PVLD Director's Blog

Whatever happened to the book?

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk to the Southwest Manuscripters about the future of books and reading.  I only wish I had come across this video of Mark Pesce from his The Human Network blog before I prepared my remarks.

In it he talks about how the act of reading is changing in the digital age, and asks the question "What is electronic about the electronic book?"  His answers fascinated and intrigued me...and scared me a bit too! 

If you are interested in books and reading, watching the entire video is a worthy investment of 35 minutes.  I suggest grabbing a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and a notepad and a pen, setting the video to "full screen" (just click on the little symbo with arrows radiating out to the edges of a square at the bottom right of the video screen), and then settling in for a real intellectual journey!

Now...tell me what you think!

The Library As Skatepark

This past Sunday afternoon the roof of the Peninsula Center Library was transformed into a skatepark and skateboarding expo to the delight of nearly 700 kids (from toddlers through teenagers), parents and interested community members.   This video shows some of the skaters  -  

And here is a link to some photos (the album is in Picasa - you should be able to open it by clicking on this link, but I've never used Picasa in my blog before!)

The event was  a fundraiser for a grassroots effort to build a permanent skate park on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

I'm sure some people are asking what skateboarding has to do with the library!  The simple answer is that the library has been involved because we see the need for such a facility every day as kids with nowhere else to skate (skateboarding is illegal everywhere on the Peninsula!) find the front steps of the Peninsula Center Library an ideal place to test their skills at grinding on the edge of our planters, or using the steps as the means to launch themselves into the air...without any safety gear and at significant risk to themselves, to other library customers, and at times to the cars coming down Silver Spur Road at considerable speed.  In other words, the library (along with a number of other locations) has become a de facto skatepark...and we spend a not insignificant amount of staff time chasing the skateboards off and repairing the damage done to walkways and walls.  It would be great to be able to direct the kids to a "real" skatepark!

Apart from pragmatic self-interest, however, the event was a great way for the library to be an active and visible partner in helping address a real community need.  The event organizers and participants were very grateful to the library for making our space available, we have been able to strengthen our relationship with other community organizations like the YMCA and the Sheriff's department, and among the nearly 700 attendees I know there were many who saw the library in a newly positive light. 

It was one of those sometimes rare events where everyone "won"-from the SkateparkPV organizers who raised 2x their fundraising goal to the kids who had a blast using the rails and ramps to the vendors who got exposure for their businesses to the garage bands who were exposed to a new audience to the library itself which for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon was the sickest place to be!

Now, I wonder how our Board and our Facilities Manager would react to a request to do it again sometime?

Just because I like it!

This week is jammed, so the chances of me writing a well thought out blog post are slim.  In the meantime, I thought I'd share this great rendition of the song Stand By Me...because I like it so much, and because if there is one thing libraries need right now it is for our communities to stand by us!

Something for everyone

It's Friday afternoon and for many people the week is drawing to a close...but not at the library! We pride ourselves on our 7 day/week service (thanks to the Peninsula Friends of the Library who pay for keeping the Peninsula Center Library open on Sundays) and most weekends also see us offering some kind of program or event.

Last Friday night High School Services Librarian Louise Beebe put on a terrific Bollywood festival for teens on the library roof with a movie, Indian snacks, henna tattos and more.

Although not strictly a weekend event, yesterday's inaugural Earth Day celebration was a huge success as these photos show. Well over 100 kids and adults enjoyed crafts, games, and booths with information about how to be a better environmental steward. The interdepartmental teamwork needed for an event like this is exemplified by the photo of our Facilities Manager, Charles Crouse, who created a display of the library's recycling and other environmental programs and reminded attendees that the library has collection boxes for used eyeglasses, cell phones, batteries and printer cartridges.

Tomorrow and Sunday art lovers can find a huge selection of high quality art books at a special Friends of the Library sale at Malaga Cove Library. The sale is open to Friends members only from 8 to 10am Saturday (memberships available at the door) and to the public from 10-5 Saturday and 1-5 Sunday.

On Sunday afternoon the roof if Peninsula Center Library will be transformed into a skate park as we host a fundraiser for a community effort to build a real skatepark on the Peninsula. Admission is free and we'll have demos by professional skaters, ramps and a grindbox for local skaters to try, food booths, music and more!

As you can see there's something for everyon at the library, and the fun doesn't stop on the weekend! I hope some of you will stop by one of this weekend's events....see you there!

Moving slowly because we are in a hurry

As readers of this blog know, it's budget season for public agencies and PVLD, like every other public library (and nearly every other organization I know),is grappling with projected deficits and difficult choices.

We are working our way through the budget process with imperfect knowledge of what the future will bring and awareness that every choice has short- and long-term consequences, both intended and unintended.  It's complicated, and made more so by the basic human desire for certainty and a clear path forward and the resulting pressure for answers.

