Breakout Philebrity: Siobahn Reardon
Who She Is: Newly installed (as of August) President and Director of The Free Library of Philadelphia. Comes to Philly as a longtime pro at library wonkery, having served previously in high-level positions at Westchester Library System, Brooklyn Public Library and New York Public Library.
What She Does: Right now, whether it was anyone’s intention or not, Reardon is serving as the scapegoat for the current library crisis. And it’s hard to say whether or not she deserves it, because even when city officials have acted like they were being transparent with the decisions behind proposed library closures, it’s still pretty vague and most of the criteria issued don’t even satisfy themselves. Given Reardon’s long record in big library systems, though, this seems like something of an aberration. Her LinkedIn profile states her specialties are Strategic Planning, Business Process Reengineering and Trustee Relations — all of which point to her as a good hatchet person but probably an even better “let’s come up with a way to save these libraries” person.
Hated On For: Right now, being said hatchet person, but also, just saying insanely dumb shit in a time of crisis. From this Inky article yesterday:
“You can’t expand Fishtown Library,” Reardon said. “You can’t grow that building to be more open to teens, and we’re looking to reconfigure for things teens like, such as [video] gaming.”
Jesus Christ. And from her Facebook status around 11:30 this morning:
Siobhan is thinking about how the weather and the job are one in the same today.
Delightful. Sidenote: Can Nutter just fucking mandate all persons with high-ish level city jobs make their MySpaces and Facebooks private already? I mean, really.
Loved By: Has 148 Facebook friends. If she can just manage to roll back on some of this shit and stop currying favor with the new boss — honestly, Siobahn, look at the budget, the money needed to keep your libraries open is chump change, relatively speaking, just tell Dude to put the screws on the Parking Authority — she’ll be fine. She’s new.
Over/Under: Could be run out of town on a rail any minute now, could be here for two decades. Right now, it’s impossible to tell.
Read about more Breakout Philebrities here.
November 19th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Hang on, Siobhan.
November 19th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
“one AND the same”, liberry lady.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
“Business Process Reengineering” may be more sick-making than video games in libraries. Don’t librarians take some sort of oath to respect their mother tongue and not befoul it with jargon?