The PNLA/WLA 2010 conference in picturesque Victoria BC provided my first opportunity to give a retrospective report on Project Compass, the year-long, IMLS-funded program to work with State Libraries and focus on building public library capacity to meets the needs of a workforce in crisis. After a whirlwind year, I could start to take a few steps back and look at what we (the big WE of state and public libraries all over the country) have accomplished in response to the economic downturn and the dramatic increases in demand for library services.

My slide presentation describes the scope, goals and phases of the overall project, and then focuses on the past, ongoing and future actions of the states represented at the Pacific Northwest conference—Idaho, Montana and Washington. To get the full-throated understanding of all the amazing work that State Libraries are doing, browse the list of Showcases presented by participants at the Project Compass summits. Nobody is resting on their laurels either, as evidenced by the list of projects that are being implemented in the coming year.

The most rewarding aspect of the year with Project Compass has been engaging in a vibrant knowledge exchange with the library community, not just with participants at the in-person and online summits, but with library people everywhere. From those who attended my conference session, I got to hear perspectives from the front lines and from rural libraries about what was needed to serve job-seekers. I hadn’t heard before about the need for wifi printers so users could print directly from their laptops and not have to queue up for the public computers. Or the need for space in small libraries; job-seeking can be an all-day effort and the job-seekers impact the tiny spaces of many rural libraries.

For ongoing connections, there is the community of practice for Workforce Resources on WebJunction. This section burgeoned since the start of the project. It is truly a community effort with lots of room for continued growth. If you’re on Twitter, use the #libs4jobs hashtag to broadcast news and events about the library-workforce connections. If you’re not a tweeter, you can still see freshly updated posts in the Twitter badge on the main section page.

Stay tuned for Year Two. Project Compass continues to augment public library services to the unemployed with a follow-on grant from IMLS.

Communities across the country are pursuing a burgeoning strategy known as economic gardening, which works to stimulate the development of small business with the goal of growing a healthy, community-scale economy. Libraries can be key players in supporting and facilitating their success. This Libraries and Economic Development webinar series will expand your thinking about the powerful connection. Your host for the series is Shelley Walchak, a mover-and-shaker with the official title of Library Community Programs Senior Consultant at the Colorado State Library.

Webinar 1: How to Make Your Library Entrepreneur-Friendly
Tuesday, Aug 17, 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific

Christine Hamilton-Pennell literally wrote the book. She is an articulate proponent of libraries’ support for local entrepreneurs. Learn specific steps your library can take to connect with and support its local business community. If you’re at all intrigued by the concept of economic gardening, this webinar is a must-see. Hamilton-Pennell introduces the strategies and lays the groundwork for their practical application, which will be covered in the following two webinars.

Webinar 2: Turning Your Databases into Business for Your Customers
Tuesday, Aug 24, 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific

Your library may already have the tools at hand (or close by) to help stimulate economic development in your community and you don’t have to be a trained business reference librarian to use them. Presenters Terry Zarsky and Kathleen Rainwater will give a guided tour through the best databases for small business information.

Webinar 3: Going to Your Customer – Outreach and Strategic Partnerships
Tuesday, Aug 31, 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific

How do you let the business community know that your library is primed and ready to help? Presenters Suzanne Kaller and Colbe Galston will talk about how to get the word out to Chambers of Commerce, small business development centers, community groups and government entities.

For more information and to access archives and registration:
http://www.webjunction.org/workforce-resources/articles/content/103122377

WebJunction is building a community of practice around libraries and workforce recovery. We want to surface all the mega and micro resources, strategies, or stories to let the world know how libraries and their staff throw out the lifeline to the community in tough times.