My inbox is full of emails from other Library Directors with questions about how colleagues are tackling these challenges...we are all looking to see if someone else has done something that would also work for us.

This post from Michael Wade's Execupundit blog reminded me again that not only is there no "magic bullet",but that at its heart the work of management is wading through all of the challenges, variables, options, and ideas and coming up with solutions that are right for your organization, its culture, and its context.  This not only isn't easy, it takes time.

As Michael's post reminded his readers,

Being a good manager or supervisor is hard work. It requires brain power, study, patience, and a willingness to learn. Short-cuts, to borrow from an old expression, are usually mined.

Understanding that is an important part of leadership. As one leader put it, "We must move slowly because we are in a hurry." There are times when that makes enormous sense.

I've been doing staff briefings today, and one of the things we are talking about is the need to take things one step at a time and make decisions when we have the best possible information and not before, so this was a timely reminder!

To the PVLD staff who I know are hungry for certainty about the future...please accept that your leaders may not have the answers you want right now.  But also know that, to paraphrase the apocryphal speaker in Michae's post, we are moving

slowly because we are in a hurry, and we want to make the best possible decisions...with your input and at the right time.  

Breathing Space

Reading this this quote from Mary Oliver yesterday on Chris Guillebeau's The Art of Noncomformity Blog (one of my favorite poets on one of my favorite blogs!) was kind of like being hit on the side of the head by a two by four -

“Listen—are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”

What an apt description of what my life has been like lately! It feels like I race from meeting to project to event to personal commitment with scarcely a moment to draw a breath.  Each of the activities that fill my days is, in its own way, meaningful and most are enjoyable as well....but cumulatively they don't necessarily add up to the kind of reflective, deep-breathing, living-in-the-moment life that I want. 

The "slow librarian" idea, the "technology Sabbath"...all are representative of my efforts to break the cycle of rushing from activity to activity and carve out some time to breathe more than "just a little".

This weekend will be the first in several months, and the last for a couple of months to come, where my husband and I do not have any work, family or social commitments.  My goal as I head out of here this afternoon is to get our few "must-get'done" chores out of the way early, and to resist the temptation to stop by the library to see how this weekend's events are going, check my email, post to Facebook, do one more dry run of the presentation I am giving Monday night, or do anything that is something that I "should" do but not something I want to do.  I want to just enjoy this gift of time and breathing space.

I know I am not alone in craving relief from the busy-ness of my daily life, and I'd love to know how you carve out time and space to do more than "breathing just a little, and calling it a life”

Book-smelling

Driving to a meeting today I heard this little piece about "The Sweet Smell of Literature" on National Public Radio's The World.

It reminded me that if, as some predict (although I don't actually believe it), books as we currently know them will be replaced by digital versions more will be lost than just the experience of turning a page. 

I've read about new technologies that enable "smells" to be attached to digital experiences, but that has been in the context of associating the smell with the content - for example the smell of food with a description or image of a meal, or the smell of pine trees when the content is about someone walking through the woods.

This radio piece reminds us that the smell of the book itself is part of the multisensory experience that is reading, and can also tell us much about the origins and history of the physical object.  It's hard to imagine how the olfactory dimension of "reading" a book can be replicated in the digital world...one more reason that I remain a committed reader of real, physical books!

 

Fraying lifelines and double-edged swords

Today marks the beginnng of National Library Week, and yesterday the Huffington Post published this column by Art Brodsky about the fraying lifeline for many public libraries across the country. 

While I'm not sure I entirely agree with Mr. Brodsky when he says that it is books and materials that "make a library a library"...books and materials are certainly central to the library's purpose, but in my mind the difference between a great library and a mediocre one isn't the books and materials, it's the people...the column makes some terrific points about the drastic budget cuts being faced by libraries across the country.

This paragraph is particularly apropos to the struggles many libraries are undergoing -

One problem for libraries in some jurisdictions is that they don't fit squarely into any one policymaker's domain, like public safety or a school system. Libraries serve a range of purposes - they help teach children to read, they help students work on projects, they provide meeting space for tutoring, they provide Internet access. They serve students, seniors, immigrants. They provide assistance to the unemployed. Libraries combine education, workforce development, socialization, recreation. But they aren't the school board, or a social services agency, and so generally get buried in the larger budgets.

PVLD is an independent special district library, which means that we are not part of any larger government entity or organization like a city or county.  The bulk of our funding (a projected 89% next fiscal year) comes from an allocation of local property taxes and we have absolutely no control over how much we get each year.  The rest is made up largely of revenue we generate ourselves (fees, rental charges, Passport service, etc. and money raised by the Friends of the Library), and with the exception of a miniscule amount of State funding, we do have the ability to at least influence this piece.  Unlike the libraries mentioned by Mr. Brodsky, however, our budget stands on its own and is not buried in any larger budget or subject to the decisions of any "higher authority".

The good news is that we do not have to battle public safety or other community services for a share of a larger entity's budget.

