Simplified Code of Conduct

I liked the code of conduct used at Imaginon as presented by Michele Gorman.

Respect Yourself.
Respect Others
Respect the Space.

what else do you need?

"This Ain't Your Mama's Library"

This program was sponsored by WMRL and presented by the funny and knowledgable teen guru Michele Gorman www.comixlibrarian.com

Some important tidbits from the program:

Adolescent Brain Research:
Adolescent brains are not as developed as we might believe. Emotion often overtakes rationality. When teens misbeahve in the library- a banning for life policy may not be appropriate. Michelle's library uses a progressive dicispline policy where the punishment is determined by the offense.

The 7 Developmental Needs of Teens (As documented by Michelle Gorman, 2009)
1. Physical Activity
2. Competence and Achievement
3. Self-Definition
4. Creative Expression
5. Positive Social Interaction with Peers and Adults
6. Structure and Clear Limits
7. meaningful Participation

Many application systems require statistical support for assertions, but it is also just as important to maintain ancedotal records to support them with actual real life stories if they are so warranted.

Keep in Mind the 40 Developmental Assets for Adolescents. It is so important that we recognize these needs and try to structure our programming efforts to meet them. To look at 40 Developmental Assets go here http://www.search-institute.org/assets/

According to Michelle there are a couple ways you can go about creating positive relationships with teens:
1. Make the first impression a positive one
2. Keep your cool
3. Remember that this is not personal
4. Lighten up
5. Remember what it was like to be a teen

Get to know what graphic novels and manga are and why you should have them in your library. Many teens are really into these literary works and would love to see more of them in our librarues, and more programming with them in general.

Also, get to know what the different Annual Awards for Young Adult Books and Authors are. You can access them via the American Libraries Association Website www.ala.org and for teens especially, the YALSA division www.ala.org/yalsa

Don't be afraid to get into the 6R (Reduce, reuse, reclaim, redesign, recycle, renew) Movement. It is amazing what you can make out of soda can tabs or duct tape.

Overall, take a moment to realize why you love being a YA Librarian or serving YA's and keep in mind that you were a teen once, too. Most of the opinions people have about teens, teens have about them.

"Celebrating Summer with Some New and Award Winning Books"

This presentation was given by Carolyn Cook, Mount St. Mary's University Assistant Professor of Education cook@msmary.edu and Michelle Foreman, Shippensburg University Assistant Professor/Librarian mtforeman@ship.edu

If you are interested in some good recommended reads for your young patrons, just check out the past winners of the following awards:

• The Pennsylvania Center for the Book's "The Baker's Dozen"
• Theordore Seuss Geisel Award-author and illustrator of best beginning reader book
• Randolph Caldecott Medal honors the finest children's illustrator for the year
• Coretta Scott King Award is given to the best African American children's writers and illustrators
• John Steptoe Award for New Talent is given to a new talent in writing or illustrating
• John Newberry Medal honors the year's best children's book
• Robert F. Siebert Informational Book Award is given to the author of an outstanding nonfiction book
• Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature honors writers of excellent young adult books
• Pura Belpre Award honors the best latina/latino writers every two years
• Mildred L. Batchelder Award recognizes publishers of foreign books for children
• Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award honors a poet who published an excellent book of children's poetry

Most of the winners can be accessed via the American Libraries Association Website at www.ala.org

New Ideas

This past week, I attended the Children's Services Division Meeting of the Maryland Library Association. I just wanted to share with you some of the wonderful up and coming programs, as well ideas and programs that are being done around the state. These meetings are every month at different library branches and are well worth the time. This group is also responsible for the Blue Crab Award for literature. Feel free to go to the MLA website and check it all out!

Up and coming:
Kids Are Customers is taking place on Thursday, October 15th at the Best Western in Westminster. There were be lots of different sessions on homeschooling, challenge materials, online book groups, book clubs, mutlicultural programming, music programming, and much, much more. The fee for registration has been reduced. It promises to be an educational event!

Look for a Blue Crab/CSD page on Facebook. Soon there will be a page up to get the word out there.

