I just finished a brief talk and discussion about mobile library services for Library Journal’s Tech Summit, and I wanted to pick up very briefly here on a subject that’s been tickling the back of my mind for a couple of weeks. This is an unfinished thought.. feel free to complete it.

The trend to associate collection items with latitude and longitude and then build mobile or even desktop apps that take advantage of that data is overwhelming. It’s overwhelming and I’ll add that I believe it to be *good*. Sure it’s helpful to make mobile-friendly versions of library websites with responsive layouts, but the “where-ness” of the mobile web is really best leveraged through these apps that push library services in new directions. I love displaying library items in context, outside of library walls like so many of these apps do, but I’m thinking now about a different kind of mobile “where-ness”.

The first where-ness I described is literal. Longitude, Latitude. Simple metadata. Clear use cases and applications. The second where-ness is a little different though, it’s less concrete and more about the intricacies of our interaction with media in different contexts. Consider for example the difference between reading The Adventures of Huck Finn in a classroom, versus reading it in a treehouse. Or what about books you might consider ‘vacation reading’ and where they actually get read? Do I have a different experience reading The Lord of the Rings while solo-camping in the Sierra, rather than in my hammock in my front yard? You bet. Do I have different songs that I play when I’m driving rather than chilling out on my couch? Yes. How about certain songs that I play when I’m driving in different regions? Certainly.

The point is that places and contexts invoke feeling, some of which is personal, and some of which is common across user groups. Places are in fact far more than points on a map, they are flexible based on the experiences you bring to them, and they change with time and use. Now that media is mobile, we interact with and generate changes in place very differently. I believe there is room to do mobile media development that accounts for or leverages this more complex version of “where-ness”, but…

I don’t have the answer! Anyone? Thoughts?

Share your library’s ebooks experience by contributing a short essay for the JanFeb 2012 issue of Public Libraries. How have ebooks affected your library’s staffing patterns, your library’s website, library services, etc. Has your library implemented any new programs or services? How are you handling e-device questions? We want to hear all about it! Essays for this Perspectives column should be approximately 500 words and are due by Monday, December 12. We hope to hear from you! Send submissions to .

The Digital Public Library of America needs a public-facing laboratory; an experimental beta space where we can prototype ideas, curricula, interfaces, strategies, and experiences.

I’m home again after a very interesting session about building a National Digital Public Library at the Los Angeles Public Library and I’d like to recap it while offering a few of my own opinions for the readers.  Public librarians reading this post: a national digital library movement is most certainly underway, and quite frankly I think it may be the only thing that will prevent our libraries as we know them from simply fading from relevance.  I’m aware that my opinions on these matters may be a bit controversial for those libraries and librarians kicking back out there, those that believe providing access to books for public consumption will remain a useful, supported service that your community will tax themselves to keep around.

Before going any further, I think it’s worth stating for clarification that this #NDPL conference was an IMLS-funded gathering that was the product of a concurrent vision overlapping with another project that’s been the talk of the town lately, that being the Digital Public Library of America (#DPLA) initiative.  I’d like to thank Martin Gomez for having the foresight to put this meeting into the works a year ago, and IMLS and the Library Foundation of Los Angeles for supporting it.  I’d also like to thank him for closing the conference with a statement endorsing the DPLA movement as something vital and of imminent importance, something that public libraries must become deeply involved with in order to steer it in a direction that serves their users’ needs. With that, I will stop switching between the NDPL / DPLA nametags and return to DPLA consistently when I refer to this movement; I hope others will too because clear messaging and good communication are important components of this (or any) movement.

It was excellent to have so many strong voices from public libraries pondering the difficult predicament libraries find themselves in as content lenders in the digital environment.  There were library directors and state librarians as well as public library technologists present, not to mention representatives from OCLC, The Sloan Foundation, the Gates Foundation and many, many more.  That said, as much as the room was brimming with public library leadership talent and as encouraging as it was to see those representatives, I was reminded of the reason why I rushed to become involved in the DPLA immediately upon hearing about the idea not quite one year ago.  I saw the DPLA as a chance to inform, influence and leverage change in my profession from the outside, rather than change it from the inside as I’ve been trying to do for years as a public employee.  After working for public libraries for 13 years now I don’t believe that the type of fundamental change that we need to make to the very definition of what a public library IS could ever happen from the inside.  That’s regrettable, but true.

