Amila’s notes from Thursday, April 20th, at the OLA Conference 2017. Conference website: https://orlib17.wordpress.com/
Keynote: “Libraries Save: Sharing Resources, Building Community & Providing Refuge During Uncertain Times” (8:30am-10am)
I didn’t take notes during the keynote but the speaker, City of Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, was very inspiring. She has led an interesting and often challenging life and her keynote focused on all of the ways that libraries were indispensable to her as she was dealing with youth homelessness, burgeoning political activism, opening an alternative bookstore, her son’s cerebral palsy, and running for city council. I would look her up if you’d like some inspiration!
Poster session (10am-11am)
This went great! I drew in a lot of people and told them our story and answered questions they didn’t even know they had. Since our poster was so… wordy… it meant that people could read the poster without my intervention, which was also nice. There were a lot more public library folks from small libraries so it wasn’t quite the same crowd or level of enthusiasm as at the Access Services Conference (and David wasn’t there to rile the crowd up). A lot of people took my fliers and said they’d be in touch with questions. One guy has wanted to start a board game collection at this library for years and we may have inspired him to just go for it!
Session 1: Libraries Save: Group Discussion about Innovative and Creative Approaches to Serving Community Needs (11am-12:30pm)
This session was kind of a continuation of the keynote with Chloe Eudaly. Chloe wanted to know what issues our libraries were dealing with, what cool things we were doing, and how she could help or connect us to people who could help. It was an “unconference” style so we just went around the room and talked about our libraries. As such, this session was a hodgepodge of ideas, resources, and cool things to look into. Here are some of them:
- A lot of the public libraries are letting non-profits use their conference rooms for free. Unfortunately, we can’t do this. Our classrooms (Barnard, Autzen, and the Willamette seminar rooms) are not available to groups that are off-campus. The classrooms are free to use for OSU groups. We have fairly strict policies governing the use of these rooms as they are quite popular and they are some of the only free and easy-to-reserve multipurpose rooms on campus.
- Some libraries had programming to teach people where to start engaging in the community and how to donate time and money. I didn’t write down which libraries, though. It sounded like Multnomah County was doing some of this work?
- Multnomah County also has a “digital equity in learning” librarian position that sounded pretty cool. Here’s a little more on their library’s digital inclusion work (aka, services that tackle poverty and barriers to information access): https://www.benton.org/blog/innovators-digital-inclusion-multnomah-county-library
- When speaking of hunger and food charity, people mentioned a new book that was just released by MIT Press about “the Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups”. It’s called “Big Hunger” and it looks pretty interesting: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/big-hunger
- I didn’t know this about eastern Oregon: 50 rural public libraries in eastern Oregon are part of a nonprofit called “Libraries of Eastern Oregon” and they collaborate on programs and services like science programs for lifelong learners and eBay workshops. It sounds pretty cool – rural libraries banding together to enhance the social capital of their often under-supported communities! Their website: http://librariesofeasternoregon.org/wp-site/
- A lot of people in the audience had noticed that immigrants were not coming in to libraries as much as they used to because they’re afraid of the government and ICE and the library is a pseudo-government entity. People have found that library use, outreach, etc. have all declined because of this.
Session 2: Inclusive Library Team Culture (2pm-3pm)
This was a session by McMinnville Public Library staff about their 2013 initiative to create an inclusive library team culture and set staff ground rules and customer service standards that everyone must abide by. Their ideas were quite radical so the session was pretty interesting. Here’s a summary:
- Here’s a link to their staff ground rules, also includes 14 takeaways: http://www.mcminnvilleoregon.gov/library/page/inclusive-library-team-culture-ola-presentation-2017
- What prompted this change?
- Between January and June 2013 20% of their staff retired, 50% of staff were working new duties, and 80% of staff were under a new supervisor. Needless to say, this caused internal issues.
- Upstairs vs downstairs tension (reference vs circulation)
- They asked themselves: “What rules can we abide by day-to-day that would improve our relationships and service?”
- At the staff retreat they decided to create staff ground rules that everyone would follow:
- Brought in an outside facilitator to help them.