The bad news is that when revenues deteriorate, as they are currently doing, we have no one other than ourselves and our supporters to turn to for help.  The responsibility for wise fiscal management, for scrutinizing every expense, for making the difficult decisions, rests solely with the elected leadership and the staff of the Library District.

This truly is a double-edged sword. 

When times are good and revenues are strong this independence is wonderful. Of course we never give up our responsibility for being good stewards of the money entrusted to us by the taxpayers or our donors, but if a project, program or service makes sense and we can afford it, we can move forward with a minimum of bureaucracy and the initiative can succeed or fail on its merits.

On the other hand, when times are tough and revenues are faltering we are the ones responsible for deciding what we need to cut...with no opportunity to blame the City or County administration or any other authority for the decision or the outcome.

As I said to one of our Department Managers the other day when he commented that I looked tired, it's a lot more fun (and a lot more energizing!) to say "yes" instead of "no".

Most days I wouldn't trade the independence or control that comes from being an independent entity foranything, but lately there are sure some days when it would be nice to be able to blame someone else!

For me the key to sanity in this time when I find myself needing to say "no" much more often than "yes" is to remind myself why I am here, and that from helping build literacy skills to providing access to computers to just being a safe haven for people of all ages and backgrounds, what we do as public libraries is important. 

And if I needed a reminder, there is none better than this quote from an article about Keith Richards and his heretofore hidden aspiration to be a librarian that has been floating around Facebook and the blogosphere for the past couple of weeks -

"When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser."

To all my library colleagues - let's not forget that despite the fraying lifelines and double-edged swords what we do matters, and that we still have some of the best jobs out there.  Happy National Library Week!

Slogging

Today has been one of those days - thanks to Cultural Offering for sharing.

Slogging

Posted by Cultural Offering at 4/7/2010 8:39 PM
Categories: Business

 

"There are days when tasks and challenges are ticked off smoothly, one by one.  The pace of work is good as we reach our daily goals before noon, allowing time to pull another project out of the project parking lot for some extra work. 

And then there are the slogging days.  The numbers don't balance and we can't find the discrepancy to save our life.  Telephone calls bring complicated questions.  Challenges pop up throughout the day stopping any small amount of momentum that was started.  Progress seems to be made at a geologic pace.  These are the days when we earn our keep by maintaining focus while keeping customers happy, solving problems and remembering that part of the day's agenda is always hidden.  The slogging days are important too.  I tell myself that."

Computers and Internet - A Core Library Service

According to Opportunity For All, a study of the use of public access computers in libraries published by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation last month,

"Over the past year, 45 percent of the 169 million visitors to public libraries connected to the Internet using a library computer or wireless network during their visit, even though more than threequarters of these people had Internet access at home, work, or elsewhere. The widespread use of these services by people of varying age, income, and experience is an indication of the unique role that public libraries play in the evolving digital landscape. Public libraries stand out as one of the few community institutions that can address the computing and information needs of all kinds of users, from seniors who have never touched a keyboard to young entrepreneurs launching a new eBusinesses strategy."

This certainly reflects our experience at PVLD, where despite the relative affluence of the community we serve and the assumption that many residents have computers and Internet access at home we are struggling to keep up with the demand for computer access (and the associated Internet bandwidth) at our libraries.    This fiscal year we will host approximately 110,000 Internet sessions on our public access computers, and this doesn't include the many people who use our free wireless Internet service to access the Web using their own computers.  The Gates study offers an explanation -

Users turned to computers at the public library for a wide range of reasons, whether it was because they did not have access elsewhere, needed faster Internet speed, wanted technical help from a librarian, competed for access to a computer at home, or simply wanted to work somewhere more peaceful and inviting than a crowded coffee shop or a hectic unemployment office."

As the economy has weakened libraries including PVLD have seen even greater demand for access to computers, and for technical support from staff, as the newly unemployed face a job market where nearly every employer demands an online job application; people who have been out of the workforce for sometime now need to improve their computer skills so they can try to re-enter the job market; and faced with budget pressures people are cutting back on their home Internet services.

Add to that technological and social forces that mean that people are relying on the Internet for access to information, for connecting with family and friends via email and online social networking, for entertainment (games, movies, etc.) and it is no wonder that our library computers are well-used and our computer classes are full.  I haven't had time to digest yesterday's Superior Court decision about Internet Service Providers ability to charge more for customers/uses that consume more bandwidth, but I can't help think that the resulting changes in cost structure will drive even more people to the public library's Internet service.

In recent years there have been studies such as this one from 2005 showing that in the public's mind libraries are still mainly about books and reading, and that too has been born out in focus groups and market research we have done here at PVLD.  The Gates study shows that whatever the perception, the reality is that for many of our library users computers and Internet access are perhaps as important, if not more important, than our books.

Interesting data to consider as we look at how to allocate our limited resources to best meet the short- and long-term needs of our community!