PLA Blog

The application deadlines for the two schools participating in the Public Library Association’s (PLA) Leadership Fellows program are quickly approaching.

Applications for the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business Leading Organizational Change program are due to the PLA office on Sept. 1. The deadline for applicants for the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business Positive Change - Creating Spectacular Organizational Successes program is Sept. 12.

The fellows program offers PLA members who are public library managers a chance to attend executive leadership training at some of the best universities in the United States. The programs, which also include Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Senior Executives in State and Local Government program and Columbia University Business School’s Leadership Development Program, were reviewed and chosen by the PLA Leadership Taskforce because they focus on teaching management concepts not generally learned in a library school setting.

PLA Leadership Taskforce Chair Luis Herrera said, “Leadership and change management skills are vital for our public library leaders to understand in order to move their organizations forward. We want to extend unique learning opportunities to our members who want to broaden their perspectives, enhance their leadership skills, drive change in their institutions and plan with a strategic vision.”

Each executive leadership program varies in length, as well as scope and focus, and candidates are encouraged to research the programs to determine which is best suited to their needs before applying. The PLA Leadership Fellows program will cover the cost of tuition, as well as housing and most meals. Transportation and any additional meals are the responsibility of the attendee.

Candidates must be PLA members who are management staff in a public library system with a minimum of five years experience in a leadership role. Anyone interested in applying should review each program to determine which one is right for you. Selected participants will be asked to share their experience at a PLA program and provide input to the Leadership Taskforce in an effort to help shape a comprehensive leadership development program.

The Public Library Association is offering a new, innovative educational opportunity to help its members become leaders in public libraries and excel in their careers. PLA Leadership Fellows offers PLA members who are public library managers a chance to attend executive leadership training at some of the best universities in the United States, including:
• Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, Senior Executives in State and Local Government;
• University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business, Leading Organizational Change;
• University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, Positive Leadership - Creating Spectacular Organizational Successes; and
• Columbia University, Business School, Leadership Development Program
Programs were reviewed and chosen by the PLA Leadership Taskforce because they focus on teaching management concepts not generally learned in a library school setting. According to PLA Leadership Taskforce Chair Luis Herrera, “Leadership and change management skills are vital for our public library leaders to understand in order to move their organizations forward. We want to extend unique learning opportunities to our members who want to broaden their perspectives, enhance their leadership skills, drive change in their institutions, and plan with a strategic vision.”

Each executive leadership program varies in length, as well as scope and focus. Once a candidate is approved by the school and the PLA Leadership Taskforce, he or she will be notified of his or her acceptance. The PLA Leadership Fellows program will cover the cost of tuition for the program, as well as housing and most meals. Transportation and any additional meals are the responsibility of the attendee.

Candidates must be PLA members who are management staff in a public library system with a minimum of five years experience in a leadership role. Anyone interested in applying should review each program to determine which one is right for you. Selected participants will be asked to share their experience at a PLA program and provide input to the Leadership Taskforce in an effort to help shape a comprehensive leadership development program for PLA. More information about the PLA Leadership Fellows, program dates, and the application process is available at www.pla.org.
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In my first PLA Blog guest entry, I mentioned my plans for the conference. How did I do?

I plan to talk to Tim Spalding about his ideas for revamping classification, because Dewey may not be the best choice for everyone. And to colleagues who are implementing faceted interfaces for their catalogs (Collingswood will be rolling out a Scriblio-powered website in the next couple of weeks).

I had a very good meeting with Tim, and I look forward to continuing our conversation via email in the near future.

I was also invited to join the folks from Darien Library for drinks and dinner. Quoting Kate Sheehan, they’re “an incredible group of people who are building not only a stunning new library but also the future of libraries and librarianship.” Or, as Darien’s John Blyberg wrote, “From rethinking our entire classification system to planning how to use a building that is wired to the hilt, to an RFID conversion, to a major web redesign, to some other things yet-to-be-announced, we’re about to enter a period of serious metamorphosis.” It was a wonderful evening. Their patrons are fortunate to have such warm and talented people working in their behalf.

I want to talk to the folks at LibLime and those who are using Koha to see how it might help us deliver better customer service.