So, indeed, I believe that our era of digital content replacing print content requires a much larger re-visioning of what public libraries can and should be in their communities. I’d describe public libraries’ current approach to the future as ‘people want their books as eBooks now, so lets fight an uphill battle to provide eBooks to patrons as a new media format the same way we’ve always done so’.  That is not going to happen, and if that’s what the goal of the DPLA is then I’m sorely disappointed and I’m sure it’ll fail.  Instead, let me suggest for public libraries and the DPLA a new mission and vision, one that taxpayers WILL support for many years to come because no other competitor does it, and because if it is explained and implemented properly (see: nationally) it will build stronger, smarter communities, and ultimately build a stronger, smarter country.  In one sentence: public libraries need to support information production with the same level of commitment that they’ve always treated information consumption.  For a while now I’ve been preaching this like a scratched record on an old turntable, but it’s important to continue to reiterate it. Libraries have always been read-only institutions, offering access to media for consumption. Card holders can read library-lent books, watch library-lent movies, listen to library-lent music.  If the public library is to succeed in this new digital era, card holders (hopefully meaning everyone in your community) need to be given access and education so they can create and contribute to culture, and gain the skills to produce things like the new media creations that will be the successors to the things we call eBooks now.  Library cardholders should be equipped to participate in the incremental construction of end-product multimedia packages (eBooks, web platforms and services, or others) through conversation and single-channel media production, and public libraries CAN and SHOULD be the intermediaries making that possible.

The meeting in Los Angeles was not about this path.  This meeting focused on the preservation of culture, on digitizing our past rather than supporting the creation of new culture.  Now I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong here, but in my experience this revelation that our unique, historically significant holdings hidden in public library basements and attics are our most important materials is actually quite new.  My impression is that only five years ago the trend was to try to sell or gift these materials to other agencies who think of ‘preservation’ as a piece of their mission.  I can remember quite a few meetings in quite a few different contexts where librarians of all levels agreed that the mission of the contemporary public library has very little to do with ‘preservation’, and that the only responsible thing we can do is get these materials into the hands of others who can deal with them responsibly.  I had an excellent conversation with Helene Blowers of the Columbus Metropolitan Library on this topic.  We both agreed that while preservation of existing cultural artifacts is important, there’s an immediate need to imagine a framework that supports both the creation and archiving of current and future knowledge.  We both hoped that the DPLA could carry a torch along that road, rather than merely shine a light on the dusty corners of our past.

For me, the highlights from the meeting in Los Angeles came from Ben Vershbow of New York Public Library’s Labs team and Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive.  Peter asked the group to think further ahead, and to consider the future of digital reading and what eBook packages will look like in 2-5 years.  This is something I’ve been deeply concerned about lately as well.  For example, with Amazon now acting as publisher, platform, and device they’ve completely monopolized the eMedia life cycle.  There’s no reason Amazon couldn’t work directly with the author of an upcoming ‘novel’ and provide them with the tools create a rich, multimedia work that would only ‘read’ or ‘play’ on the Kindle Fire, or perhaps would have enhanced features that are only available when using a Kindle Fire. Peter retweeted a statement from Michael Colford, Director of the Boston Public Library at one point, saying “if we don’t deal with access to contemporary books, we risk losing relevance for libraries.”  I appreciate that, yet I remain completely unconvinced that the future of libraries rests solely or even largely on awkward content lending arrangements. Librarians have made it about that, but it doesn’t have to be about that.  I think it’s time to move away from a model that places value in consumptive transactions, and toward an experiential learning model that supports creativity and contribution.  I’m reminded of the final sentence in an old blog post by Aaron Schmidt from 2009 called Libraries Might Not Provide Content in the Future & it’s Okay, where he says “If anything, we should consider books, movies, music and computers loss leaders and show people what we can really do for them once we’re lucky enough to have them in our buildings.”