Program Ideas:

• Manga drawing
• Teen Team Reading where teams of teens compete to see which team can read the most pages in a set amount of time
• Lego programs
• "Discover Your..." sessions discovering/exploring different topics
• Stuffed Animal Slumber Party
• Yoga for Tots
• Anime drawing
• Creating Duck-tape wallets
• Musical instruments from around the world
• Chess clubs
• Teen Activities Blog
• Teen Summer Reading Club Blog of Book Reviews
• Wacky Water Fun Fests with Water Games
• Measured reading collections online
• Bookmark Contests with prizes for each age group
• Art Show for the community put together by kids
• Mall story-times
• Percy Jackson Parties
• Fancy Nancy Parties

All kinds of fun things are going on around the state! Feel free to share what you are doing or even use some of these ideas on the list.

ALA Scholarship Bash

On Saturday night, Nora and I were fortunate to attend the ALA Scholarship Bash which was held at the Art Institute of Chicago. The bash started at 7:00 p.m. and I can tell you that the two of us arrived back at our hotel shortly before 11:00. It was such a wonderful event and the museum was only open that evening for ALA attendees. If you remember our morning fiasco with missing the kickoff breakfast for the empowerment conference... our lunch was store made yogurt and fruit at a little coffee shop in the Hyatt conference area, so by the time we arrived at the Art Institute we were starving. They had at least 3 areas set up for food service. We gravitated to the outdoor area and joined a very friendly librarian from Phoenix (who ordered teen books for the Phoenix Public Library System- Nora did get her email for tips) for finger foods, sandwiches and drinks. Wandering the art exhibits was amazing. But don't point too close to the paintings or alarms go off, trust me, they do.

ALA Empowerment Conference, 2009

When my copy of American Libraries arrived and I scanned the information about the upcoming ALA conference in Chicago, the Empowerment Conference caught my eye. Sponsored by the Library Support Staff division of ALA, of which I have been a member for the last several years, the "mini conference" for support staff who supervise others appealed to me immediately. As both a Branch Manager at our Main Library Branch and the Circulation Supervisor for our Library System, I felt this could directly affect my day to day activities both in my branch and in my duties system-wide. I mentioned the Empowerment Conference to our Public Services Coordinator, Lisa McKenney, and she invited any Branch Manager who was interested in attending ALA this summer to let her know how the experience would benefit them and the Library System.

Nora Drake also responded to her inquiry and the two of us were selected to attend the conference. We arrived in Chicago Friday afternoon and were on our way to McCormick Place early the next morning, sans breakfast. After criss crossing the complex we finally arrived the Welcome Breakfast and conference kickoff at the HYATT REGENCY McCormick ( geesh!) only to find nothing left but coffee and crumbs of the breakfast. We did get to hear most of Prof. Gini's keynote address about "Lincoln's ten critical tasks of leadership"

The first session I attended was "Leadership = Vision + Communication + Empowerment: an overview with Alexis Sarkisian, who is a Library Marketing consultant. She discussed communication models and explained how leaders need to make sure that the message you are sending out is understood. It is the "senders" responsibility to get feedback from the "receivers" to elminate misunderstandings and assumptions. You don't "push" a message out, it is your responsibilty to be sure it is being sent in a way that people can understand or "hear" your message. She makes the point that leaders have vision and while leaders can be managers, not all managers are leaders.

The second session was Leadership for Library Support Staff lead by Kevin Dudeney from Austrailia. It was interesting in itself to learn a little about the Australian system, they take a 2 year required course to become Library Technicians. He began by talking about how we manage stuff, but lead people. He developed this course himself and focuses on the 5 practices of exemplary leadership:

1. Model the way - earn the right and respect to lead, people follow the person, then the plan.
2. Inspire a shared vision - express enthusiasm for the vision and it will spread to the team.
3. Challenge the process - step into the unknown and look for opportunities to innovate.
4. Enable others to act - make it possible for others to do good work.
5. Encourage the heart - show appreciation of the teams contributions, teams can become tired, frustrated and disenchanted.

We saw his list of the differences between leaders and managers, a long list I might add, that most of us furioulsy scribbled away to copy since there were no handouts for this session. There was a discussion of the different types of power, such as legitimate power; reward power; coercive power; expert power; charismatic power; referent power; and information power.