I attended a meeting of the nascent Koha user group, led by Meadville Public Library’s John Brice and LibLime’s Josh Ferraro. Koha is making great strides, and I look forward to working with the software and the community in the near future.

I definitely plan to talk to OCLC about exposing our records in WorldCat.

Is it rude to collar Andrew Pace and Roy Tennant when they’re drink-in-hand? Because I did it to each of them. I got Roy at the WebJunction party, Andrew at the OCLC blogger salon. There’s no question in my mind that both of them would genuinely love to have small libraries’ collections in WorldCat, and, as both pointed out, Karen Calhoun has already written about this very thing. They hear us; they’re working on it. They need to hear from more of us; they need to make it a higher priority.

Some other thoughts:

Why is it so difficult to get a vegetarian meal in Anaheim?

LITA’s Top Tech Trends needs an overhaul. It managed to be interesting at Midwinter in spite of its use of technology. But, at least for me, the brilliance of last Sunday’s panelists and moderator couldn’t overcome the myriad problems introduced by trying to include virtual panelists and Meebo/Twitter-based audience participation.

LAMA (soon to be LLAMA) 101 was interesting. It’s a welcoming group, and I look forward to joining in the fun. One bit of strangeness: no one sat in the first several rows of seats. That’s pretty typical for library conferences in general, but I thought it would be different among leaders, administrators, and managers. I guess it’s all relative.

ACRL President, Jule Todaro, and keynote speaker, Dan Ariely, did a fantastic job at Monday’s President’s Program, as did my fellow panelists. Everyone involved was kind and brilliant and a joy to work with and get to know. I’m very excited about PLA and L(L)AMA and the folks who have become colleagues now that I’m working at Collingswood Public Library. But I’m going to miss having a formal relationship with ACRL.

Stephen Abram is a can’t miss panelist. He accepts, more fully than anyone else I’ve seen present at a library conference, that public speaking is theater, and theater benefits from the play of opposites, from presenters willing to play the foil. And so, last Saturday for the LITA Internet Resources and Services Interest Group’s “There’s No Catalog Like No Catalog: The Ultimate Debate on the Future of the Library Catalog,” Abram played Oscar to Joseph Janes’s Felix, Goliath to Karen Schneider’s David, goon to Karen Coyle’s Gretzkey, and Steve Ballmer to Roy Tennant’s Ray Ozzie. Which is to say, Abram affected boorishness, grandiosity, combativeness, and even defended proprietary code—in part because it brought out the best in his fellow panelists, in part because overstatement plays well in a crowded theater, and in part because well behaved librarians rarely make history.

The following are a few of the many highlights from this program. Listen to the MP3 for more.

What are catalogs good for? What are they not good for?

Coyle: The original card catalogs were the Google of their day. Now just 3% of all searches start at the library.
Abram: Catalogs are everything we want, nothing that users want. Librarians aren’t going to give you what you want, they’re going to give you what they’ve got.
Coyle: Why shouldn’t users discover library resources on Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, etc.? And why is the library catalog a dead-end, a place that has links to it, but no links out?
Abram: Why don’t you have a Meebo widget or another live Ask a Librarian option on every failed search?

What about WorldCat Local and the Open Library: the one big catalog in the sky approach?

Coyle: One big catalog is nonsense. All data should be exposed on the web, not as an inventory, but as a bibliography consisting of a million little catalogs, all resource-oriented. Do not start with place. And we need to let other people do things with the data, even things we don’t like.
Schneider: I envision lots of big catalogs. But sometimes place does matter. Sometimes you want to go into a building and check out a book.
Abram: WorldCat is not a catalog. It’s a registry for data.
Janes: WorldCat is a catalog. It’s the University of Washington catalog.

What should catalogers do going forward?

Schneider: We need to celebrate what is good about cataloging. So many techies end up reinventing cataloging.
Janes: I taught the class that resulted in the founding of the Internet Public Library. As it grew, we needed metadata and better organization. There was a computer science student in the class who handled the back-end. Basically, he ended up reinventing Dewey.
Abram: Catalogers have reinvented themselves over the past 20 years. They’re informing Google, Yahoo, etc. But not library interfaces.
Coyle: We’ve forgotten why we do what we do. For instance, why don’t we use title case? Are the things we’re doing serving our needs today?
Schneider: This is part of a larger problem. Libraries are dogma driven. Very little that we do is based on evidence.