Here are four ways to share what you know:

1. The fastest way is through your Twitter account, using the #libs4jobs hashtag. You can see the accumulated tweets by searching for the hashtag in Twitter or following the live feed on the Workforce Resources overview page.
2. Jump in to any of the discussions or start one of your own. Current topics include Partnerships with workforce centers and the IMLS 21st Century Skills.
3. Add to this list of workforce resource websites that libraries have created to help staff and patrons find what they need. It’s a wiki —you know how to wiki, don’t you?
4. Write up a story, short or long, about the impact you or your library has had on a patron. Post it in the documents section or send it to WebJunction to post on your behalf. We know there are big and little success stories occurring every day. We’d like to put them all together as evidence of the amazing power of libraries.

What is your story?

New:

• Economic Gardening: libraries help to grow local economies
  Find out how libraries can nurture this exciting idea.
• Community and Library Services Analysis Tools
  Analysis worksheets created by Kitty Yancheff of the Humboldt County Library in Eureka, California to assess community and library services to triage social services.
• Speaking of Kitty, she is one of the presenters in Thursday’s (Jan 28) webinar on Libraries and Workforce Recovery. If you miss it, there will be an archive.
• In fact, there’s a collection of links to Webinar Archives related to Economic Recovery.
• There is a new addition to the Impact Studies and Reports document— a link to ALA’s report A Perfect Storm Brewing: Budget cuts threaten public library services at time of increased demand.

Workforce Resources will continue to grow. We welcome your contributions. Tell us what your library is doing to guide patrons toward recovery. Share your stories of patrons who were steered toward success with the help of the library.

View the webinar archive »
Visit the new Group »

In this webinar, Nancy will focus on librarians as community technology stewards. She will offer practical steps for you to begin to understand your community, assess the technology needs of your community, and how to select, configure, and support the online technologies your community uses. Here’s a sample of her well-stocked slideshare account to give you a taste of her passion and commitment to building relevant online communities. The definition of ”technology steward” (slide 9 & 10 ) sounds so much like our work in libraries, that I’m sure there are many of us in libraryland who are eager to change our job titles!

I blogged about my CiL presentation back in March, after Sheila Kearns led me to the Digital Habitats project (thanks again, Sheila) and Nancy White commented on my post!  So you can only imagine how excited I am to bring Nancy and her work to the WebJunction community and for the way it relates to technology stewardship @ your library.

View the archive for the webinar »

While grants have explicit start and end dates, the work we do at TechSoup to support libraries does not. TechSoup’s MaintainIT Project was funded by a 3-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that ended last month. It’s hard to believe that three years have passed, but March 31 just came and went, because nothing really changed for us behind the scenes of MaintainIT. And nothing much will, really…We’re continuing to support libraries and we’ll continue to share stories from libraries, so please stay in touch.

And we here at WebJunction would like to invite you to join the celebration as we honor the over 400 Cookbook contributors, share lessons learned from the project, and to let you know that the Cookbooks are alive and well on WebJunction. In addition to all three MaintainIT Cookbooks, WebJunction is home to the Cookbook Contributors Group, the collaborative group who uses and updates the Cookbooks.

You’re encouraged to join the group if you’re responsible for buying, supporting or maintaining your library’s technology, so you can continue to share your experiences, solutions and challenges with others. And we’re excited to provide a number of ways for folks to update and build upon the Cookbooks over time.

Please join tomorrow’s virtual celebration, where you’ll get top technology tips from library technology experts, hear what MaintainIT Project staff learned from their many conversations and library travels around the country, and learn more about how you can keep the Cookbook community alive on WebJunction.

In these tough times, there’s little more important than recognizing the efforts of so many people committed to sustaining strong and relevant technologies in our libraries, who have taken the time to share their experience and expertise so that all libraries might benefit. Here’s to all who have stopped “reinventing the wheel”!

Register for the webinar »

REPORTS ON CALCULATING A LIBRARY’S RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Compiled by Don Reynolds, Past President of the Association of Rural and Small Libraries, and Director, Nolichucky Regional Library, Morristown, Tennessee
Updated February 20, 2009

Public Library Benefits Valuation Study. St. Louis Public Library, April 2001.