Ben Vershbow did more than just show off the jaw-droppingly amazing digital projects he manages at NYPL Labs; he was the one speaker who offered a glimpse of a realistic vision for the future of a DPLA working in harmony with our existing public library infrastructure.  Ben briefly moved conversation away from digitize, digitize, digitize and brought up the Make Magazine article from earlier this year about public libraries as hacker spaces or fablabs where people can create projects for their own personal growth, for the benefit of the community, or both.  He also pointed to the project in Fayetteville NY, where the librarians have actually set up the first public fablab.  Friends, it’s not an accident or a weird coincidence that writers, technologists, entrepreneurs, futurists, hackers, artists, and intellectuals of all sorts have been either expressing interest in a ‘new kind of public library’ or even trying to make such things themselves.  It’s not a coincidence that there’s a group of hackers voluntarily building a mobile app for the Tulsa Public Library in Oklahoma, while there’s also a group of hackers doing work in the Washington DC Public Library, or while a ‘TechRaising’ event in Santa Cruz brought together developers who were happy to help the library realize a new digital project.  It’s a sign of the times that efforts like the Read/Write Library in Chicago will be featured in a talk at SXSW this year, and that popup portable reading rooms like the Uni project run successful Kickstarter campaigns and have mass appeal.

What I’d really like to hear at future meetings are some ideas about how the DPLA movement can incorporate the ideas and the energy that all of these other independent projects have, and how that kind of work can be supported on a national scale without losing the local flavor that remains so important in communities.  I’d like to hear less about digitization, which is not to say it is unimportant, but it is to say that preserving the past is probably the least imaginative step forward public libraries can take into the digital future right now.  So, in conclusion, here’s what I believe this movement needs next:  the DPLA needs a public-facing laboratory; an experimental beta space where we can prototype ideas, curricula, interfaces, strategies, and experiences.  I know I’m not alone in wanting this, I’ve had many conversations in which this has come up.  Look for future posts describing this beta space.

Save the Date! Nov. 21, 2011 ~ 2:00 p.m. CST
Get your e-reader and e-book questions ready and visit the PLA Facebook page on Monday! For one hour, Carson Block, library IT consultant and the moderator of PLA’s e-book webinar series, will answer “e-questions” from PLA’s Facebook fans. www.facebook.com/pla.org

I’m in Los Angeles now for the National Digital Public Library conference, which promises to be a group of forward thinking, influential public librarians and library administrators thinking through how they might contribute to, benefit from, and provide end users with valuable services from a Digital Public Library of America.  Here is the agenda.  Briefly, here are the two things I have on my mind going into this.

First, there’s been talk that the DPLA needs to focus on APIs first, and user interfaces second.  While that’s an logical approach for any project, I’m deeply concerned that such an approach actually means that building useful applications and creating different ways of interacting with DPLA content will be sidelined as low priority, the result of which will make the DPLA nothing more than a vast collection of collections that commercial vendors will use to build and sell useful apps to public libraries.  Of course it’s fantastic that this content will be available for vendors to work with, no doubt some of the greatest innovations will come from there, but I want to see some of the initial development dollars for this project spent on products that will immediately impact public library users.  I can probably count on both hands the number of public libraries with web application teams that have the time and the skills to work with DPLA APIs to make slick, beautiful, usable applications.  I believe the university environment is different, and this API/interoperability base is sufficient for their library staff to work with to create great, useful end products, but again I don’t think it’s anywhere near the scope of average public library capacity to do this work in house.

Second, I continue to dwell on the need for a physical footprint for the DPLA in the public library world.  This needs to happen in the form of content creation kiosks, stations, or even larger facilities of some type.  Public contribution (in the form of user-generated content) to the DPLA guarantees its usefulness, success, and public buy-in, and with a massive established infrastructure of public library buildings across the country we absolutely have to think about how to leverage these assets to make the DPLA a lasting, sustainable venture.  Our greatest cultural artifacts may be the yet undiscovered, undocumented, unrecorded troves of knowledge stored in boxes of physical media in citizens’ basements, or they may even be embedded in the experiences and thoughts of library users themselves, just waiting to be told as stories or illustrated as new media works. Jeffrey Schnapp over at the Harvard MetaLab wrote a nice post speaking to this point, I remain vocal and active in the development of the librarylab.org architectural pattern supporting content creation on the scale necessary for a national digital library, and I’m tempted to also to point to the recent success of the Fayetteville Free Library’s FabLab project in their public library as a forward-thinking project in this context.  It is not enough to build a website or establish a set of standards for the DPLA to be a success; a national digital library needs to be woven into the fabric of our communities just as any of our other basic services are.

I’ll follow up with some notes and observations after this fascinating meeting / planning session is over.

At 1 p.m. CST on Wednesday, Nov. 30, the Public Library Association (PLA) will host a live, hour-long webinar, “Fully Engaged Customer Service at Your Library” as part of PLA’s “Public Libraries at Work” monthly webinar series. During this webinar, participants will learn a fresh approach to customer service and discover ways to reduce work stress by enacting techniques to connect with patrons and respond to their needs in an efficient and positive manner.

