We're really excited to have you here for today's webinar and I'm going to go ahead and get us started and begin our recording and I'm excited to welcome today'stoday's presenter, George Needham, we had a great pleasure of working with George here at WebJunction.
We're excited to be able to bring him back to the WebJunction platform and to share his excellent work and inspiration on today's topic.
So, welcome, George, and thank you so much for being here.
>> George Needham:  Well, thank you very much, Jennifer, for the invitation.
I want to thank you and Kendra and Sharon.
It's great to be back working with WebJunction again so thank you very much for the opportunity.
I'd like to welcome all of you to today's presentation.
It's a pleasure to talk to you and talk about one of my favorite topics, which is how to be successful no matter what's going on around you.
It's more on the human side of how we build successful libraries.
It seems like we're always in uncertain times.
We wish we could be doing fortune telling, but I won't be doing that today.
There is a long record of people making prognostics.
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
Bill gates supposedly said in 1981 that no one will need 640 kilobytes on a computer.
Robert metcaf, who was the founder of Ethernet.
He said it would go supernova and in 1996, it collapsed.
You remember the great catastrophic collapse.
There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.
No chance.
Yeah, okay.
Well, so, I think this is the best advice you can give about fortune telling, which is don't ever make predictions.
Probably been attributed to a whole lot of people, but my favorite attribution is to Casey Stengel.
So, let's move on from here because there is a lot to prepare for the future.
We can prepare for the future by really going through a few steps that are not complicated that can work for small BBs, medium libraries, large libraries, academic.
This can be helpful for people who are just jumping into the field and maybe became director before they were expecting to.
I'll try to point out some of the things as we go through here that are helpful for small libraries and things that new managers might want to try.
So, I see there are five areas that successful libraries have in common.
The first is, they align with their communities.
They really understand what their communities are about and what drives their communities.
What drives the people in the community?
What makes the community successful or not so successful?
The second thing they do is they question the orthodoxy.
They are willing to say, why do we do this?
How do we do this?
Is this the best way we can do this?
The third thing they do is they manager their message effectively.
They tell their own story.
The fourth thing they do is they stay focused.
They know what they're supposed to be doing and use laser-like precision to stay on target.
They make mindful choices.
They actually think about the things they're going to be doing, as they move forward and they choose those things carefully.
I would like to just say, this is my only slide with a bulletpoint list.
I don't like this kind of slide, but I figure this is the best way to lay out the agenda for what I'm going to be talking about.
The first one is the successful libraries align with their communities.
They have their ducks in a row.
I'm going to be quoting from a couple of other sources.
one is the library report that came out several years ago.
Another thing is a book by Dave lankas.
I've known him when he was at Syracuse best.
He wrote a book called, expect more, demanding better libraries for today's complex world.
I will tell you when I'm quoting from them.
I'll quote from the aspen library's report.
It stressed the importance of aligning with the communities.
Public libraries that align their people, place and platform assets and create services that priority local and community goals will find greatest opportunities for success in the years before.
Dave said, bad libraries only build collections.
Good libraries build services.
Great libraries build communities.
You know, this is also the -- 
what do I mean by successful libraries aligning with their communities?
A successful library has a bone-deep understanding of what their community's all about.
If you're not born in the communities, if you didn't go up there, the easiest way to find out is to ask.
We're librarians, do a little research.
Doesn't have to be in books or magazines or other types of recorded history.
We can ask questions of the people in the community.
Here's a few questions you can ask to help develop a bone-deep understanding.
What are your favorite places to visit in the community?
If you have a guest coming from out of town, where do you take people?
What makes those favorite places so special?
What makes them so pleasant?
This kind of question you also want to know is, what brought you here?
Why do you live in this community?
If you're not a native, what keeps you here?
What would make you want to leave?
The more you can learn about why people live in the community, what's important to them, what makes them tick, the more important it is.
They also understand what the library's image is.
We were doing a one-day program, trying to get some solid information for this library to do its planning and we started in the morning with a community group.
We had a few members of the business community, friends of the library, a couple of library staff, trustees sitting around a table.
I asked them, how does the community see itself?
What its role?
Nobody really wanted to say anything and finally somebody said, well, this is a community where people live until they can afford to live somewhere better.
Somebody else said, yeah, that's a hell of a thing to build a library on.
I said, no, they handed you the key of the kingdom.
Help them live somewhere better.
Do the things that make that possible.
