WiLS 2013 Community Regional Meetings Report

In September and October of 2013, a newly-reorganized WiLS held a series of six regional community meetings in locations across the state of Wisconsin, each hosted by a different member organization:

• UW-Rock County (Janesville)
• Chippewa Valley Museum (Eau Claire)
• Nicolet College (Rhinelander)
• Fond du Lac Public Library (Fond du Lac)
• Carthage College (Kenosha)
• Southwest Wisconsin Library System (Fennimore)

The purpose of the regional community meetings was to provide a venue for library and cultural organization members to get together, discuss their collaborative projects and challenges, hear about what others were doing around the state to connect with their communities, and possibly light the fire for collaborative projects among attendees.  These meetings also gave new WiLS staff an opportunity to meet with members and hear about the common challenges facing libraries and librarians across the state.  Each meeting had between six and twenty attendees, and each meeting was structured similarly:  a welcome and introduction was followed by a brief icebreaker activity, a few presentations from attendees on their collaborative projects, and a more lengthy discussion on challenges and possible solutions to them.  This report will briefly summarize the common themes of these discussions as well as the solutions that were presented to adapt to the rapidly changing library landscape.

Money

It is probably surprising to no one that one of the most common concerns among library leadership and staff is money.  Library budgets remain stagnant (or shrinking) while the cost of the resources and staffing that are at the core of library services continues to rise.  And in addition to the traditional products and services the library makes available to the community, its scope expands: the digitization and preservation of unique local content, continuing services which have been defunded locally such as job centers, helping community members adapt to legislative or technological change, and so on.  Every day, every library is expected to do more with less and it will take innovative people working together to realize these goals.

Meeting attendees offered a number of solutions to help ease the stress of a stretched budget:  establish communication platforms between library types to redistribute materials, learn about the various ways libraries can generate revenue beyond traditional funding streams (grants, consulting, fundraisers, sponsorship, etc.), reorganize and realign library staff strengths to its mission for maximum efficiency, and collaborate with industry and other community stakeholders.

Change

Everything in the library world has changed in the last thirty years – information platforms, funding sources and structures, physical library space, staff roles, patron expectations – and keeping up with and adapting effectively to those changes is hard, professionally and emotionally.  Just when you can claim mastery of something, it disappears or is reinvented as something new to learn.  Meeting attendees overwhelmingly recognized that change is the new normal for their libraries and discussed their experiences leading staff through change, coping with failure, watching technology come and go, and managing shrinking budgets.

The solutions to these issues presented by meeting attendees were largely focused on trying to change negative staff perception of change and of failure by fostering a positive and supportive environment among library workers and administrators.

Space

Meeting attendees talked a lot about the physical space in their libraries – how to expand it, how to use it more meaningfully, how to arrange it to meet staff needs, how to accommodate heavily- and lightly-used physical collections, how to manipulate it to adjust to current and future technologies.  A few attendees had too much space but more than a few had too little and construction projects are expensive and often off the table.  How do you make the most of your current library (or museum) space?

Of the solutions suggested to this problem of space, most involved collaboration between libraries or between libraries and community organizations to delegate the use of space more efficiently.  Can the historical society house the newspapers that the library digitized?  Can the lesser-used collection be housed off-site?  Does a shared print initiative make sense?  Will a cafe bring in more patrons?  What about an industry-sponsored technology center?

Staff

Meeting attendees recognized that the success of a library and its services is entirely dependent on its staff at all levels – administrators, librarians, and non-professional alike.  Cultivating an engaged, positive, dedicated, innovative, and happy staff and library environment is very important to the library mission.  However, shrinking budgets and high retirement rates are a challenge and carrying over the important knowledge those retiring library workers have accumulated and created is exceptionally difficult.  There are additional challenges to training current staff – with such rapidly changing technology, how do you pick your continuing education path?  What skills are most beneficial to library workers today, and 20 years from now?  How do you realign staff to changing library roles and expectations, and encourage communication between traditionally separate library departments? There is also a volunteer staff to manage – how do you keep them engaged and giving their valuable time to the library?

A number of solutions were offered to the issue of staffing, though meeting attendees recognized that while more money would help attract qualified and quality staff, it might not keep them and it might not keep them relevant.  Collaborating with library schools to develop graduate and continuing education courses, fostering an environment in which it is expected that workers will try new things (and occasionally fail at them!), encouraging communication between all library departments, and performing regular staff strengths analyses and position realignment were all proposed solutions to the issue of effective and successful staffing.

Other Challenges

Other common concerns were raised at the regional community meetings, mostly relating to the collection and patron services and including specific issues such as copyright, ebooks, local content, access, information literacy, outreach, and advocacy.  These are worthy and important concerns; if you wish to learn more about the discussions from the meetings surrounding these topics, contact WiLS at 608-218-4480 or .