A couple of weeks ago the teens at the Annex were participated in our first ever "Rock Band" competition organized by Annex staffer Kali Merina. If the success of an event can be judged by the noise levels, this was a chart-topper (Apologies to our neighbors, especially the PV Board of Realtors who have the misfortune of being directly below the Annex. Next time we'll do it after normal business hours!)
Looks like fun, doesn't it!
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
Adult Services Assistant Manager Debra Petersen and Branch Manager Jennifer Addington attended the Public Library Association's biennial conference in Minneapolis last week and came back full of ideas and enthusiasm.
They are sharing what they learned and their thoughts on their PLA Minneapolis blog. Check it out for some great ideas...and keep checking as there is more to come!
I think we might transform this blog into the "PVLD conference" blog as a way of sharing what we learn at the various conferences and workshops that staff attend.
Seth Godin had an interesting post today called Managing Urgencies - basically about the human and organizational tendency to give our priority to fighting fires and "managing urgencies" at the expense of working towards long-term goals.
The post particularly resonated with me because we are working on our 2008/2009 budget and 2009/2010 forecast and things are looking pretty grim. Over 85% of our revenue comes from property taxes, so the housing market downturn is having a real impact. Add to that reductions in the little State funding we do get, recent cuts to passport processing fees, and rising costs for everything from databases to health insurance and we are facing some very challenging times. Oh yeah, and we recently completed a Classification and Compensation study and would very much like to start implementing the results...but this will be expensive.
In this environment it's easy to focus on the short-term - where can we cut costs? Do we really need to send people to conferences or training? Can we defer replacement of computers for another year? How much can we cut the book budget without having a significant impact on the collection?
We're asking ourselves these questions and more, but we're also trying very hard to stay focused on the long-term. This is definitely not easy!
For example, our Friends of the Library are embarking on a major capital campaign to raise funds for restoration of our historic Malaga Cove Library and expansion and remodeling of our Miraleste Library so that these libraries can meet the long-term needs of our community. They are also starting to build an endowment that will provide a long-term source of supplemental income to PVLD. As they turn their attention to these long-term projects we are working with them to cut the amount of support they will give to PVLD in the coming fiscal year in half - a reduction from $278,000 to $135,000. Will this really hurt in the current budget climate? Absolutely! Is it the right thing to do for the long-term? Absolutely!
We are also looking closely at our budget for training, workshops, and conferences. Will we be sending as many people to conferences as in previous years? Probably not. Will we still try to send at least some people? Definitely. Why? Exposing our staff to new ideas, interacting with new people, and learning about new technologies and products is a short-term cost but an investment in the future.
Will we be replacing all of the computers we had hoped to, or adding as many new public computers as we would like? No. Will we be making strategic investments in new technologies like IPhones and PDA phones for a few staff members? Yes. Why? Because as the world around us moves toward the mobile delivery of information we need to understand those technologies and develop services for that new world.
Is it going to be a tough couple of years? No doubt, but we're going to do our best to make sure we don't let the short-term pain tempt us into sacrificing our long-term vitality.
After yesterday's post I don't want anyone to think that I am anti promoting the library....of course we want to let people know what we offer. That said, I'm not sure traditional approaches to marketing, promoting, branding, etc. will work in the Web 2.0 world.
As the blogs and articles referenced in yesterday's point out....in an era of "cheap, ubiquitous interaction" one of the goals is to "do something worth talking about" (worth talking about positively of course!)
Another goal is to find ways to get yourself into the conversation. That's why having a presence in online communities is so important. We still haven't had a good opportunity to get PVLD onto Facebook, Ning or some of the other social networking sites, but we re taking steps to get ourselves out ontp the social web.
We're now on the new LibraryThing Local, which allows us to make people aware of our libraries and our programs via the popular LibraryThing social catalog (and, by the way, mark us as a favorite, subscribe to an RSS feed of local events including ours, or add comments to the "comment wall".
I'm also pleased to see that we now have 9 reviews on Yelp.com - with an average rating of 5 stars.
Ways of getting into the conversation...and they didn't cost us a dime!
While I was battling the forces of chaos at work and at home last week I missed a couple of great posts by Jeff Brooks on the always insightful DonorPower blog. Both make the point that it's what you do and how you do it, NOT how good you are at marketing that determines success.
In Advertising Can't Buy Me Love Jeff has a link to this post on Ron Shevlin's Marketing Whims blog, which makes the point that "You cannot advertise your way to greatness."
