PLA Blog

Taps are playing on day one of PLA’s Results Boot Camp II. We are quite a mixed bag of librarians, serving very different customers. We come from library systems, consulting agencies that are tax supported (I’m in that group), small libraries, big libraries, state libraries, and more. This is how I summed up our day in my notes:

• Involving the community in planning is vital - which can make staff and trustees unhappy.
• Choosing roles through a community committee is vital - which can make staff and trustees unhappy.
• Library roles are changing, so adapt or die - which can make staff unhappy.

So, basically, if you’re doing the right thing by your library, there’s a good chance you’re making somebody unhappy. As long as that’s not the majority of your constituency, you’ve got your priorities straight. The staff don’t work for the library, they work for the public. We all have things we are good at, and things we like to do, and if you’re really lucky, they’re the same thing. But the community committee is there to make sure that when you spend their money on library service, you’re worried about what they get, not what you do.

This comes down to doing fewer things and doing them really well. We can’t continue to survive, let alone thrive, if we can’t make tough decisions and allocate our resources to what the majority of the public wants from us. We worry so much about our roles in the future (will libraries be needed, will I have a job that fits with what I know how to do, will Google/Borders/Amazon put us out of business) that we lose sight of the fact that the staff needs to be flexible, do their job as it is defined by public needs, and welcome new training and roles. When staff become inflexible it’s time to question whether or not they “can ‘t” do their job or “won’t”. If they won’t, then maybe the library isn’t the best use of their skills.

As Sandra Nelson said today, it’s not an easy time to be a librarian. If we look to our communities and let them help us improve our libraries, then we make the job easier but less comfortable. But oh, so exciting.

Tags: conferences, PLA, PLA Blog, PLA Boot Camp 2006

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 7:36 pm and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.