Instructor Cheryl Gould, library training consultant, will define the three elements of customer service interactions and show webinar attendees how they can successfully engage in each part—resulting in more successful and rewarding customer (and staff) experiences.

The cost to attend “Fully Engaged Customer Service at Your Library” is $28 (PLA Members), $31.50 (ALA Members) and $35 (Nonmembers). Groups of any size can register for $129. The deadline to register is 4:30 p.m. CST on Nov. 28. Register here. Get more information here.

“Perspectives” is a regular feature in Public Libraries, the journal of the Public Library Association. Each issue has essays on a particular topic of interest to public library practitioners. For the January/February, 2012, issue, you’re invited to write about:
• How your library is balancing its resources? Print? AV? Electronic? What about realia (puppets, toys, coupons, sewing patterns, tools, games, laptops)?
• How are you adjusting to e-books?
• How are you balancing your services? Adults, seniors, teens, tweens, kids, outreach, jobseekers?
• How are you seeking new users? New residents from elsewhere in the U.S.? New residents from other countries?
• How are you advocating for your library and with whom?
• How are you keeping your staff and coworkers motivated and up-to-date?
These are topic-starters….you may have ideas of your own!

Essays should be 800-1000 words. Photographs are welcome! E-mail your essay to Nann Blaine Hilyard, , by December 1, but earlier is better.

On Monday I’ll be giving a brief talk and moderating a panel discussion at the Digital Library Federation Forum in Baltimore.  I’ll be speaking on “What A National Digital Library Means For Public Libraries”, and our panel will be answering questions on related topics.  Panelists include Michael Lascarides (NYPL), Toby Greenwalt (Skokie PL), and Jefferson Bailey (formerly Brooklyn PL, now at LC).  For those not able to attend, here’s a synopsis of what I’ll cover in my 20 minutes.  I’ll post slides afterward.

Because of my involvement with the Digital Public Library of America effort, I’ve put a lot of thought into what different realizations of such a huge project might mean for library patrons in San Jose, CA where I work for San Jose Public Library.  It’s really quite clear that the people of San Jose are embracing the shift from physical content to digital content; our eBook usage stats just keep going up and up.  It’s also quite clear that people *love* our library buildings; they are packed every day and our door count just keeps going up and up.  This seems hard to reconcile: if the library’s greatest value proposition is it’s collection of circulating books, yet more and more of our collections are leveraged on an iPad from the comfort of an armchair at home, why are the buildings so busy?

The truth is, people like to *go to the library*.  It’s a community space, where they attend programs, see friends, and feel comfortable.  You don’t need to buy a cup of coffee in order to use the bathroom, and nobody is going to yell at you if you sit around all day and read the magazines.  I watch people chill out with their iPads, reading, browsing, all while sitting in a group of giggling friends.  Public libraries are community spaces that are specifically set aside so that you can make yourself smarter in your leisure time.  That’s really the coolest thing ever; something a community can take pride in. The digital shift hasn’t pushed people away from libraries.  So far the addition of eBooks to our collections has just been a boom in activity.  So, enter the DPLA: a digital library mega-effort with an ambitious goal to make all of our rich cultural heritage available across the web.  How will that change the activities in library spaces in rural Texan towns or neighborhood libraries in San Jose?

I think that the DPLA is a great opportunity for libraries to shift their focus to supporting a different set of activities in our buildings, and public library’s already mild support of these activities is one reason that we haven’t seen people leave our buildings behind for the comfort of their armchair at home.  The activities I speak of are creation activities: the production of new knowledge for personal growth and sometimes even the public good.  The future of public libraries lies in supporting creative endeavors in their local community and empowering the patrons to contribute their creative work back to the community or to the whole world via the internet.  The traditional library is a read-only space, meant for the consumption of knowledge: by providing access to media, we enable patrons to read books, watch movies, or listen to music.  The library in the age of the internet is quite different: texts or books are now just as easy to write or edit as they are to read, movies are just as easy to mash up and edit as they are to watch, and music is just as easy to remix as it is to listen to it.  Of course its ‘just as easy’ if you have access to the tools and skills to do these things.  Herein lies the new role for public libraries: we need to be centers for knowledge production, not just knowledge consumption.  There is no other institution doing this work, and public libraries are best situated to fill the gap.

