The Safe Library

Book excerpt: For over 22 years, Steve Albrecht has trained thousands of library employees around the country on the dos and don’ts of handling challenging, entitled, eccentric, demanding, harassing, or even threatening patrons. His articles, blogs, podcasts, and keynote speeches have helped empower equip library employees at all levels to be more empowered, assertive, and confident when helping users who are struggling with homelessness, mental health issues, trauma backgrounds, and substance use problems. The Safe Library offers practical and realistic tools which will make every library facility a better, safer place to work. Readers will learn: de-escalation skills, communication tools safe workplace habits security measures personal protection methods, and, how to activate one’s best customer service skills, even under stress. This book provides advice and support to help library employees best deal with sexually harassing patrons, unruly groups of students, thieves, Internet hogs, and others who can disrupt the safe library environment. It offers best practices for helping patrons experiencing homelessness to follow library rules while staff treat them with dignity and respect; helping staff stay motivated to deal with the same challenging patrons and their accompanying demands, day after day; protecting smaller or rural library facilities and keeping one-room, one-librarian facilities safe; working more effectively with onsite security guards and responding law enforcement officers, to create more consistent responses; and using daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly facility security checklists to regularly assess the state of your buildings and IT systems. This book is for all levels of library employees, from longtime staffers to part-timers and even library volunteers. It will especially appeal to library directors, managers, and supervisors who have to manage different types of staffs and patrons in different types of facilities, ranging from downtown locations to rural library buildings. Here's the book that answers the most common (and even uncommon) user behavior and customer service questions, or as many attendees have said after experiencing Steve’s dynamic training programs, “Here’s what they don’t teach you in library school.”