James LaRue - myliblog

In November of 2018, I left my position at ALA in Chicago to return to my Colorado-based writing, speaking, and consulting career. Today, I brought up my new website, created in Google Sites/new. For folks landing here before the DNS entries propagate around (tricky stuff!), I've included below some of the business services I will highlight in the new website. Speaking Looking for an inspirational talk? Looking for a workshop? Recent topics include: Intellectual freedom and social justice Transformational by design: a paradigm shift The first year: six strategies for being a successful library director Key trends (emergent literacy, library as place, ebooks, community reference, advocacy) Library building programs and processes: building for tomorrow Library as publisher: from gatekeeper to gardener Community reference: leaving Fort Ref, taking it to the streets Advocacy: Telling the library story Trustee and director training: making each other look good Succession p...

I've been doing a talk for a while now about what I believe to be the five transformative trends most deeply affecting libraries today. But after each talk, I pick up a lot of insights from the audiences. After my last talk (for NEFLIN, in Jacksonville FL), I realized that I now think there are SIX trends. And I have begun to think of them as a movement from one thing to another. So it looks something like this: EMERGENT LITERACY ==> from book desert  to book abundance DIGITAL PUBLISHING ==> from gatekeeper  to gardener COMMUNITY REFERENCE ==> from embedded librarian to community leader SELF-DIRECTED, COLLABORATIVE LEARNING CENTER ==> from consumer  to creator GENERATIONAL TURNOVER ==> from Boomer to Millennial ADVOCACY ==> from head  to heart Literacy. That is, given what we have learned about the importance of early literacy, there's no excuse not to push more books in the homes of children between the ages of 0-5. And we can track th...

Recently, Tim Miller, the director of the Pines and Plains Library in Elbert County Colorado, reached out to Sharon Morris, Director of Library Development for the Colorado State Library. He was looking for a workshop based on the idea of organizational values, and knew that Sharon had just finished her doctoral dissertation on just that topic. Sharon and I have done a number of workshops and classes together so she invited me to team up to help develop and deliver this new one. We're still working on the final title, but it's something like "Our Values, Our Culture: Purposeful Libraries for Community Impact." Here's a broad overview of the premises of the day: Individuals have deeply held values that they bring to the work place. Often, people can discover that they hold a key subset of those values in common. When you think, talk, and reflect on that, you not only become more mindful of how you show up at work, you become more intentional about the culture...