After scrounging up some lunch and a chance encounter with Joe outside the building, Nora and I attended "Leading from any position: opportunities to contribute to your Library's success" with Maureen Sullivan who happens to be from Maryland. She also mentioned the communication issue, i.e. "What I think I said may not be what you heard" and the notion that even leaders need to know how to be effective followers. She focused on resonant leadership and how that is based on the relationship between the leader and those who work with them. Resonant leadership depends upon emotional intelligence which can be intuitive or developed. Emotional intelligence is based on the competencies of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. She points out that we must listen to the negative but don't focus on it. Focus on the people who are doing what needs to be done. Don't let negativity hold the organization back.

And we're just gettin' warm!

ALA in Chicago

What fun and what a great city! Oh, but this is the learning journal...

I had a very good first ALA experience in Chicago, I went to lots of interesting programs, spent time perusing the vendors, and met interesting library folks from all over the country. Although I have to say, the vastness of ALA was a bit over-much for my introverted self and it was a challenge to strike up conversations when I just wanted a bit of quiet between one program and the next. Nonetheless, Chicago was packed with librarians and it was fun to walk down the street and guess whether someone was or wasn't...

Friday July 10 Pre-conference: Customer Service from the Best
This was a great program from the training manager at Trump Properties in Atlantic City. She has done a lot of training for NJ Libraries and it was surprising how many parallels there were between casinos and libraries (still looking for an exciting library version of a comped drink ticket - somehow forgiving fines doesn't seem as glamorous.)

• ACT Customer Service
  
• Acknowledge - smile be pro-active, friendly verbal greeting
• Connect - Use names when you can, give info, solve problems, listen!
• Thank - invite a return visit, express appreciation, share info about upcoming programs, give a fond farewell

Aha! Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill.
Start a volunteer greeter program
If there is a negative experience at any point on someones library visit, other staff have to work twice as hard to make the overall experience better. If you can't do good customer service for the customers - do it for your fellow staff!
Saturday, July 11

Redesigning Tech Services (OCLC presentation)

Redesigning Technical Services Workflows, Saturday morning, July 11, 2009:

NISO OCLC study looking at metadata standards - how do we leverage and collaborate to get better metadata and have everyone do less work in publishing and libraries (Not so much my cup of tea so I can't recall who this presenter was - interesting but not as engaging as the next two speakers for me.)

Arlene Klair, Adaptive Cataloging & Database Mgmt Group Leader, University of Maryland Libraries

• UMUC has directed their attention to streamlining their processing and copy cataloging sot that catalogers can spend their time on cataloging special collections
• Shelf-ready processing with their main book vendor - UMUC can do it cheaper but they cannot do it faster
  
• They use Connexion for batch loading (as does WC)
• They download full-records and take them without fussing so much
• They've started using 100% cataloging option from OCLC called Promptcat which catches any records that aren't up to standards and OCLC finishes the record based on their profile (at least this is what I understood - need to look into this further.)
  
• They use a commercial service called Bibliographic Notification to upgrade bibs (especially CIP) lag is somewhere between 2 and 3 months.

Rick Anderson, Associate Director for Scholarly Resources and Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah

Rick acknowledged that anyone who had heard him speak before would find his remarks repetitive, but thought it was all worth hearing again.

There are 4 areas where “Technical Services needs retooling.”

1. Books
2. Serials
3. Cataloging
4. Collection Development

• Consolidation — put serial and monograph staff into one organizational unit
  
• Simplification [of processes] — use shelf-ready, don’t examine every book, duplicate call numbers don’t cause the patron to fail in retrieving the right book
• Simplification — drop check-in, binding, and claiming for print journals and focus on doing things that get the patron access when the patron needs it
• Their orders are shipped to OCLC to be cataloged and sent to them shelf ready - "they will do it well enough" there aren't enough problems to warrant inspecting each item
  
• Simplification — Catalog is not about completeness it is about Connection. He suggested looking at the catalog logs to see if known item searches are the most frequent type of search
• Subject headings should be thought of as opportunities for keyword searches - suggested not worrying too much about punctuation or beauty
  
• Set up processed for the bulk of items not the exceptions
  
• “Patrons know; librarians guess.” use ILL as a selection tool - suggested looking at circ rates, 50% of librarian selected items didn't circ Pay extra shipping to get books from Amazon overnighted. Also purchased an Espresso Book Machine to do print on demand

Champagne Dreams on a Beer Budget: Cost Conscious library space designs
(All three presentations are available through the above link.)