- Brainstormed positive and negative ideas on post-it notes, did the dot exercise (similar to what LEAD did at the last retreat).
- Then aggregated suggestions to the ground rules above.
- They framed these new rules positively, as a good change
- They read these rules at every meeting, as a refresher.
- This change created a leadership pipeline:
- As a leader, no longer just completing tasks. They’re now delegating and encouraging others to complete tasks.
- They even relabeled departments as “teams” and dept heads to “leaders”
- Breaking the rules and documenting that behavior:
- The rules are very behavioral – it’s possible to document if people are following a rule or not.
- The rules are very useful for setting expectations.
- Documentation of behavior is necessary if you want to change behavior.
- They talk to employees who are not following the ground rules. Wow! Lots of people asked about this!
- Staff ground rules are all about what behavior people need to display. This has actually made the conversations and documentation easier.
- It’s the responsibility of supervisors to not shy away from those conversations. Better to have difficult conversations sooner than later.
- The supervisor has to step up and tackle an issue as the starting point to resolving it. Example: Saturdays weren’t divided up fairly. Their supervisor stepped in and made them fair.
- You need concrete rules to point to when conflicts happen – to hold people accountable.
- They had disciplinary proceedings for people who did not follow the ground rules. It did lead to some dismissals. Wow!
- To get people with the attitudes they want, they’re very careful with their hiring. They care more about attitude and positivity thank skills.
- Some other ideas that stemmed from this or are related to this:
- They chose to care and do little things for people. They went from not caring about coworkers to genuinely caring about them.
- Talked about focusing on positives and strengths.
- Go with the flow: influence rather than control.
- Give credit rather than take it.
- Servant leadership: Serve those under you, help them succeed
- Getting to yes: What way can we tell a customer “yes”
- Also talked about developing customer service standards (see link)
- All in all, they noticed a definite change in the library aura after implementing the ground rules. Even the patrons noticed and commented on how much better the library had become!
Session 3: Time Management: An Unconference Session (4pm-5pm)
This was an unconference-type session where we just shared recommendations and experiences about time management. There were about 30 of us and all of us have tried multiple time management techniques so there were a bunch of good ideas going around. We sat around in a circle and hashed things out. It was an informative session.
- Here are some methods and tools for time management:
- Pomodoro Technique. A lot of people in the group had ADD / ADHD. Apparently people with ADD experience time non-sequentially? So, techniques like Pomodoro don’t work well for people with ADD.
- Dot journal / bullet journal: customizable, lots of physical writing (if you like that kind of thing)
- TickTick task app: better for easy things
- One Note and other note-syncing programs / apps
- Errands app
- Trello: a board app for tasks
- GTD: “Getting Things Done” philosophy. Anything that takes more than 1 step to complete is a project.
- Toggl app: tracking what you did with your time. Also has a useful Google-based extension.
- Outlook
- Google Calendar: Has “goals” that look for open spaces in your calendar to add your incremental goals (like a 15 min walk)
- Sand timer: Yes, a physical sand timer for like 3 minutes or so for replying to emails. Imposes a time limit, prevents you from overthinking it
- Paperclip reward system: Reward yourself for good behavior by adding a paperclip to a chain and building a chain of success. Really, this includes any method to gamify your incremental focus successes.
- How to focus:
- Plugin that yells at you when you navigate to a time-wasting page
- Set fake deadlines. (How to make yourself really believe them?)
- Respond to things right away before the urge to ignore it kicks in
- Before you establish priorities, establish criteria for what’s important to you
- Using people as a time management tool: reporting to others to hold yourself accountable.
- When someone asks for help we often don’t want to say no. We like helping and saying yes. What to do?
- Can say “Yes, but can you take this other thing from me?”
- Give yourself time to respond yes or no. Tell them you’ll get back to them.
- Think of it this way: when you say yes, you’re taking time away from other projects and tasks you want to do as well.
- Pay attention to your body – observe stress before you get sick
- Many of us in the group are bad at estimating how long something takes.
- Look into appreciative inquiry, a change management tool
