Monica Erickson, SELCO-PLA Scholarship Recipient
Chatfield Public Library

Greg Buss' presentation, Great Libraries for Dummies, seemed to call to me, for some reason.  He said that as our libraries become more and more customer focused they transform from good to great.  He emphasized that there are 4 major trends in library customer service:  1) the library as a destination, effectively becoming the "community's living room"; 2) customer convenience as first priority (anticipate needs, exceed expectations, surprise and delight!); 3) customer based technology that empowers the patron; and 4) connecting with the community.  He was firm in insisting that there are 10 things you must be doing to achieve excellence.  1) Be open 7 days a week; 2) create comfortable and appealing spaces; 3) utilize the power of the customer (utilize self-serve, automated services that frees up staff for value-added services); 4) merchandize collections; 5) walk the floor; 6) provide web-based services; 7) involve the community (My Library, Your Library, Everybody's Library); 8) promote the library; 9) measure, compare, and adjust; and 10) fully utilize staff and Board.  He also went on to list the 5 steps to excellence, but I'll let you check them out on the PLA website.  Overall, a great primer on the basics of excellence in library customer service.  How to do all these things with limited staff, time, and money ... hmmmm ... there's a topic for a great book for Dummies destined to be a best-seller.

In Optimizing Space for Results:  Library Spaces for Today's Services, Cheryl Bryan discussed how we can repurpose spaces within our libraries to support new services or needs.  She recommends the book Managing Facilities for Results and emphasized key points in developing a plan to change spaces in your current building.  I found myself nodding in agreement when she described the library as becoming "the third place" - the place between home and work.  She also mentioned its increasing value as a neutral meeting place as many groups no longer want to meet in members' homes and also a place where those who work at home can come to connect with others.  She emphasized the importance of constant change with a quote from Einstein.  "Life is like riding a bicycle, you need to keep moving or you'll lose your balance."

Like everyone else, I too, enjoyed the luncheon featuring Nancy Pearl very much.  How can any librarian not appreciate her sentiment:  "In this world we are only given one life.  Through books and reading we can have many lives, go anywhere, do anything, be anyone."  I was thrilled to hear her state aloud something I've always believed and that keeps me trying even when the effort seems hopeless ... that there is the perfect book out there that will turn someone who is not a reader into a reader if only the two can be brought together!  If you want to be inspired, go listen to Nancy when you get a chance.

RX for RA - Training Library Staff in Fiction and Nonfiction was a last minute substitute for me as another session I wanted to attend filled to capacity before I could get there.  This session seemed to be all about reader's advisory training through years-long genre studies way beyond the scope of anything I could hope to even adapt to our small library's situation.

Making Space for Teens in Libraries provided examples from 3 California library designs specifically for teens.  It was reiterated a couple of times that more time is spent on planning bathrooms in libraries than in planning teen spaces.  The presenters said there is really no solid research on teen spaces in libraries at this point - no best practices, so this means we can do whatever we want!  Two of the presenters at this session were architects.  I thought it was interesting to get imput from a couple of architects who actually seem to know something specifically about library spaces.  They showed examples and provided many tips for planning such spaces.  I appreciated the fact that they emphasized working with teens to get impup and examining existing teen spaces, such as their bedrooms, to get ideas on how to best create a space they will actually want to spend time in at the library - a space flexible enough for a variety of different activities.  The California examples were all amazing.  I could hear the barely contained frustration some folks were dealing with as they asked how they could even hope to provide something similar in their libraries - libraries that were barely as big as the teen section alone presented in one of the examples.  Frustrating as these very limiting factors are, I think anyone who attended could still come away with important factors to consider and ideas for improvement when struggling to make better spaces for their teen patrons.