The Los Medanos College Experience responded Monday, April 8 to a request to take down a story published at lmcexperince.com titled “Read Contra Costa set to arrive in Los Medanos College for fall.” The same story was published in the print edition of the Experience March 21 under the title, “Acclaimed author set to visit LMC campus.”
A misunderstanding about the nature of the information provided by the Contra Costa County Library to the LMC Library led to the release of embargoed information since no contract with the author had yet been signed and negotiations are ongoing.
“By sharing possible authors or books, the LMC partners were mistakenly providing inaccurate information that could have caused problems during contract negotiations,” said LMC President Pamela Ralston.
After preliminary information was shared by the county about LMC being the likely site for a county library event, LMC Library department chair Kim Wentworth explained, “We told the county that we would start recruiting faculty and students to help plan the events. We didn’t know that we should limit our promotion.”
Contra Costa County Librarian Albert Garcia, who is helping plan Read Contra Costa, said this was his first time planning an event like this and that the county library reached out to LMC to begin planning the event, but didn’t have the contract completed when it was announced to the college.
The LMC Library, as well as the LMC Experience, were unaware of the logistics of the contract negotiations and weren’t told that any promotion of the event should be withheld from the public until the contract is signed.
“I didn’t know there was language regarding the promotion of the event,” said LMC librarian Christina Goff.
“We should have been crystal clear about the limitations regarding promotion,” Garcia said. “It should have been made clear from the beginning.”
To prevent this from happening again the LMC Library will ask future partners about the limits of what information can be distributed to the school, as well as to the student newspaper.
“The team working to partner with the county library will validate promotion and communications requirements prior to sharing information publicly. Other teams working on similar partnerships will be reminded to be mindful of validating requirements regarding partnerships as well,” Ralston said.
Garcia said that when planning events next year he now knows the requirements and paperwork that need to be completed and shared.
“This has been very overwhelming for me, but I now know what should be done beforehand,” Garcia said.
Any updates about republishing the original story online will be announced in the print edition of the LMC Experience and at its online edition lmcexperience.com.