What would you like to have happen in the library software market?

Schneider: I’d like it if every product were open source.
Abram: I’d like everyone to catch up with the latest release of the software they’re running. You need to upgrade every year.
Coyle: I’d like systems to separate library management from user services.
Janes: I wish the market were bigger, because greater demand would increase the supply of good stuff. Much of what we use feels homespun. Shouldn’t we merit major software players’ attention? I’m talking Apple. Nintendo. Our largest enemy is indifference.

If there’s really an anti-Stephen Abram, it’s Martha Yee. Quiet and dignified, a cataloger’s cataloger, Yee can work an ALCTS room into a hand-clapping, foot-stomping frenzy by pushing up the sleeves on her cardigan or asking if anyone might like some tea. At least that’s how it feels. And when you’re sharing a stage with futurists like Jennifer Bowen, Dianne Hillman, Tim Spalding, and Roy Tennant (along with moderator Robert Wolven), as Yee did at last Sunday’s “Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging,” sometimes you need someone who speaks for the people, who shares their past, who lives in the moment. However, while Yee is anything but a techno-utopian, she is also anything but reactionary.

Her presentation was on the Semantic Web. To her credit, she’s put more time into figuring out how RDF really works, instead of how it promises to work, than anyone else I’ve encountered. And she has questions—smart, thorny questions. They aren’t intended to derail the project, but to make it better. Her most important: Can all catalogers do be reduced to a set of pulldown menus? (Queue thunderous applause.)

Tennant presented on WorldCat, Bowen on the eXtensible cAtalog pRoject, Spalding on LibraryThing, and Hillman on how catalogers need to reinvent themselves as metadata librarians. Each presentation was strong, though in each case I’m sure you either already know about these projects/movements or you don’t much care. Rather than summarize, I’ll finish with a few highlights:

Tennant: When I’m looking for a library book, I want to know: How many clicks am I from having the book sent to my house?

Tennant: Data is a collective asset. OCLC is a membership collective for this data.

Yee: You need to tie the acquisitions budget to the processing budget or you get a backlog. Digitization only magnifies this relationship.

Bowen: We need to distinguish between granularity and complexity. We need to create interoperable granularity.

Spalding: The tag war is over. Tags are not better than subject headings, but they’re useful. We have ample evidence.

Hillman: The day of the ILS may not be entirely dead, but it’s on life support. We’re looking at the disintegrated library system. Discovery is the first piece that’s being dis-integrated. Soon metadata will be managed in different databases.

Yee: Good metadata is never going to be free. We have to figure out who is going to be paid for it.

I felt like I should show up for Saturday morning’s “Stretching Existing Staff” in disguise. Or, perhaps, in a bull’s-eye t-shirt with a “Kick Me” sign taped to my back. I mean, I know all too well that my colleagues are being stretched, and they know they’re being stretched, and they know that I know, etc. Why rub salt in the wound?

And yet, the allure of having library managers tell me how they do more with less was too strong, so I screwed up my courage, showed up as me, sat right up front, and here I am blogging about the presentation. Because it was a great one. Worth the price of admission all on its own. That great.

The big takeaway from “Stretching Existing Staff: New Service Delivery Models,” is that it’s extraordinarily important to work smarter, not harder. Of course you know this already. Even I already knew it. But it’s far, far more important than you or I realize. Smart is hard. It’s often counterintuitive, and sometimes we have to confront our own limitations and mistakes. But it’s worth it, because two good things happen when you do things that make sense: your colleagues become a lot more productive and your neighbors—the people who make use of the resources you steward—begin to like you even more than they do already.

The PLA group that sponsored this session, the Workload Measures and Staffing Patterns Committee (which is related in some way, I believe, to the Issues and Concerns Cluster) selected a great group of presenters:

• Ruth Barefoot, Manager, The San Jose Way, San Jose (Calif.) Public Library
• Valerie Rowe-Jackson, Deputy Director for Public Services, Richland County (S.C.) Public Library
• Anne T. Haimes, Branch Group Manager, Atlanta-Fulton (Ga.) Library System
• Dale McNeill, Director, Community Library Services Department, Queens (N.Y.) Library

One very cool thing: they didn’t futz around with a moderator. Instead, the speakers provided very brief introductions for each other. Another cool thing: two of the presenters used PowerPoint presentations that consisted almost entirely of photographs (brava!), another told his story without the hindrance of a deck to distract us (bravo!), and the fourth, though she used a fairly typical PowerPoint slideshow, was very good about using the bullet points as textual cues for the audience, not as her script (brava!).