Library’s Contribution to Your Community. Illinois Regional Library Systems, 2002/3.

Libraries: How they stack up. An OCLC Report. OCLC, 2003.

Value of Public Library Service. Massachusetts Library Association, October 2003. Also available: “Estimated retail value and Values explained” and Calculator work sheet

The Economic Impact of Public Libraries on South Carolina. January 2005.

Taxpayer Return-on-Investment (ROI) in Pennsylvania Public Libraries. Pennsylvania Library Association, September 2006.

Value for Money: Southwestern Ohio’s Return from Investment in Public Libraries. November 2006. Report Summary

Making Cities Stronger: Public Library Contributions to Local Economic Development. Urban Libraries Council, January 2007.

Worth Their Weight – An Assessment of the Evolving Field of Library Valuation. Americans for Libraries Council (Libraries for the Future), May 2007. Two notes:
1.) This report summarizes all the various valuation projects from around the country.
2.) I was having some trouble getting this to download, but was told by Libraries for the Future that the website issue is being addressed.

Vermont Library Association’s Library Use Value Calculator – What is your library worth to you? August 2007. (Note: Follows Massachusetts model.)

Return on Investment for Public Libraries. Library Research Service (Colorado), 2007/8. Note: This site also includes numerous case studies of individual libraries. Individual ROI Calculator.

Return on Investment (ROI). North Suburban Library System (Illinois), 2008. (Note: Two calculators are available here, one for a library’s return on investment to the community, one for the ROI for an individual.)

Maine State Library’s Library Use Value Calculator. Updated 2008. Note: This approach also follows Massachusetts model.

New York Libraries: How They Stack Up! Revised October 2008. Printable brochure version, also revised October 2008

At the OCLC Symposium held on Saturday, David Weinberger (of Everything is Miscellaneous and Cluetrain Manifesto) and Nova Spivack (of twine.com and grandson of Peter Drucker) talked about the semantic web, and what it means for libraries. Both Spivack and Weinberger emphasized the power of the collective, and the importance of understanding the social graph. When asked by an audience member what it meant for information professionals, Weinberger said “you need to be in a smart network”, meaning, make sure you are on Facebook and twitter, or whatever relevant online community space there is. But make sure the people in your network are saying smart things, and pointing you to good information. You can check out the tweets of other attendees to get a sense of the lively conversation the talk engendered.

On Sunday, David Lee King, Cindi Trainor, and WebJunction’s own Rachel Van Noord gave a talk about putting the library into the online spaces where your users are and how to cultivate that online community space. David’s library in Topeka, Kansas is on Facebook and twitter with friends and  use YouTube to share online book reviews and guides to using the library. But what he emphasized was that these tools are not just mechanisms to push out information, but are instead platforms for engaging their community members into a conversation with the library.

In the same talk, Cindi talked about how her library uses LibX, an internet broswer plug-in which literally situates library resources into online resources such as Wikipedia, Google Scholar results, and amazon and barnes & noble search results. Rachel ended the presentation by talking about the 5 principles of cultivating online community, re-emphasizing David’s point that conversation and leadership are keys to engaging people in the online space.

My conference badge is sporting a new Weaver ribbon, which I acquired at a social event hosted by the multi-talented trainer/consultant Pat Wagner. A Weaver is someone who has mastered the art of networking, someone who recognizes patterns in interactions with people and makes the connections that result in positive action. I am an apprentice Weaver.

This midwinter conference is allowing me lots of practice. I am here as a Board member of CLENE and an emissary of WebJunction. The conflation of interests between these two organizations is full of potential. The best thing they have in common is members who are interested in continual learning and who are dynamic, innovative, congenial, creative …I could go on. Paul S always says it better.

I love the opportunity to meet up in person. I appreciate even more the virtual connectedness that allows us to weave all of these relationships into powerful actions no matter the physical location. We are all producing a masterful tapestry that tells the story of libraries.