California: San Diego City Auditor Says Public Library Needs Internal Controls Immediately
From the San Diego Union-Tribune:
The San Diego city library system lacks a set of rules and procedures governing such things as security, inventory, purchasing and revenue collection and should create those policies immediately, according to a letter from the city’s internal watchdog.
City Auditor Eduardo Luna, in a Dec. 2 letter, alerted the library staff that it lacked basic rules — known as “internal controls” — that are needed to assure the operation runs efficiently and lessens risks.
In response, Library Director Misty Jones said the staff will develop a plan to install the controls that Luna said are needed by July 2016.
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Luna said that library officials attributed the lack of policies and procedures to the management structure of the department, which ran the library system “by location, rather than function.”
Read the Complete Article
Direct to the Full Text Letter From City Auditor to SDPL Director (8 pages; PDF)
UPDATE San Diego Union-Tribune Publishes Editorial: “Library System Fixes Shouldn’t Take So Long”
Filed under: Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Public Libraries

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.