Chicago Friends Group Loses Round
in Weeding Battle
A Cook County Chancery Court judge declined September 19 to issue a temporary restraining order against the ongoing weeding of books at Chicago’s Sulzer Regional Library. The request had been made the day before by the Friends of Sulzer Library in response to community concerns about the truckfuls of books that have been removed from the north-side facility since mid-August. Judge Sophia Hall said there was no evidence that irreparable harm could result from the weeding, the Chicago Tribune reported September 19.
Friends Treasurer Ron Roenigk told American Libraries that his group had also filed a complaint for a preliminary injunction “to force them to come to court to explain what they are doing.” Roenigk said that as of September 14 “there were 2,000 linear feet of empty shelf space in the Sulzer Library fiction section.” Two Sulzer staff members have told AL that probably 35,000 books, 7–10% of the entire collection, have been removed.
At a board of directors meeting September 18, Chicago Public Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey reiterated that the weeding was a normal operation involving “older books such as chemistry and medical books from the 1970s.” However, she admitted she did not know how many books had been weeded, the percentage marked for discard, or the current whereabouts of the volumes removed.
Dempsey also came under fire for the condition of the 17-year-old building, which has experienced repeated water damage and a recent mold infestation in the basement where the library’s technical services and audiovisual departments are housed. The north-side community paper Inside noted that city workers had begun to replaster and repaint mold- and water-damaged areas September 5. Dempsey insisted at the meeting that “a top-to-bottom analysis by the city’s Public Building Commission is underway.”
However, in an August 29 letter to the city Office of Budget and Management, the Friends group expressed concern that a repair feasibility study completed in March by the Chicago architectural firm of Holabird and Root had not been released to the public and that “repeated attempts to secure this document have been thwarted by Commissioner Dempsey almost since it was completed.”
Posted September 24, 2001.
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