For this reason, a Digital Public Library of America stands to have great influence on public libraries if it successfully accomplishes this one thing.  It must support user generated content, and give patrons the opportunity to integrate and display their own contributions in the context of ‘trusted’ library content, and it has to make that experience fun and rewarding for the participants.  In addition, if the digital library is to support these kinds of community contributions, it also needs to provide some infrastructure, some means by which the content is digitized or uploaded or displayed.  The “if we build it they will come” digital library will not work, even if it is a successful realization of de-siloing library assets and metadata for exposure on the web (which, btw, is awesome).  The DPLA or any large public digital library effort needs a mechanism for contribution, and serious UX work making that contribution engaging.  I’m also talking about the DPLA creating a task force for proposing real solutions to public library technology budgets, and hiring and training staff who know how to use the technology.

I think the added value of user generated content is best illustrated through an example.  I loved the comment Martin Gomez, director of Los Angeles Public Library, made at the DPLA plenary meeting: “What’s in it for the KIDS?”  Here is one example of what could be in it for the kids.

One of our most popular programs at the San Jose Public Library is the “Battle of the Bands”.  What’s not to love?  It channels the rowdy, creative energy of teenagers in a safe space to express themselves and feel confident as producers of knowledge.  In less nerdy words: we support making them feel like rock stars.  The problem is that as cool as that may be, the library only assists these kids in a few small aspects of the creative process.  We could do much, much more to turn the Battle of the Bands into a rich, lasting learning experience for the participants, and a DPLA could support pieces of that.  Here’s how.

First, to play in a band you need access to instruments, analog or digital.  These are are the tools for knowledge production.  One library in East Palo Alto lends out guitars to patrons.  Or you may be familiar with other libraries, where they lend out power tools or digital cameras.

Next, participants might want to record this event.  Maybe they want to shoot a video, maybe they are just trying to capture audio.  There’s an opportunity to teach audio and video production here.

Finally, the fun part: sharing their creation with their friends, and publishing it for the whole world to see.  Of course great services exist to do that and there’s no point in trying to invent our own version of YouTube, but we don’t necessarily have any tools for those kids to put their newly shot music video into the context of rock n’ roll history via a national digital library that pulls together trusted content from museum, libraries, archives and historical societies around the country.  This is where the interoperability of the DPLA could be a game-changer for recreational learners of all types.  If the Battle of the Bands participants could build collections and connections between trusted sources and their own creative work, they’d be learning by using media.  So if our band were a goth band and they found images and videos of The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees from the 1980s, then drew connections to Edwardian couture and then perhaps some 19th century literature (you can tell I’m going out on a limb for this particular example) they could build their own little collection of these materials.  Then, perhaps they could connect their collection to another person’s steampunk band on the other side of the country, and discover that even though the old-timey steampunk music doesn’t sound like other music they are into, there’s a common love for 19th century literature.

The point is this: once more ground work is established, a Digital Public Library of America could facilitate any of these activities.  The final example describing curation-based learning is the most obvious touchpoint, while the other steps: lending tools like musical instruments or offering a studio environment for audio or video production may require a more indirect form of support, perhaps through architecture or a design pattern like librarylab.org.  Most importantly, I hope this example illustrates the changing nature of library spaces, and their continued relevance in their communities as programs like evolve into core activities: the bread and butter of 21st century library service.

Thanks for reading!  No guarantees this will be an exact transcript of the DLF presentation, I like to make that stuff up on the fly.

I hope you are planning to join us tomorrow (Thursday, October 27) for a PLA Facebook Forum with guest Nancy Pearl. Beginning at 1:00 p.m. (central time), for one hour, on PLA’s Facebook page, Nancy will answer questions from PLA’s Facebook “fans.” Ask about readers’ advisory tips, book recommendations, read-alike ideas—all the things that Nancy knows best! Come join us for what promises to be an informative discussion!

The 2011 PLA “Results” Boot Camp took place October 18-21, in Nashville. Designed to help attendees get their libraries in strategic shape and prepared to meet any challenges, the PLA Boot Camp program is led by Sandra Nelson and June Garcia.
We asked Boot Camp attendees to tell us about the experience. Here are some of their observations:

I just returned from the Public Library Association (PLA) Boot Camp that was held in Nashville, Tennessee. This is a weeklong strategic planning and implementation session that is intended to provide the basic knowledge and skills to begin working with the community and to begin working internally with other managers and staff. Sandra Nelson and June Garcia are dynamite facilitators. Both are very dynamic and they work together just about seamlessly.