In the library world you often hear people say that one of our problems is that we're just not very good at telling people what we do and why they should love us. That's why I thought Jeff's comments were particularly relevent:
"It's a common delusion in brand advertising: That you can -- through superior creativity, some elbow grease, and a lot of media spending -- become loved and admired.
Maybe it used to be possible. Back when there weren't very many brands, there was no easy way to find out what other people beyond your immediate social circle were experiencing, and the average person had a pretty weak BS-filter. Now, people see right through your claims, and can find out the real truth in a few minutes online.
The only way to get people to love you is to be consistently lovable, and to do something worth talking about. And the only way to be "iconic" is to stay that way for a long time. Advertising hardly helps at all. And when it reeks of BS, it only makes things worse.
So take that creativity and money you might have spent on advertising, and use it to actually become great. Then you won't need advertising."
Jeff followed that post with another challenging the orthodoxy that "branding" is the key to success. He quotes a recent Harvard Business School blog posting by Umair Haque on The Shrinking Power of Brands about how in a web 2.0 economy "characterized by cheap, ubiquitous interaction... the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: information about expected costs and benefits doesn't have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches -- instead, consumers can debate and discuss expected costs and benefits in incredibly rich detail."
As Jeff points out on DonorPower - "If you want to have a powerful brand, you need to do something very cool, very useful, and very worth talking about."
Do libraries need to pay attention to the fundamental blocking and tackling of marketing and promotion - e.g. getting our events into the local papers, telling our story in the community, and making people aware of our services - of course we do.
The challenge for libraries is to do things that are, to re-quote Jeff, "very cool, very useful, and very worth talking about ". Recent experiences here at PVLD would support this theory -
If what we offer isn't cool, useful, and worth talking about then no amount of marketing will make it succeed. If it is, it will succeed even if we don't market it well....
Anyone visiting the Peninsula Center Library yesterday would have smelled the delicious odor of crepes wafting through the library as we celebrated our second annual French Film Festival in partnership with the Chadwick School International Cinema club (CHiC). Thanks to that partnership we were able to offer two days of wonderful film events coupled with a student art show and culminating in a full-house showing of La Vie En Rose.
A Chadwick -Merci!
Yesterday we closed all of our libraries in preparation for going live with our new website (note that if you are a regular user of our old website you may need to clear the cache of your Internet browser and then restart your computer to see the new site) and Integrated Library System (or ILS - the system that supports all of our library operations like the catalog, issuing library cards, checking library materials in and out....).
Closing the libraries is a big deal for us, as we take great pride in closing only on a very few major holidays like Christmas and the 4th of July. We took advantage of the opportunity to have all of the staff together for a Staff Development Day...the first in many years. We had a great time as staff from the various locations got to meet one another, we did some training, and finished the day with our first ever PVLD Drum Circle:
This proved to be energizing, stress-relieving, and a lot of fun...just what we needed to get ready for the launch of our new systems today.
So...how're we doing with the new systems? Overall pretty well although we have found a few glitches, like -
The biggest surprise of the day has been the number of people complaining about the fact that the new system doesn't have the capability to create and save lists of items from the library catalog for future reading/reference. In our old system not only could a user create such lists, they could go directly from a list item to the catalog to place a hold. We had no idea this feature was so popular, and unfortunately we didn't do a good enough job of alerting people to the fact that it would disappear. Definitely a "lesson learned" but also a reason to continue our exploration of Bibliocommons which is built around the ability to create and share lists.
The new systems have some great new features, though - things that our users have been asking for like the ability to rate and review items (once we get it working consistently - it seems it may be a software bug), the ability to keep some or all of your borrowing history for future reference, and new email notification capabilities like getting alerts of pending due dates BEFORE the item is due, or saving catalog searches on topics of interest and then getting email notification when new items that meet the search criteria are added to the collection.
All in all its been a good couple of days, although this is definitely a work in progress as we resolve issues, add new content and capabilities to the website, and implement additional features like the ability to pay fines and fees online.
The staff have been as amazing as always - the core project team has worked long and hard to get the new systems set up and tested and the front-line staff at the public service desks have accepted the changes willingly and are doing a great job of coaching our customers through the transition.
Everyone is a bit wearly right now, but if we can get through the next few days and get some of our niggling issues resolved we've got a great foundation for continuing to offer leading online services to our users.
One of the blogs I follow regularly is Designing Better Libraries because I love the way it brings ideas from the non-library world of design in to the library context. Today there was a post on The Total User Experience featuring Valeda Dent of Rutgers University reporting on a talk by usability expert Dr. Bill Gribbons .