San Jose’s Ruth Barefoot

• Reinvent your environment: get the good stuff—your “gold”—off the shelf and put it in the marketplace where your customers can find it more easily. San Jose particularly emphasizes the first ten feet of the library, which has a bookstore look and feel in order to win people over immediately.
• Emphasize self-directed services, such as self-checkout, renewals, and holds, and also paying fines online. This is all part of their goal to teach customers, because they want “to learn how to fish.”
• Simplify your policies: all checkouts are for three weeks, except movies, which are one week; everything has a $.25/day overdue fee; customers can check out as much as they want; they display DVD’s and CD’s in their cases.
• Provide customer service training for everyone on staff, and train everyone to mentor elementary school students and teens. This is part of empowering staff to put customers first: the phones on San Jose Library’s floor don’t ring when there’s an outside call, which means floor staff working with customers aren’t distracted. People working in the office answer the phone and can ring floor staff when there’s a call they need to take.

Richland County’s Valerie Rowe-Jackson

• When their bookmobile became too dangerous to operate, they opened a branch in what had been a convenience store, which they renamed The Link.
• They parked the bookmobile outside while The Link was being set up, to help their patrons make the transition, and they employed their librarian/bookmobile driver in The Link once it opened. The pictures of The Link look great: all the best aspects of a small library combined with all the best aspects of a small bookstore.
• To provide better service, save space, and make better use of existing staff, they provide reference via dedicated videoconference from the Library’s main branch.

Atlanta-Fulton’s Anne Haimes

• When they renovated the 15,000 square-foot South Fulton Branch, they merged their two reference desks, Children’s and General, into a single desk.
• They made the desk more visible and accessible, and in so doing freed up space for public programs.
• They cross-trained their reference staff, which meant that fewer person-hours need to be spent staffing the newly combined desk. This fostered teamwork and freed up time for programs and outreach.

Queens Public’s Dale McNeill

• You need to know your community, your staff, and your buildings. What’s big in Texas, what plays in San Jose, may not befit Queens.
• When they realized just how much social work librarians were doing, they asked themselves, “Do we really need librarians to do this work or could someone else do it better?” So they hired social workers to work in the libraries not as librarians, but as social workers. Some of them even do home counseling.
• They have converted 20 of their 60 branches to self-service only. Patrons don’t have an option of going to a circulation desk; it’s self-service only. The self-checkout machines take cash, credit cards, and checks, as well as payments, and they’re multilingual. They also provide a receipt for check-in of materials: patrons wanted proof that they’d returned items.
• Some changes are rolled out slowly, such as self pick-up of holds, which was introduced over two years.
• It’s important to have clear expectations for staff and to make sure everyone knows what the positive and negative consequences of their actions will be. When retraining is required, it’s best to have someone model good behavior, though that someone may not be a manager; it might make more sense for it to be someone at the same level as the person who would benefit from retraining. And be sure there are rewards associated with growth and change, even if it’s just a pat on the back. People need to have their effort acknowledged and appreciated.

PACs in the Library 2.0 World (PLA)

This session was a panel consisting of four presenters, each addressing a different aspect.

Ross MacLachlan of the Phoenix Public Library
Endeca: Developments in the OPAC World

The Phoenix Public Library uses Endeca because:
it is a search engine
it harvests data
it enables guided navigation
it is commerce driven
it is API-based

They wanted their site to be:
customer-centric not librarian-oriented
easy to use with not a lot of halls to go down

They have been able to:
Integrate Endeca data with bibliographic data
Integrate Endeca data with library data
Integrate Endeca navigation API

They opted to adopt BISAC (Book Industry Standards And Communications) and abandon Library of Congress subject headings because it:
Facilitates browsing
Is hierarchical (LC is not entirely hierarchical with its comma and dash conventions)
Take advantage of order records that come with BISAC headings
Is configurable in Endeca

Within the first 3 months, circulation increased 15%, web traffic increased by 27%. In a post-implementation study, the site received a 92% approval rating.

