In that vein, I am going to present to you a summary of their top ten benefits of tough economic times in reverse order;

10. Refresh Your Organization- This is the opportunity to look at the positions in your organization to see if the needs can be met through making positions more diversified or by changing the roles and services provided by the positions. You should be asking yourself if there is a need for the position, how else it can be filled, what else can be done? How much of the work is really relevant and how much is just filler? Its important to make the positions more fulfilling and satisfying by utilizing the talent that the employees.

9. Developing Staff Skills – Tough times can give libraries the opportunity to learn and grow from each other. Instead of paying for coaches and consultants, you can utilize the knowledge of your staff to train other staff members. Its important to allow staff to cross train other staff in a various roles and positions to give them the opportunity to grow and help people on multiple levels. Allowing staff to work together to teach each other can also help staff work more effective in teams, improve moral, or to work more collaboratively.

8. Make New Friends- In the good times, all these good friends existed out there but we weren’t talking to them. Now, in the hard times, we need to renew these friendships and make new friends. It’s important that you rely on local organizations and that you encourage them to rely on you for the resources that both can share. For example, the library can supply the community space for a food or hunger organization and the organization can provide the program.

7. Finally Write That Grant – Get someone who has an affinity for writing, has attention to detail, and most importantly has an interest in writing a grant. It would be helpful to get someone on your staff to help review state and federal grants so that they get trained (for free) about the grant writing process. You can also utilize volunteers who are looking to keep their work experience solid while they are unemployed to write grants.

6. Say It Better (Improve Communications) – good old fashion face-to-face communication. These times we have gone through have created so much fear and libraries are relearning the importance of communicating effectively to staff. Simple things, like leaving your door open, can help staff change their perception of you.

5. Kill Mission Creep – The most important skill a manager has is to demonstrate confidence with a clear message and knowing what they want. You want staff to get behind your initiatives and know where the library is headed. It’s important to revisit the strategic plan to make sure that all staff is working towards the same goals. Bad things start to happen if the only thing your working towards is keeping the doors open. Figure out what is it you really want to do and do it really well instead of trying to do to many things part way. In order to accomplish this, you should figure out how to say no to things that lie outside of goals of the strategic plan.

4. Enjoy Spring Cleaning (Leaner Facilities) – There is a lot you can do to fix up and change your facility for little to no money. Take this opportunity to clean out and throw away what you don’t need and to create a leaner space. Remember the adage, there is a place for everything and everything in its place and having too much “stuff” around the building leads to less efficiency. Explain the why’s of why a leaner space is a better space. For example, decrease the number of flyers on the desks and teach staff to be better salesman with face-to-face interactions.

3. Weed’em and Reep – Many libraries are weeding significant portions of their non-fiction collections to make room for more computers and chairs or other resources that patrons may need at a higher level. Perform a turnover analysis on all of your collections and anything that is low should be considered for downsizing.

2. Meet New Needs and Create New Users – Its important to have fun and change with the needs of the community to gain a new set of users. If people had an experience that is relevant to their lives, its more likely that they will vote in favor of the library when it comes time to go to the taxpayers for funding. We have created many rules to preclude patrons from using the facilities and we should be starting to change to more welcoming spaces.

1. Adjust Your Attitude – A fish stinks from the head down. Managers and leaders who are up against the challenges of the economic downturn and are negative will not inspire staff to rise above the challenges to solve the problems. By solving the problems from a positive space the manager creates a sense of team and comradely. Even if you’re not in a leadership position its possible to lead through your attitude towards staff and situations.

As per the title – Jan suggested in her welcome at the New Members Reception that we jot down one or two ideas each day to share with our colleagues who were not so fortunate to be here. Could we share them here? Anyone can send a comment here and I’d really like to hear some ideas inspired by sessions I just can’t fit in.

From PreC. Who said “Management Can’t Be Fun?”

• When you are a manager it is more important to be respected than liked.
• The ‘tent’ of management can hold up if it is missing some of its poles but the one that will take it down is lack of open communication 
• We all will meet some of life’s clowns!!!!! 
• We tend to hire for skills and fire for lack of characteristics – so start looking for the characteristics you want and teach the skills to the people who fit your organization and have the personality suited to give service to others – all others! 
• Reading is a solitary endeavor but librarians are people who serve the information needs of others. 
• Information is the gateway to empowerment – John Wood showed us just how empowered people can be with a little help along the way.

Help – I found the insert picture icon now how do I give my image a URL?