From: Jeff Martin, Acting Library Development Program Manager, Washington State Library,

So what did I take away from PLA Boot Camp?
• The world continues to rapidly change. New technologies are released constantly. Changes in technology and many other factors are changing consumer’s preferences and the way people desire to find and use information. This has many implications for the library “brand.”
• The library needs to plan with their community and align themselves to the community’s priorities. Only then will the library remain truly relevant.
• The library cannot be everything to everyone. Especially in current times, trying to do everything for everyone likely means the library is doing little as well as it should. Focus energies where the library can make a difference in serving the community.
• In these times of declining revenues, it is not a matter of adding or enhancing services or programs when library revenues finally increase. It is a matter of re-allocation of staffing and other resources. You have to give up some things to do others.
• Setting library goals and objectives after aligning library service priorities with community priorities is not as hard as it seems. Easy to use templates were provided to support the setting of goals and objectives.
• Integrating numerous other templates and models that were provided throughout the course should serve us well as we move toward the future.
Final note.
 Nashville is a fun city with lots to see and do.
 Be sure to visit the Nashville Public Library when in town. At a minimum, take the self-guided tour. Ask for the brochure. It is well worth the time. The library is only ten years old. It looks like it only opened yesterday. It is immaculately kept. Its architecture makes it seem as if it’s been there for a hundred years. The building is magnificent.

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From: Gregg Grisa,Adult Services Librarian, District of Columbia Public Library,
Trying to summarize my Boot Camp experience in 300 words is a bit like trying to cross the Pacific in a canoe. I suppose it could be done, but I don’t want to attempt it! Boot Camp was one of the most intense learning environments I’ve ever encountered. Both leaders Sandra Nelson and June Garcia were knowledgeable and approachable. Possibly the most memorable exercise of the week occurred when the Camp was split into two factions to discuss the issue of public library budgets, one side arguing that public libraries are a great value to taxpayers, the other that public libraries are a terrible waste of scarce tax dollars. Then three members of each side were selected to participate in a “debate” about this issue. I couldn’t believe that I was standing in front of a room full of public librarians arguing that public libraries are a tremendous waste of tax revenues! Having worked as a public librarian for over 25 years, I felt terrible about my “performance” (but I guess my bachelor’s degree in theater wasn’t as useless as I thought). Another especially challenging module involved trying to decide how to allocate the budget of the mythical Anytown Public Library. In the scenario, money was tight and the budget could only stretch so far. Programs and services would have to be either reduced or (gulp!) eliminated entirely. The previous day, this process of prioritization to meet goals had been discussed on a more theoretical level, and the general level of anxiety in the room was low. Trying to put it into practice turned out to be an entirely different matter. I think many of us enrolled in Boot Camp really enjoyed the “Sacred Cows” exercise–identifying outdated practices that libraries keep in place despite their obviously dated nature. [One of my favorites--does your library still affix Cutter numbers to each nonfiction item?] Other interesting questions raised–can you think of any titles that should be in the collection of every public library? Although I would have argued for a Random House, Webster’s, or American Heritage English Dictionary before the discussion, I’m not so sure now. However, I left thinking that perhaps the titles in the Results series (Managing for Results, Strategic Planning for Results, etc.), many authored by Sandra and June, might indeed be a valid answer.

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From: Brenda Branson, Director, Chesterfield County Library, SC,
Over the past few days, a group of over 50 library professionals deliberated over the logistics and means necessary to extend the life of public libraries by aligning services and resources to specific needs in our communities. Knowing that a “strategic plan” was the most efficient and effective means of aligning these components, I delved into the process eagerly. Under the influence of the “June and Sandra Show,” I quickly discovered my weaknesses, discovered strategies to break though situational roadblocks, accepted my stubborn reluctance to change – I am a life-long professional, and finally began to embrace the urgency of serving as the token pioneer in the necessary move towards a 21st Century public library that has value in today’s society. Being pretty confident under June and Sandra’s guidance, I took a deep breath while leaving Nashville, yet more determined to tell my story, influence my staff and colleagues, and discover exactly where the CC libraries need to go. For some us, the first step will be to discover and accept where we currently are, so that when we take the significant step into the future, we can plant both feet firmly on the road to success. Many thanks to Sandra and June, for your patience, wisdom and a wonderful week in Nashville. Country music never sounded so good!

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