Norfolk Public libraries have done a phenomenal job of improving every library branch. Each has a kidzone and 30 Internet terminals, new carpet, paint. $123.605 per branch
Terrific customer service to give the same treatment to every branch - rich and poor alike.

Brooklyn Public - new Teen center in a storefront staffed by a youth counselor. Computers and magazines but no other collection - down the street from the library so there are runners. Interesting idea. Met someone the next week at RWA who was from this system and when I commented on what a neat idea it was she grimaced mildly and did a tiny eye roll - I guess innovation always looks different from the outside than from the inside! :)

Library 2.0 buildings: Creating Zones with Heart

was packed and I got there too late to get a good seat - the usual thoughtful and visual presentation - don't put up nasty signs or make it clear that the director is the only valued member of the community by putting up a parking sign reserving their space - lots of slides.

Here is one presenter's blog posting pre-ALA regarding the program
And an article about the panel discussion in LJ

Sunday July 12

2.0)verload: What a small, understaffed library really needs by Michael Porter of WebJunction

• Meebo - staff of 7 at Freemont Library in CO has chat on their site
  
• Twitter - can be another tool for pushing library programing
  
• Someone mentioned KGB - text a question paid service (why isn't library land doing this - can Question Point provide this service with AskUsNow?) Gates grant to publicize it?
• Flickr - put it all out there...

Re-purpose everything you do so that web page announcements also go to the newspaper, twitter, flickr and vice versa. There was a lot more to this, but that is enough for now. Basically there was no solution to overload but there was the strong suggestion that we need to be where our users are.

With Respect and Dignity: Serving homeless people in library communities

• Michael Santangelo, OLOS presenter, said that ALA will have a toolkit on this topic coming out soon (Dec 09?)
• There is also an OLOS listserv on poor and homeless patrons
• OLOS can help find resources and connect folks who are looking at similar problems but Michael emphasized that no two situations are the same - based on environment, community, administrative attitudes, etc...
• Suggested getting buy-in from whole staff and networking with other institutions
• Start from a place of professionalism - we didn't create the problem
• know your library's policies and be sure that they are applied across the board - bad body odor and too much perfume should both be addressed same for strollers and suitcases
  
• Document the advocacy process (programs, pictures, etc.) so that you can determine what works and what doesn't
• Preventative librarianship - local social services, programming with govt agencies on filling out paperwork, handling debt, foreclosure and landlord issue assistance and legal resources, etc.
• Again there is more - really neat librarian from Lexington, Kentucky, Ruthie Maslin, has done some tremendous programming - she surveyed her potentially homeless folks and asked what they wanted in the way of library services - it was all very reasonable and doable. Seeking input instead of assuming
• LPL issues library cards with limits on # of items - individuals can use the shelter address
• She listed 5 steps to success:

1. involve all staff
2. involve customers you hope to connect with
3. set achievable goals
4. measures of success
5. budget for it
   

Catalog Use and Usability Studies: What do they show and how should this affect our decision making?

OCLC Report titled Online Catalogs: What users and librarians want
Presented by Karen Calhoun and Janet Hawk - presentation available on Slideshare

• Users expect catalog to look and work like popular web sites (summaries, abstracts, TOC, google search)
• users want context - excerpts from books, music and video clips and ideally full-text
• Delivery is as important or more important than discovery
• How do we delivery books? More links to online full-text
• Improved search relevancy is important
• Evidence based cataloging
• Digital online accessible materials are important to users - especially global users (Can a public library justify spending $ on traffic that doesn't pay taxes? Can we afford not to have that traffic?)
• Cornell does 80% of their cataloging as fastcat in acquisitions - accepting the full-record with few if any changes. They accept that fast and conveniently available are essential to quality library experience
  
• Align resources with effort - media and digital collections
• Consortial cataloging could be a good option for getting the regular stuff out of the way and focusing on special collections

WOW - lots of ideas!

Monday was taken up with packing and taking a boat tour of Chicago architecture (it was my director's idea - honest!). A very worthwhile trip. Thanks WMRL!