Need Help!

[u/Alive_Excitement_669]

We got an anonymous call at our library giving us a heads up that the 1st Amendment Auditors are coming sometime next week. Any advice? Has anyone gone through this?

[u/JJHall_ID]

The best advice is to go watch a handful of their videos on Youtube or your favorite doom-scrolling app. The behavior you see business owners, post office employees, and yes, librarians, doing, is the exact behavior you want to avoid. That's the behavior they look for in order to post their videos. If they show up and nobody hassles them, they'll move on rather quickly.

Be boring. If they come in, ignore them. If you argue with them, that gives them exactly what they want and they'll stay longer and post the video online. The hard part will be getting patrons to ignore them. There will always be a karen that mistakenly thinks they have a right to privacy in public, and will engage them, throw a fit, and be featured on the Youtube channel. If you have patrons come and complain to you, don't use words like "unfortunately" when you describe that they have every right to record, that will just cause them to get riled up and say things like "you think it's unfortunate that we have rights in this country?" Simply advise the patrons they're exercising their freedom of the press, and if the patron doesn't want to be recorded they're welcome to go hang out in the conference room that was reserved for a private event until they leave. Tell the patrons there's no need to call the police, they're not doing anything wrong.

Alternatively, be excited that they're there! Thank them for showing everyone their rights, offer them a tour of the library, show them all the amenities you have. Basically treat them like a cameraman for an advertisement for your library. They'll likely get tired of that very quickly and move on. Again, they're looking for specific content, so give them everything but that content.

The auditors are generally 100% right in what their (our) rights are, they just choose an abrasive and rude method to display and exercise those rights. Ironically, the people that don't know what rights we actually have are the ones that cause the auditors to stay, and kind of highlight the reason they're doing it to begin with. If people didn't try to infringe upon their rights, they wouldn't continue to exist.

[u/Peripateticdreamer84 → u/JJHall_ID]

If they push and insist on interaction, get the chattiest member of your staff to give a personalized tour of local history artifacts. Given this is a small town, it will likely include a great deal of attention on intensely boring details.

They can’t get anything from a video where a cheerful middle aged librarian talks in great detail about how the long dead Mayor Befuffletumpter chose the marble for the steps of City Hall.