The concept of moving from designing for "usability" to designing the "user experience" (referred to as UX)is one that has been talked about in business circles, and to a lesser extent in library circles, for some time. It's been the subject of at least one best-selling business book and the concept underpinning the design of the Cerritos Public Library not too far from here.
Up until now I've not been a huge fan of the "experience" school of design mainly because I have tended to associate it with "experience" businesses like the Rainforest Cafe, or Disneyland - i.e. somewhat gimmicky.
Then I read Valeda Dent's description of designing for the user experience as "shifting that burden of understanding how to use something or find something away from the user" and a light went on.
This is something PVLD has been trying to do in everything from the design of the new carpet at the Peninsula Center Library to the design of our new website, we just haven't called it "UX". That simple concept of "shifting the burden of understanding how to use something away from the user" should be a test we apply to everything we do...no Imagineers or fake trees required. That's a design concept I can embrace!
Its a dreary and cold Friday afternoon (at least by Southern California standards) at the end of another week of trying to cram too much activity into too little time. I don't have time for a lengthy or particularly thoughtful post, but it's always nice to end the week with some good news and I'm pleased to have several items to share.
Have a great weekend...and if you are in California, stay dry!
I've had the Public Library Association 2007 Statistical Report sitting on my desk for a while, and finally had a bit of time to look at it. The following table compares PVLD to some other California libraries of a similar size, as well as to the national average (nothing scientific about which libraries were chosen – Redondo Beach is right next door, and Newport Beach and Redwood City are libraries I consider to be comparable to PVLD in terms of service ethic) –
PVLD |
Newport Beach Public Library |
Redondo Beach Public Library |
Redwood City Public Library |
National Median | |
Legal Service Population |
67,200 |
83,361 |
67,112 |
76,087 |
75,099 |
Total Expenditures Per Capita |
$74.96 |
$68.48 |
$54.31 |
$75.13 |
$34.13 |
Expenditures on Library Materials Per Capita |
$8.99 |
$9.90 |
$5.45 |
$6.84 |
$4.40 |
Public Service Hours/Week |
102.0 |
233.8 |
102.0 |
105.0 |
102.0 |
FTE Employees |
45.4 |
63.5 |
31.4 |
65.0 |
40.0 |
Annual Circulation Per Capita |
7.74 |
12.61 |
12.71 |
14.73 |
7.32 |
Annual Visits Per Capita |
9.3 |
7.16 |
6.54 |
9.25 |
4.91 |
Annual Reference Transactions Per Capita |
1.55 |
1.58 |
0.84 |
0.95 |
0.78 |
Library Holdings Per Capita |
3.84 |
3.71 |
3.07 |
2.28 |
2.9 |
Library Cardholders As % of Population |
46.7 |
118.6 |
97.5 |
76.1 |
57 |
Circulation Per Cardholder |
16.58 |
10.63 |
13.04 |
19.35 |
14.48 |
Program Attendance |
31,039 |
28,740 |
8,360 |
103,808 |
15,602 |
InterLibrary Loan to Other Libraries |
610 |
263 |
591 |
57,756 |
1884 |
*For libraries with a service population of 50,000 to 99,999
One challenge is that it can be hard to tell whether we are "comparing apples to apples". For example, the number of registered cardholders per capita is influenced both by geography (How easy is it to get to the library from other communities? Do they get a lot of commuter or tourist traffic?) and by library policies and practices (How often do they purge the cardholder database? ) In the case of PVLD we caught a data error following submission of our data and actually have closer to 63 cardholders per capita. We're also perceived to be a bit geographically remote, and don't get the same amount of non-resident usage that a Silicon Valley community like Redwood City or beach-side towns like Newport or Redondo would get.
Sometimes the situations are different – for example city libraries are likely to be in buildings that are owned and maintained by city staff, unlike PVLD which is responsible for all aspects of library operation. Even if the maintenance costs are factored into the reported expenditures for a city library there is likely some economy of scale to be gained from receiving services from another city department.
Sometimes the numbers reflect a very different operating model – for example Redwood City is part of a cooperative system that has a shared catalog and robust delivery system, so one of their cardholders can place a hold on an item in another library and have it delivered to the Redwood City Library for collection. That's a very different model for "inter-library loan" and this is reflected in Redwood City's statistics.
And sometimes the numbers just don't make sense…like when Newport Beach shows over 2x the number of public service hours per week but lower total expenditures per capita than PVLD.
Even with all of the data questions I still find the statistics a useful tool for getting a sense of how PVLD is doing. While it would be nice to see higher circulation statistics its nice to see that on measures like visits per capita and program attendance we do pretty well – especially given the relative size of our staff.
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