PVLD Director's Blog

Back to reality!

We just got back from a week in beautiful Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico.  Whale watching, snorkelling, and just chilling out...heaven!  Now its back to cold hard reality with rainy, cool weather and a plateful of issues awaiting me back at work.

Oh well...when things get stressful I'll just look back at these photos and dream of our next trip!

Innovation on a Shoestring

Last fall I had the privilege of serving as a mentor for the Eureka Leadership Program for emerging California library leaders.  During the residential leadership institute that kicks off the program participants work in small teams to build leadership skills through action learning, exercises, and case studies.  During one of the exercises the team that I was working with came up with an idea for a mobile library cart to enable library services to be delivered and promoted at locations throughout a community.

Today our Eureka team got an email from team member Thomas Vose, the Manager of the Lake Elsinore Public Library in the Riverside County Library System.  Thomas had taken that idea of a mobile library cart and turned it into a reality -

This picture shows the cart at its debut at a local outlet mall.  Thomas reported that people were able to sign up for library cards and check out materials, and that he plans to take the cart to the local Senior Center and park, and to an upcoming Children's Fair in the community.

Apart from being proud of Thomas for grabbing onto a good idea and making it a reality, I love that he was able to implement it at virtually no cost using equipment that the library already owned....a standard book cart and book bins, a laptop computer, and a simple signage stand. You can see how it could be expanded for a larger event just by adding more carts of library materials.

What a great way to expand the reach of the library and build community support - and all it took was some iniative and ingenuity.  Now you know why Thomas is an emerging library leader!

Staffing the Library of the Future

Michael Stephens of Tame the Web posted this video from Down Under on his blog today.  I found many aspects of it thought-provoking - most of all the assertion the definition of the "future" as 2015. Many of the concepts outlined in the video are things that PVLD (and many other libraries) have been evolving towards for some time, but it will require a significant increase in the pace of change to truly be the library of the future depicted in this video in five years!

I love the idea of creating an organization like the one portrayed (especially the "genius bar" model and the idea of having staff working virtually to provide services that are not tied to having our buildings open...), and am  trying not to think about the challenges of changing organization structures and compensation systems that may be embedded in labor contracts; physical libraries that cannot easily/cheaply be reconfigured; the management skills needed for an organization of this kind; and all of the others things thay could slow our progress.

Food for thought, though! 

"Stuff" Happens

This weekend PVLD experienced a major problem with our website and our web-based SOPAC online library catalog.  The website was down from Friday evening through noon today (Tuesday), and the SOPAC catalog is still down.

We don't know (and may never know) the cause...a piece of code gone haywire or a hacker attack are the most likely explanations. 

The bad news is that our website hosting service (the company we pay to maintain our website and SOPAC on their computer servers) had never backed up our systems despite billing us for backups with every monthly invoice.  This meant the loss of several months worth of enhancements.  Yikes!  Needless to say we will be acting to recover our payments from them.

The good news is that our Digital Services Team of David Campbell and Erik Adams did an amazing job of keeping their cool under very trying circumstances.  All employees were alerted to the problem in an email that David sent out in the wee small hours of Saturday morning, and by the time the library opened on Saturday a rudimentary web page with access to our library catalog and basic functions like the ability to place holds was up and running.  By Saturday afternoon that rudimentary site also had tabs for access to our online databases/resources and calendar of events. 

By Sunday the website had been transferred from the non-performing hosting company to servers owned by the company that does our web development and was available in the library (at least in its October 2009 configuration which means minus some recent enhancements), complete with access to our pre-SOPAC online catalog, and by noon today a fully functioning website and online catalog were available to remote users.

David and Erik are now working to restore the website enhancements that were lost and to get SOPAC back up and running as quickly as practical.

In my career I have had many occasions to learn that "stuff" does indeed happen, and to come to the view that the important thing is not the fact that it happened but how you react.  Do I wish that this weekend's challenges had never occurred?  Sure.  Am I proud of how our PVLD team responded?  Absolutely.   I know David and Erik were thrown for a loop, and somewhat embarassed even though this was not their fault, but they just quietly went about fixing the problems in a way that kept the most important needs of our library customers in mind. 

Great job, guys!

Wasn't that a party!

Saturday night the Peninsula Center Library glowed as we celebrated "80 Years of Magic" at the Palos Verdes Library District.  From cocktails in the library to sit-down dinner and entertainment on the library roof over 500 guests had a truly magical time.  Many of our guests had not been in the library in years, if ever, so it was fun to show them all that we offer. 

We're still crunching the numbers, but we think it was a financial success,too!

The event would not have been possible without many, many hours of hard work by the Event Committee under the leadership of Cc Yu; library staff (especially Merna Marshall, Charles Crouse and the Facilities Team, and our IT staff); and dozens of other volunteers. 

We also were fortunate to have sponsors and advertisers  who generously supported the event.

A huge thank you to everyone who contributed!

Volunteer Coordinator Dori Medina put together this slide show of the event.  Enjoy!

U@50

With PVLD's 80th anniversary event looming I've hardly had time to breathe much less post to my blog!

Last Friday I did take a brief break from event planning activities to attend one of the California State Library's Transforming Life After 50 symposia.  Libraries from around Southern California that had won grants for projects to develop library services for Baby Boomers shared their projects.  PVLD's Debra Petersen and Louise Beebe did a great presentation unveiling the business networking website they developed using their grant (currently live in beta as www.infogalaxy.org and soon to be launched as PVconnect.org) and other libraries presented projects ranging from a Festival of Books to computer classes for Boomers to a One Book, One Community event.

As part of the day's activities the facilitators showed this amazing video, winner of an AARP competition called U@50 that had young people creating YuTube videos about what their life will be like at age 50.

The concept in this 2nd place winner is both simple in its presentation and devilishly difficult to execute...not to mention thought-provoking - if you aren't able to view it from this post, click here.