Do English for people for whom that's not a native language.
Help people get their ged and armed forces.
Help them move up the ladder, move up the rungs of the ladder to be economically successful.
If you do that, it shows you understand your community and you're helping your community move forward.
Somebody said -- I hate to jump in here.
One of the things said, I really like the idea of asking questions that are not library centric.
Don't ask people how to run the library, that's your job.
Ask them what they care about, what they worry about.
What their hopes and dreams are.
And what you can do to help accomplish those things.
Successful libraries are relentlessly local.
They care about their community.
they're part of a cookie-cutter production.
Rather, they are actually part of the community they serve.
So that means having a good local history collection and collecting local authors and sometimes authors you wouldn't ordinarily buy because their writing might not be at the level you think it should be.
They thought of themselves of being at the small end of the funnel and we would collect as much information as we could, books, magazines, recordings, links and take them down through the funnel to serve our local community.
Anybody basically who has an internet connection can do that for him or herself.
We need to collect the information about our communities and feed that up to the web to make our communities visible and important on the web.
One small example of this, if you don't like what Wikipedia says about your community, fix it, change it, take response billfy for the ones who make your community look good on Wikipedia.
How do you learn this stuff?
Join the conversations that are already going on in your community.
I these high-tech kind of ways.
You can listen.
It's not just the online conversation.
It includes what you hear in your churches, at the chamber of commerce and what the school board is talking about, the county economic development agency, it's what you hear in line at the super market or McDonald's.
Libraries should be involved in all of the discussions that involve the future direction of their communities.
I'm going to quote here from the aspen report, the key steps -- 
excuse me.
The key steps in building community leadership to support the public library include improving communications with leaders and developing champions, reaching out to and engaging with young professional organization and demonstrating the impact of partners working together.
I'll talk about partners later on in the program.
What we're looking to do is create mutualistic relationships.
Mutualism is one form of symbiosis.
What I'm talking about here is a partnership.
Every one has skin in the game and is going to share the benefits.
You have assets to bring to the table with every partnership.
You have things that other organizations in the community need.
It might be space.
It might be collections.
It might be skilled staff.
This is not -- I'm not talking about New York public library here.
I'm talk about every community library in America.
You have things that people want.
Leverage these things in the part partnership.
The publication community from WebJunction is a good way to start.
It lists lots of possible collaborators.
Make sure that your clear that you're not just looking for funding, you're looking for somebody to help push the community forward.
So, before I go to the next area, I'm looking over here to see if there are any questions.
Jennifer, anything in particular you think needs to be addressed?
>> Jennifer Peterson:  I haven't seen anything jump out quite yet.
If you have even questions not necessarily just for George, but questions you want to toss out, don't hesitate.
>> George Needham:  Yeah, you have 149 people on this webinar who have lots of ideas.
If you have questions, there's 149 people here who have more experience and insights than I do.
Don't fail to take advantage of that.
Successful libraries question the orthodoxy.
There's no excuse by duration of your time and job to fight this one.
Small libraries can question their orthodoxy just as easy as big ones.
This is a great place for new managers to start because if you think about it, a new manager has [Indiscernible] to ask why.
Why do we use it this way?
If you can do that in a respectful way that, you can actually be very successful in challenging the status quo.
So, successful libraries take risks.
You want to scan the horizon and see what's coming down the pike.
What are other customer-facing organizations in your community doing?
What are the grocery stores doing?
The banks?
Auto stores?
What are retailers doing?
Maybe it's delivery.
What are they doing in stores?
How do you translate what you see in the rest of the world into how you manage your library?
And when you've started to look at these things and how you can apply them in your library, you have to start thinking about, well, it might be different to put something in a different place, but it's a smart risk.
It's a way of trying something new and trying something different.
If you're a new manager and people are suggesting things to you or if you're a long-term manager who's having people suggest ideas to you, you want to reward risk-taking even if it's not successful.
Not something like, close the library on Mondays.
You want to make sure that you reward innovation, even if it's just giving people praise publicly.
The easiest way to kill innovation is to punish somebody for an honest mistake.
You don't make mistakes here.
We are a very risk adverse organization and we have to get past that in order to truly take advantage of what the future has to offer.
The next thing I would suggest is you can't depends on old assumptions to run your library.
When I started out in libraries, as a student assistant, I worked in a library that had an excellent collection of materials in Polish.