——

Grace Lillevig, Harris County Public Library, Houston, Texas
PAC 2.0 Patron Reviews

Patron reviews are available on almost all other sites (retail, social, etc.). Lillevig presented four options for adding patron reviews to a library website.

1. Blog
Often used for staff-generated reviews only because an account is required
Easy to set up
example: Madison Public Library. Patron role: comments only.
example: Seattle Public Library Shelf Talk. Patron role: comments only.

2. Wiki
Includes content from users
Easy to set up
Open, closed, or moderated
example: Palo Alto City Library. Patron submissions are moderated before being posted.
example: East Bonner County Library. Patron submissions are posted directly.

3. Custom database
Time, money, and expertise required
Customizable
example: Denver Public Library. Patron submissions are moderated before being posted.
example: Harris County Public Library. Patron submissions are moderated before being posted. Uses PERL. Book reviews, movie reviews, and Spanish reviews are all kept separate on the site.

4. Commercial options
May integrate directly into catalog
Some include content from other sources/libraries
Sometimes less control and/or moderation
example: Chilifresh.com. Has some (but not a lot) of content so far (still building).
example: Aquabrowser My Discoveries
example: Evanced Solutions Summer Reader. This product is completely separate (does not integrate with PAC) and is staff moderated.

Things to consider:
Moderation
Staff time
Cost
Customization
Usability

——

Kitty Little, Queens Library
Language and Access

Globalization means that you must know who your customers are.

Queens is the most ethnically diverse county in the US, which has a big impact on everything they do. The Queens Library PAC has multiple skins for the site in multiple languages, created by staff fluent in those languages. The Ann Arbor District Library PAC is available in multiple languages but use machine translation instead. They have a suggestion tool for fixing translations but have received none in the six months the languages have been available.

The Queens library uses MARC 880 fields (support vernacular). They also use BISAC and are happy with it. Spanish language subject headings are native in their catalog.

——

Amy Cantu, Ann Arbor District Library
Blogging the PAC: Staff Training and Buy In (PDF)

(department heads, etc.). The AADL site went live in 2005 and is one big blog, pulled from a variety of specifically focused blogs (director’s blog, library news, etc.). All staff are invited to blog, and some are required to. Staff may blog using their staff account (real name) or separate blogging account (name of choice, many use a cute pseudonym).

Make it relevant:
Media mentions
Local events
Hot and new
Staff interests

Make it Fun:
By-lines and beats
Informal style -ok to have a personality, ok to be controversial
Tagging
Comments

Make it simple:
Easy input - Drupal (very robust open source software)
Few rules
No worries

Most comments are made on the director’s blog and the teen gaming blog. They’ve received ~20,000 comments in 3 years. They haven’t had problems with spam or inappropriate comments. Staff were very concerned about cursing/etc. in comments but it’s not been a problem at all.

——

Answers to attendee questions:

TLC is the reseller of Endeca for libraries (much more affordable than retail price). Being a development partner can also decrease the initial cost.

At HCPL, a staff member reviews every single review submitted. Summer reading reviews are so numerous it’s a full-time job to moderate, which is a considerable cost in staff time.

The Phoenix Public Library has integrated reviews and ratings from Amazon (free) and Rotten Tomatoes (fee) into the catalog but you have to click through to those sites to add your own (so not completely integrated).

——
I found this session interesting and informative, but it was not necessarily the information I was expecting. I’d like to learn more about how libraries are making their PACs more 2.0-y in the sense of hacking/altering their ILS to integrate tags, user content from social media sites, allowing patrons to integrate their library accounts with their accounts/content from social media sites, etc. Much of this information relates more to the library website than the PAC specifically. Still, I learned a lot and thought this was a very valuable session.

This year’s Caldecott/Newbery Banquet was one of the best I’ve attended. The speeches were awesome and the entire night was delightful.

Karen Breen, 2008 Caldecott chair, presented the Caldecott Honor:

• to Laura Vaccaro Seeger for First the Egg, published by Roaring Brook Press/Neal Porter Books
• to Kadir Nelson for Henry’s Freedom Box: A True Story of the Underground Railroad, written by Ellen Levine, published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic
• to Mo Willems for Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity, published by Hyperion Books for Children/Disney Book Group
• to Peter Sis for The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, published by Frances Foster Books/Farrar Strauss Giroux

Breen presented the 2008 Caldecott Award to Brian Selznick for The Invention of Hugo Cabret, published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic.

