James LaRue - myliblog

It was news when they  named a library after me . It was news when they  took it away . On the whole, I greatly appreciated, for a while, being both a person and a building.

Suzanne tricked me! She told me she was getting an award this evening at the Castle Rock Town Council meeting for her work on community reference. I thought, "Well- deserved, and about time!" So I even put on a sport coat (under my winter coat), and we braved the snowy roads. But when we got there, the two local Rotary Club presidents in fact presented me with an award - the 2015 Castle Rock Rotary Clubs Person of the Year award, "in recognition of his service to the people of Douglas County by building an Outstanding Public library System." I was totally surprised. I have not been the director of the Douglas County Libraries for two years, and in fact have spent most of my attention far outside Douglas County. But I remain very touched: ultimately, this is about the recognition and appreciation of the library as a community asset. Several Rotarians came up afterward to tell me that their whole idea of what a library could be had changed; they now saw it not ju...

Salary:           $10,923.47 - $16,388.67 Monthly Job Type:    Full Time – Exempt (40 hours) Location:    Philip S. Miller Library, Castle Rock, CO Department: Administration A visionary, entrepreneurial Library Director and leader exits. A new chapter begins. Maybe YOU will be the leader to take Douglas County Libraries to the next level! Douglas County Libraries has a great opportunity for a new Library Director. Located just south of Denver in beautiful Douglas County, our independent library district is funded by a 4.0 mill levy approved by Douglas County voters in 1996. We are an innovative, technologically advanced, fiscally responsible and financially stable, dynamic organization with more than 300 employees, 1,500 volunteers and seven library branch locations. We are regularly ranked by the Library Journal as one of the top public libraries of our size in the United States, serving a...

I'm planning, over the next month or so, to wrap up a few outstanding projects at DCL, then to prepare a kind of "issues and directions" paper for the board. This will just call out some of the key issues that, in my mind, the board should pay attention to going forward. But I'm also trying to keep a distance here: there are many, many good people both within the staff and at the board level. While I'm proud of the work I've done here, and certainly have many thoughts about the future, I am under no illusion that the library belongs to me. It belongs to the community, and their ability to move forward shouldn't be too constrained by a single voice or vision.

Many thanks to Elaine Grant for today's piece  on the DCL ebook platform, and our experiments with publishing. And thanks to Lynn Neary for NPR's broader coverage on the ebooks-and-libraries issue. You can find that here .

What follows is the draft of an article I wrote for library colleagues in Bulgaria. There's not much in it that's new; but it's an attempt to provide a more comprehensive narrative of how public libraries got to where we are regarding ebooks, and what Douglas County Libraries has attempted to do about it. eBooks - an introduction For decades, librarians in the United States of America predicted the arrival of the digital book. Finally, around 2009, the Amazon Kindle, followed by the Sony ebook Reader, became popular Christmas gifts. They were soon followed by the Barnes and Noble Nook. By 2011-12, Apple's iPad became the most stylish option, followed by a host of Android-based tablets. The early adopters of this technology tended to be well-educated, upper middle class, and middle-aged. By the end of 2012, about 20% of library patrons had, and preferred, ebooks to paper books. Again by the end of 2012, roughly 50% of the sales of all popular adult fiction were e...

Here is the article that tells the tale. I find myself wondering about this issue of "accountability." Suppose (just hypothetically) that Commissioner Repella were to cast the deciding vote on the appointment of a really bad board member. How does the "elected official component" make the situation more accountable? Commissioner Repella is term limited. To show public displeasure against that decision, no one can vote against her for Commissioner next time, because she can't run. And with the many other issues that Commissioners are tasked with, won't library issues tend to get lost in the cloud? If being an elected official just means that people can speak up at public meetings to the decision-makers, the public can do that at library board meetings, too. But also, see this news article from 2011, in which then local Republican Party Chairman Mark Baisley said that "he was approached by a person running for a local utilities board. He says they...

Here's the first article , covering the attempt to take back the nominating process from the Trustees. Here's the second article , covering the meeting between the two bodies. And finally, I have appended the text of the Trustees' guest column to the Douglas County News Press(appearing on page 9 of the March 14, 2013 edition). The Douglas County Libraries, a library district (and like the county, a subdivision of the state), was established by a vote of the citizens in 1990. At that time, the County Commissioners granted to the new Library Board of Trustees (first by InterGovernmental Agreement, and in 2001 by resolution) the right to nominate its own members. The commissioners have always been the final appointing authority. That arrangement isn't uncommon, although there are several variations around the state. There are no elected library boards in Colorado, and appointing authorities often hand over the nominating process. But library law is explicit about...