We had Polish literature and novels and nonfiction that had been translated to Polish.
We had subscriptions to magazines in Polish.
The magazine -- let me try that again.
The neighborhood in which we livedlived, the Polish population had moved out 20 years.
But the algorithm was this was the Polish neighborhood so we have to supply Polish materials.
Nobody from the main library had been there for 20 years.
We needed materials in Spanish for the Puerto Rican population and urban fiction and things about the city because we had a large African-American population, too.
This is the library I used to work in.
This is a photo I took a couple months ago.
The library's been closed for years because it couldn't keep up with what was happening.
It was built on old assumptions that didn't change.
You have to be scanning what's actually going on to adapt to any situation.
So, one of the things I love over the last six months or so in public libraries is how -- a lot of us adopted a pokemon go.
People offer games.
A place for people to share information and lots of libraries jumped on this with both feet.
There have been several examples in my career of places where we've made good adaptations to changing situations.
The shift from dhs to dvd and downloadable content.
I think we're doing better in offering things to a diverse clientele.
I think we have a long way to go in other areas but we are trying to adapt to situations and by constantly scanning the community, constantly scanning the horizon about what's going on, we can continue to adapt and grow and change.
Successful libraries also experiment with new services.
When I worked at oclc, one of my dear colleagues once said -- 
when we were having an argument.
We said, nobody ever died of bad cataloging.
We take ourselves so seriously that we forget that we can try new things, try different things and maybe they won't work but we're not really going to kill anybody or end the whole library thing because it didn't.
We've seen interesting new services or the last few years in libraries.
I think one of the interesting ones I've seen is having social workers and mental health counselors who work in libraries to help the clients in the libraries and also to help staff understand what the people they're working with are dealing within their own lives.
That's an experimental service.
Again, a small library may not be able to take that and they may not have the budget or opportunity to do that.
They could work with their county mental health agency and see what they can do to help get people in the library once in awhile or work with you on your staff day.
When I was working in one library, I was in a senatorial district that was about 60 miles long and about 10 miles wide.
It was really badly Jerry mandered.
So the senator lived at the very far north edge of that district and our library was at the very South so whenever he was going to be in our town, I offered him our meeting room to do public office hours for the public to come in and talk to him about any issues they might have had with state government.
Most of the time, I had 20 minutes or a half-hour alone with the senator.
Allowing him to use that, we had a good opportunity to have quality time with the -- an important member of the state senate.
We opened our drive-thru window at 7:00 in the morning because it's on a busy commuter street and people could drop off their used materials and pick up their holds.
I got to tell you, it hasn't been the most well-used service yet but it's still catching on and we're still trying it out.
So, you can try new things.
Maker space is a really good example of something a lot of libraries are experimenting with.
As the price of 3D printers come down, we can do these things in libraries, see how they work out and work with partnerships and we can make the library more of a player in our communities.
I think successful libraries also do a good job of cross-training.
I strongly believe that everybody who works in the library should be able to do what we expect the public to do.
So, even shelvers, people who are working only in backstage in the tech services area or the circulation area, everyone should be able to help a patron, a user, a member, whatever phrase you use, being able to do things like use the online catalogs.
If the staff has to pretend like they don't know it and take them back to another desk or hand them off to somebody else, it looks like we don't know what we're doing, quite frankly.
If you're big enough and you have the opportunity to do this, you could try this.
They made everybody, on the staff -- I'm talking about everybody from the truck drivers to the shelvers -- take a course on how to be a reader's advisor.
If someone said, you work in a library, you must read all the time.
They can say, I do love to read, I don't get to read at work but here's something new written by James patterson.
Being able to book-talk for 30 seconds or a minute on a book by anybody who works in the library is a way of successfully cross-training.
Again, that's not something everybody can afford to do.
I think it could be a goal.
Successful libraries also practice technology agnosticism.
It doesn't mean you have everything that's out there.
What it does mean is that you --
the best you can do is to stay away of what's available and maybe every now and then, catch a wave.
Whatever you're doing in technology can be used across platforms.
For example.
So, you want to make sure that your website is as useful as possible, whether somebody's looking at it on a smartphone or laptop or pc.
You want a cross-section of downloadable and audio books.
As the public library shifts from a repository of materials to a platform of learning and participationparticipation, its ability to provide all formats is vital.
Our state library here in Ohio has a technology petting zoo.
Staff and community members can try out equipment in a non-commercial setting.
