Librarians interviewed by The State didn’t seem to mind McMaster’s intervention. Lexington County Public Library Director Dan MacNeil admitted that the excluded titles “are not ones that we would probably choose on our own.” Kershaw County Library Director Penny Harvey said that the 1,147 discs she expects to receive will take the collection “from nothing to something,” despite the cost of adding antitheft tagging. “I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
However, some librarians elsewhere apparently are: The MSNBC website reported June 17 that Tacoma (Wash.) Public Library discovered in its settlement windfall of 1,325 CDs 57 copies of Three Mo’ Tenors (2001), 34 copies of the Bee Gees’ This Is Where I Came In (2001), and 47 copies of the Los Tuscanes de Tijuana greatest-hits compilation from 2000, Corridos de Primera Plana. “Not to disparage the artists represented, but I was pretty surprised by the numbers,” reacted TPL staff member Lara Weigand. Worcester (Mass.) Public Library Director Penny Johnson said of Entertainment Weekly's Greatest Hits of 1971, “It’s an OK album with some decent songs on it. It’s just that we don’t need 148 of them.”
Tina Kindo, senior assistant attorney general for Washington, said the anomalies were due to an errant allocation program designed “to give everyone a variety of genres”; it is currently being reprogrammed by claims administrator Rust Consulting of Minneapolis. That came as good news for Wallace Hoffsis, director of collection development for Sacramento (Calif.) Public Library. He told MSNBC News, “We’ve been wondering if we’re going to get 12,000 Yanni CDs.”
Posted June 18, 2004.