenty of complaints about limited hours, inequality of resources/services allotted to certain branches, fines (too low!), and overzealous security. Then there's this scathing indictment:

There seems to be a huge upheaval in your research libraries with vicious infighting for turf supremacy and wholesale transfers of staff from one supervisor to another (outside of their core competency) by mid-managers in each respective institution. It seems like a wholesale slaughter with morale at an all time low. How is this supposed to improve the research libraries internal and external relationships?

Sacre bleu! I presume this was written by an insider. We can only hope Monsieur le Président chooses to respond to this and other serious and/or critical questions posed by his constituency.

Some librarians are, of course, contributing to the commentary, even responding to some of the more mundane questions that surely don't warrant Dr. LeClerc's attention. We just can't help ourselves!