It's a way of, again, showing that the library's up-to-date in what's available out there and we're interested in being part of that transition into different types of technology.
And then finally, I think it's important to let the customers take the lead.
What I mean by that, we have library staff who are -- if we're lucky -- well-connected in the community and have deep roots in the communities and know in communities.
They can't know everybody.
By letting the customers, the members of the library take the lead in patron-directed acquisitions in public libraries, online self-registration, services that we can offer outside the building, a book mobile at a kiosk, at a community fair or county fair, all of these are ways that we can let people have the experience of being in control, which is what they feel like they're getting when they're in Amazon or in ebay and convert that into the feeling they get in the library as well.
Jennifer, were there any questions that came up here that I should take a look at?
>> Jennifer Peterson:  There's some great conversation that's come from choice.
We have some folks that come through academic and serving a small university and how to attract folks either way.
Lots of great partnership ideas, programming partnership ideas.
There were a couple other questions -- you can certainly comment on that, as well.
There was a great question in terms of -- when I hear all of your ideas, I often find myself wondering how I would prioritize and somebody asked a question about whether or not five-year strategic plans are a good plan for incorporating some of your ideas.
That sort of touched on my thoughts of, well, how do you prioritize or how do you build some of this into the culture of the organization through prioritization or planning?
>> George Needham:  Well, I think, strategic plans -- 
whatever the lengths.
Five-years is kissing the envelope on how much planning you can do.
It is a great platform for incorporating some of these ideas.
When we get to the last section in the program and talk about the attitudes, the mindful choices we make, that's where it starts to get into the culture.
The culture of the organization is how all of this stuff gets demonstrated.
It's behavior and the actions you do toward your community.
You can build into your plan how you can improve customer service, let's say.
But I think in order to do that, you've got to know what kind of choices you make that indicate good customer service, that create good customer service for the end-user.
To use the strategic platform and the goals you set for individual years, that's a good place to put a lot of these things and -- as long as you keep referring back to it and you don't just put it on the shelf and forget about it.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Yes, exactly.
I like your thought of it's building it into the ongoing learning of the organizations.
Maybe -- you know, in terms of prioritizing, if it's the  customer service piece, prioritizing that as a working group within a small segment of a time frame not that sort of strategic plan time frame.
>> George Needham:  Exactly.
Yep.
It can come up in your individual goals, as a manager, with your team.
As a team goal.
What can we do to -- let's see if we can identify three new ideas we can try this year.
They don't have to cost any money.
They can be, can be bring anybody in from the state library to do the technology petting zoo?
Can we approach the local university about doing something together that might bring in people from both communities.
You can build these things into more than just a five-year plan.
They can go into very specific goals you set for yourself.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  
Absolutely.
 Excellent.
There was another question, kind of a big one.
We can take some of this offline and add resources.
Someone is looking for suggestions on how to convince people, mainly officials, to help them understand the importance of the library and in this case, open thepublic library where there's no money for libraries.
I know the aspin report is a great resource for working -- 
especially the toolkit -- they do a great job in the report of demonstrating the importance of the library and the community and then some of the toolkit pieces help to make that argument.
George, I don't know if you have favorite resources you recommend as well?
>> George Needham:  One is ala's libraries transform.
It is how libraries can affect communities.
There's a lot of good information.
It's rooted in information and I think that's a very solid way to go.
That's really -- a lot of good information about how to tell the library's story.
How to get people excited and motivated about the library.
The other side of that is the research institute of public libraries.
They've done two [Indiscernible]
so far on how to prove outcomes and impacts.
Their information's available online.
The presentations that were done at both conferences are all available online now.
You've got people who are very much statistically-oriented.
They want the numbers.
You have people who want a good story.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  
Excellent.
Those are great resources to explore and thanks for mentioning them.
There's a great question -- and I have to tell you, whenever we sort of address some of these topics that are more soft-skills, there's always a question around how do you accomplish this if your director's checked out.
[LAUGHTER]
or vice versa, often times, it's how do we do this if the staff is checked out?
Can you talk a little bit about how you've -- someone suggested asking your board or friends to help maybe bring those ideas to the director.
I know you've got great insight so I'd love to hear your thoughts.
>> George Needham:  There was a program done by the Ohio library called sprinting to the finish line.
It was people in the last five years of their career and how do you keep the job exciing until the end?
