PLA Blog

I’m the Assistant Library Manager at the Perry Hall Branch of the Baltimore County Public Library (MD) http://www.bcpl.info and I’ve been a librarian with BCPL for over 25 years. This is my first time blogging for PLA, although I’ve been blogging conferences for my library all year. http://bcpltrip.blogspot.com    However, I don’t have all the skills down for embedding live links, etc., so forgive me on that end. Part of my problem may be that I’m doing this on a Mac. I had to download Firefox here to be able to post, although I didn’t have problems back at home with Safari.

Anyway, my branch will be moving into a new green building next March which we hope will be LEED certified to the silver level so my first  session today was Sustainable Libraries: Shades of Green. Unfortunately, I got there too late to get some of the handouts so I hope the presenters all post them on ALA’s handouts page http://presentations.ala.org  I found this presentation to be really helpful in understanding the whole green planning process since I haven’t been a part of that process back home. (I was transferred to my branch after the design process was complete.)  Also, it was nice to have several case libraries to illustrate the planning process and the areas of green design.

There are 6 main areas of green design (I was only able to write down 4 fast enough though, sorry!):

• sustainable site planning
• safeguarding water and water efficiency
• energy and atmosphere
• indoor air quality

One point that hadn’t occurred to me was that scanning and digitizing your local history material can be considered a green initiative since it makes the material available to customers without requiring them to consume fuel to come visit your facility. I was also interested in various ways libraries earned their LEED points for educational components. One library had scientific instruments on the roof; another used a touchscreen display system to teach patrons about various systems used in the building, how they work, and how they were environmentally friendly. I plan on visiting these libraries’ websites as well as researching what other libraries are doing to give me ideas for our own educational credits for LEED certification. Community partnerships were proposed to help deliver educational programs as well.

Another important point was that you have to balance green features with your customer service goals and customers’ expectations. Sometimes you have to compromise or make difficult choices.

Tags: ala2008, green libraries, PLA, sustainable libraries

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 4:21 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.