James LaRue - myliblog

One of the surprisingly popular talks I've been giving (most recently, this morning in Rapid City SD) is about public library policies. I don't focus on particular wording, or even a checklist (although such checklists do exist, like this excellent one from the Colorado State Library). Instead, I focus on the general orientation that boards and staff should take when confronted with the inevitable issue of patrons behaving badly. Although it will come as a surprise to some, the best response to trouble isn't always to create a new policy so that stern librarians can ensure it never happens again. I propose a set of guidelines, instead. They are: Begin with general policy guidelines. Start with ALA's Library Bill of Rights , one of our clearest statements of professional purpose. Use your best judgment. No matter how thorough your policies may be, there will be surprises. Remember the mission and values of the institution, and do your best. Presume innocence and g...

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, I read the galley proof of my friend Anne McGhee's book The Wisdom Within These Walls . You can pick it up from Amazon here . I happen to have been around when Annie first started gathering the stories that form the core of the book - interviews with real people in the area. She found some incredible people. One woman was a police dispatcher in Dallas, and on duty the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. One man actually helped get us to the moon. Another tells the heartbreaking story of the Pacific theater in WWII. Back then, Annie turned the interviews into brief, very powerful monologues. Then, she put together a readers theater group to perform them. These "plays" remain some of the most moving moments of my life. But she has continued to think about these stories, and her book is about just what wisdom means. Her definition is a gem: " Wisdom is our capacity to take in the experience of life, infuse it with intention, and return it to the world ...

A decade ago now, one of my libraries opened a teen area. The manager of the branch (Greg Mickells, now the director of the Madison WI Public Library), had an idea. Why not hire teens as staff - not just as shelvers, but to staff the service desk, answer questions, assist in collection purchasing, and generally have parity with the adults? I admit I was a little dubious. But I went along. It was a staggering success - and not just because we hired some very bright young people who took their positions seriously and did a fine job. More to the point: some 10 years later, they all came back. As librarians. I've been thinking lately about our failure as a profession to reflect the growing diversity of our society. The problem, I think, is that we pounce on candidates who have already run the MLIS (Master's of Library and Information Science) gauntlet. It's too late. If we really want to pull more diverse candidates into the pool, we have to get them while they're sti...

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...

I have been working over the past year and a half with several folks, mostly new library directors, as a coach. One of my clients just hired a key person for her team, and was curious enough about a hiring technique I have used in the past to give it a try herself. Mostly, this is a version of the "assessment center" technique known as the "leaderless discussion." (You can find out more about the assessment center here .) The core idea is very simple. First, know what you're looking for - at least in the sense of demonstrable skills. Second, create a scenario or exercise in which that skill must be demonstrated. In the case of many leadership positions, a leaderless panel discussion, large enough to promote real interaction (at least five people) and around some relevant job topics, is a rich source for observational data. Third, have multiple observers, who have been coached about how to observe people's communication behaviors (I give them a chart ...

I had breakfast this morning with my dear friend and colleague Monique Sendze, now director of IT and innovation for the Tulsa City County Library. It sounds like a terrific job, a terrific library, and I know she'll be successful there. She and I wound up having a conversation I've had three times over the past two days, so it might be worth digging into it a little deeper. The larger frame is that institutions have rhythms: they focus outward, they focus inward. Institutions breathe, too. Sometimes library leaders get curious about their environment, explore it, build relationships, investigate themes and needs. Then they turn in to do something about it - sometimes to strengthen a core that suddenly needs some attention, sometimes to implement a project or vision identified in the outward-looking phase. Then, after that project is done, the possibilities branch. Institutions stagnate. They remain inwardly focused, incurious about their environment, disengaged with la...