• What ARE the expectations of a librarian? The group agreed that it’s not enough to only be good at “reference”–it goes further than that. Even in an academic setting, librarians can no longer be strong in only one arena of librarianship.
• Librarians should take leadership roles within the school/community they serve. In turn, this makes the library’s role (as well as the librarian’s role) in the community more visible and potentially viewed as valuable.
• What is a “bar” for librarians to meet or exceed? Should there be such a thing? This brought about some lively discussion.
• Attitude–can it be quantified? Does it have to be? Attitude was mentioned as a way of evaluating librarians.
• What are ways in which librarians can be evaluated? Peer, “secret shoppers”, supervisor only, written evaluations, self-evaluations were all mentioned as possibilities.
• We discussed a couple ways to get buy-in on new technological advances: Use early-adopters of technology to be the prophet to the rest of a (jaded?) staff; put nay-sayers on committees with early-adopters.
• How do paraprofessionals come into play? What is the break-point between what a para can answer vs. what a professional can answer? This is an age-old question that still has some librarians disagreeing.
• Is mandatory involvement the way to go, in terms of getting staff to contribute to new technologies, new ideas, etc.?

Stephen presented first, and gave a really nice comprehensive overview defining social networking, the difference between social networking (connecting and building relationships with other people) and social media (the sharing of objects with other people in a social way). Some of the social networking use examples he presented were very practical and successfully functional, such as using a meebo me chat box on the “Ask a question” page of the library site, or creating a Facebook Page for a library. Also of note is that librarians are starting to post home-grown profile pages on their library web sites, giving students a better sense of who the librarian is and what kinds of specializations they cover, as well as profiles that advertise a librarian’s availability on Facebook.

However, there was also something oddly disturbing that Stephen pointed out. He cited two librarians who have tried to perform “outreach” on Facebook by searching for students with their school affiliations and sending out mass messages to these people using Facebook’s built in messaging system. Their messages were perceived as spam (which is, essentially, true), and their accounts were shut down. However, instead of finding different ways to outreach do outreach on Facebook, they continued to work to beat the system. Not only is this behavior deplorable — purposely trying to get around Facebook’s rules for sending messages (the Inbox, Messages and Pokes help section states that if someone is not your friend, you can only message them individually, after negative experiences with past open messaging policies) to spam users, even if it’s for a benevolent cause — it’s very anti-culture for Facebook, and really kinda makes librarians look bad. One of many interesting reports on how Facebook users interact with messages is available through the HP site.

Beth Evans reported that she had great success using MySpace with students at Brooklyn College. The library has 4,000 friends on my MySpace, and they’ve been able to successfully market services and events through the online service. The library encourages everyone to “friend” them on Facebook, which I believe to be a double-edged sword. Beth noted that the reason that students say they don’t expect to see libraries in social networking spaces in OCLC report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World, she believes that it might be because “it may not occur to them that we have something to offer,” which I think might be an interesting discussion to have, especially with public librarians.

David Lankes tied all of the presentations together while offering food for thought at the same time. His presentation about his work on participatory reference at Syracuse was truly scintillating stuff, and is definitely worth a listen. His statement, to paraphrase a little, that knowledge is created through conversation, and libraries, being in the knowledge business, are in the conversation business, seems very natural and innovative at the same time. Reference transactions should be conversations with the patron as well as any other human or digital resources at your disposal, instead of isolated Q & A sessions, which seems a bit obvious to me (doesn’t everyone bring all of their people and resources into the process?), but it may be that not everyone does reference this way. What’s truly innovative is the Scapes vaporware (conceptual software that only exists as concept) application that he’s developing to track this very collaborative reference process. That, and while ownership of space online is OK, we’ve been “too busy chasing Amazon and Google that we’re not really figuring out whether or not we’re in the same space” competitively. As librarians, you shouldn’t “define your mission by cool features, do it by core principles,” thinking carefully about how and why people use these online spaces. We need to stop chasing all of the innovators and making second-hand copies of everything, and really create something innovative to meet our patrons needs.

So yes, social software (an umbrella for social networking + social media) can create a collaborative environment in which reference questions can be answered. However, librarians need to take care in applying these applications, and, even better, should begin to really spearhead new ways and technologies in the area.

Monday morning’s speaker was Geoff Livingston, co-author of the book Now is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs, and contributor to the blog of the same name, carrying on the conversation started by the book. This morning’s breakfast was a discussion of the differences between audiences, communities, and stakeholders, and how using social media varies from types of user bases. Geoff posted a sort of preface to the Breakfast on his blog, which bloomed into quite a discussion online, and translated to a discussion at the event, which was very, very cool to watch.

