Librarians as Community Leaders

4:00pm- 5:00pm Mary Dewalt:

• building and empowering staff and communities
• Jamie La Rue's marketing/library pyramid; community involvement is the highest level of marketing and library work that will allow you to reach the greatest amount of library users; it can help you can touch an extra 15% of your communities
• staff is the face of the library inside and outside of the library
• empower staff and creating a learning organization is central to creating a library that can effectively reach out to large portions of the community
• communication between departments and different teams is key to empowering staff
• improvement occurs slowly over time
• connection to community doesn't happen automatically
• management and staff must both provide support for cultural shifts and community involvement
• tap staff interests and connections both within and outside of the library
• allow staff to have the power to decide how to spend certain funds; especially with programming
• stay tuned in to the community with media, public documents, meetings, community groups, and generally actively participating in things going on
• work to integrate into existing community organization activities
• remember that continuous improvement is important; over time getting involved gets easier and easier and more effective;
• all staff must be able to articulate the library's value (to the community) and their own value as library employees