Selznick began his speech as he began the book, with a stunning visual delight, taking us on a journey to Paris where a young man lay asleep until the phone startled him awake. Selznick’s illustrations (created especially for this occasion) were displayed on the big screen with dramatic musical soundtrack. The illustrations told the story of Selznick being informed that he would receive this award, with Hugo representing Selznick, traveling from Paris back to the very Hilton where we sat watching. Here Randolph Caldecott rode by on a horse in a flurry of excitement, and that image of the iconic award namesake became the medal on the cover of Selznick’s book. Bravo!

Several years ago, Selznick was feeling dissatisfied with his work when he had the opportunity to meet Maurice Sendak, who informed Selznick that he hadn’t come close to reaching his full potential. Selznick undertook an unofficial apprenticeship to Sendak, unbeknownst to the master. Selznick also found inspiration in the work of Remy Charlip, the author and illustrator of one of Selznick’s childhood favorites, Fortunately. Selznick had the good fortune to meet and become friends with Charlip, and they had many discussions about books and art and movies. Selznick says that beautiful little coincidences inspire his work, one of which is that Charlip turned out to also be a fan of Meliese’s Trip to the Moon, a great source of inspiration to Selznick.

Selznick had a flash of inspiration, desiring to make a book that read like a movie, as Where the Wild Things and Fortunately do. The secret, he says, is in the page turns - only the reader can move the story forward.

Selznick reminded us that, regardless of anything else, of the fanfare of these awards, kids want good books and that’s what we as librarians are in the business of doing.

——

Nina Lindsay, chair of the 2008 Newbery committee, presented the Newbery Honor:

• to Christopher Paul Curtis for Elijah of Buxton, published by Scholastic Press, a division of Scholastic
• to Jacqueline Woodson for Feathers, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons
• to Gary D. Schmidt for The Wednesday Wars, published by Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin

Lindsay presented the Newbery Award to Laura Amy Schlitz for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, illustrated by Robert Byrd, published by Candlewick Press.

Schlitz was visibly overwhelmed by the thrill of the evening, but delivered her eloquent, witty speech from memory. She is a storyteller and held the audience in the palm of her hand the entire time.

I so enjoyed this evening, much more than I have some past years. It was my pleasure to listen to these two master storytellers, as different as they are brilliant.

In the past two days I’ve attended two presentations, spanning six hours, on The Catalog. In that time, no one talked about one of my major concerns: users can’t search for the articles in our collection, which means they can’t find them without our help. Perhaps this is such a big issue that it’s not worth mentioning, or maybe it’s so small that no one else cares, or maybe it’s just a dead issue and I should stop caring. Or maybe the panelists have never worked reference.

Anyway, that’s why it was such a pleasure, last night over dinner, to talk to someone who works for one of the larger serials/database vendors.

Me: How are librarians as negotiators?

Not bad. Some better than others. But many are surprisingly good.

Me: Has anyone really impressed you? Not just as a negotiator, but as someone who’s just really smart and informed about what patrons want.

Rick Anderson at Utah. Mark Sandler at CIC. Beth Bernhardt at UNC Greensboro. And there are a lot of really smart people at the California Digital Libraries.

Me: What do you think about open access?

No effect. What really matters right now are consolidation and consortia and everyone’s shrinking budgets. It’s harder and harder for anyone to make money.

Me: Which vendor has the best patron-focused database interface?

Reed Elsevier’s Scopus is really nice. Not that anyone uses it, or any of the competitors’ interfaces for that matter. Nor should they. Google’s better than any of them and it’s what people use to find articles. Then it’s just a question of accessing them.

Everyone has a story. Being able to turn your story to something that can be shared with others enhances self worth and benefits the community overall.  Their story lives on after they are gone. As libraries, we have the training and in some ways, duty to document and archive society’s culture and history. We have the ability to share this knowledge with others that are even outside of our communities through technology. Therefore, I was very excited to attend the PLA sponsored workshop yesterday. 

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.