What I realized after attending the Social Media Breakfast, as I munched on my bagel and lox, is that for quite some time the PLA Blog definitely has an Audience, a group of people consuming the content. The discussions that came from posting the Service Responses (Stakeholder-oriented feedback), and the comments we receive during conferences are the closest we’ve come to being Community. However, what hasn’t happened here is an all-out Community effect, a full-duplex give-and-take of discussion, ideas, whatever floats your boat as the reader.

So my question is this: In your opinion, what would encourage the growth of community interaction here on the PLA Blog? What would get you posting comments, submitting stories, case studies, questions, and pictures from your libraries, and just generally make the blog more interactive? Do you see this blog as a potential for Community, or is it strictly straight information for you? Is your idea of public librarian Community elsewhere?

I’m very interested in your responses to these questions, whether it’s in the form of comments here on this post, response posts on other blogs, or in email, and I’d like to try to incorporate these responses somehow in planning for the blog going forward. Let us know what you think!

PLA will award nine public libraries with a lump sum of $8,000 each to be distributed to as many of their employees as they choose for the purpose of working toward obtaining an MLS– $6,500 is to be used directly for payment of tuition at an ALA-accredited library school; $1,500 is to be used to support attendance for one or more of the selected scholarship recipients to attend a PLA-sponsored continuing education event such as the 2009 PLA Spring Symposium.

One library from each of the nine PLDS size categories will be selected. The categories are:

• Group 1 Service population of 1 million and over
• Group 2 Service population of 500,000-999,999
• Group 3 Service population of 250,000-499,999
• Group 4 Service population of 100,000-249,999
• Group 5 Service population of 50,000-99,999
• Group 6 Service population of 25,000-49,999
• Group 7 Service population of 10,000-24,999
• Group 8 Service population of 5,000-9,999
• Group 9 Service population under 5,000

The deadline for applications is December 3, 2007 at 5:00 CST. All applications must be submitted through an online application form available at www.pla.org.

Borders will be honoring educators with a $50,000 donation to First Book, an organization that gives children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books.

Inquire at your local Borders about their special reception celebrating the week on September 28 from 4:00 – 8:00 pm. If you call far enough in advance, perhaps your local store and your library can work out some collaborative programming!

The Hollywood Librarian was great last night. Really enjoyed some of the old movie clips and interviews that were included. I’m proud to be a librarian!

We learned the Metro system yesterday – seems very easy like most systems in other big cities. We’re going to try the bus this morning to get over to the Conference Center and see the scenery from the street level.

Hope this beautiful weather holds! We’re really enjoying our visit so far.

After the screening, writer and director Ann Seidl explained her interesting distribution method for the film. The film has been moved into the finals for an independent film festival (if you know the name of the festival, please comment here and let me know, I can’t find it), so it will get some exposure. But, rather than sell the film to a distributor, Ann would like to grant rides to show the distribution DVD, as well as a package of comprehensive marketing and discussion materials, so that interested public libraries can show screenings themselves.

What she asks in return is that libraries charge money for the screenings, with 1/3 of the fee going to her production company, 1/3 of the fee covering distribution costs, and 1/3 of the fee going to the library showing the movie. Her idea is to use the library, which, according to the movie, provides more points of service than McDonald’s, to get the word out about the movie and its message. Sign ups for this distribution program begin tomorrow at Booth #4207 in the Exhibit Hall, where you can ask questions and give your feedback about the film.

For those who missed the film, you can watch the recently-released trailer:

WGBH/Boston, a leading producer of quality children’s programming and award-winning resources for educators, is pleased to offer librarians a FREE Peep and the Big Wide World Event Kit. The kit has resources for organizing 3 different hands-on science events for preschoolers.

This free kit is available as part of the educational outreach linked to the WGBH-produced, EmmyR Award-winning series, Peep and the Big Wide World. The goal of the series and its outreach is to nurture young children’s interest in science play and discovery.

The kit includes informative Leader’s Guides that outline how to set-up and run the 3 separate events, which focus on the themes of Shadows, Structures, and Ramps. Related reproducible materials for families attending the events are also provided.

To get your free kit, contact by September 30th (one Event Kit is available per library branch while supplies last). You can also download components of the kit and other resources from the site.

For details on the television program, visit the PEEP and the Big Wide World site.