Sometimes people are burned out and they think, if I can hold out until I hit my retirement age, I don't want to try anything new, I don't want to do anything new.
The suggestion to go through the friends, I would hesitate to go through the board because that starts to get into governance issues.
Using the friends of the library to float ideas with them and to get those -- get the excitement going elsewhere sometimes is what you need to do.
Maybe if you're in a communications area or in a public service area, getting the people who use the library regularly excited about something.
It's really tough.
If the director truly is -- or if the staff truly is burned out to the point where they don't want to try anything new, I'm not going to lie, it's tough to get them kick-started and motivated again.
Sometimes you -- I heard one thing, yeah.
The last library research service.
One of the ways of getting people motivated -- this might be helpful for the place looking to get a library where there's no money for one.
Compare yourself to the community that your local high school football team fights the most.
If you have two communities, one of which is -- their high school football teams play each other year and there's a rivalry, if they look worse, that's one way to get things moving.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  I love that.
Everyone loves a little competition.
>> George Needham:  Exactly.
Let's move on to the step number three, which is that successful libraries manage their message successfully.
One of the things that happens is we think that people know what we do and we make that assumption and we forget that there's new generations.
We forget that we've changed and they've changed and we have to have a good message to convey to people.
You want to convey that message in a way that's meaningful to the individuals.
So, one of the things that I thing we do -- and we don't take enough credit for -- is we can evangelize learning as well as reading.
I think our focus on reading is terrific.
I think we should look at reading as the pathway to learning.
Learning has a professional patina to it.
If people can understand that you can't advance in your career or do well in standardized tests or you may not finish college in four or five years if you don't read.
But the learning aspect of it is what's the important part.
If the reading leads you to learning, which then allows you to do these other things -- 
frankly, nobody else in your communities is really the spokesman for reading and life-long learning.
The schools do it for k through 12.
The colleges do it for their own students.
We, in public libraries, can do it for the whole community.
I think another thing we need to do is emphasis the abundance we offer.
Scarcity is not a good business plan for libraries or anyone else unless you're having a sale that is limit three per customer.
We focus on our shortcomings and what we don't have instead of thinking about the richness of what's here.
I remember a line, life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.
We have a banquet of maters to help expand your horizons, build your career, enjoy your retirement and we should focus on that abundance rather than looking at what we don't have.
It could be great to have a few more dollars for the book budget.
By focusing on the abundance and how much we have to offer the community, we have the opportunity to be seen as a positive role -- take a positive role in the community instead of only always looking like we've got our hand out.
Once we -- I talked earlier about being so totally based in the community.
What you got that you need to have a vision to share with your communities.
A vision is about the community you serve, not about the library.
The Columbus metro library, which is the public library in Columbus, Ohio, their vision is a thriving community where wisdom prevails.
It has nothing to do with the library.
The mission of the Columbus metro library is about the library, about what the library will do in order to try to accomplish and achieve this vision but the vision's about the community.
Where do we want Columbus to be if we do our work really well?
And I think we need to have -- I mean, that's six words, it's six words.
You could put it on the back of your business cards.
It fits on a bumper sticker.
It doesn't have to be a page and a half about how you're going to get there.
In fact, one of the things successful libraries know how do is they know how to edit themselves.
They don't try to explain the library's entire strategic plan and why you need a new branch in hootp erville.
The 2793 rule that you can find in the learner guide is an excellent introduction to focusing on your audience and tailoring your message to them.
You can have multiple messages as long as they don't contradict one another.
And also, while you're considering your message, don't forget that you can learn a heck of a lot more by asking good questions than you can by repeating a prefabricated statement.
So, I'm going to take a little pause here before you go into the fourth area.
Are there questions on this area?
>> Jennifer Peterson:  I think that they were wracked in attention.
[LAUGHTER]
>> George Needham:  I hope that's it and they weren't wracked with pain.
[LAUGHTER]
>> George Needham:  There's folks taken advantage of asking each other questions, too.
I know they're listening, as well.
Successful libraries stay focused.
It goes back to something I started talking about earlier.
The idea that you want to start with the end in mind.
And, what do you want your library to be?
I'm going to suggest a real simple exercise, again, that any library can do because this isn't going to cost you a penny.
Think about this, maybe in a board meeting, a staff meeting, a friends of the library meeting or some other opportunities you have when you're talking with the public.
Think about a headline, a tweet, the little crawl at the bottom of the cnn screen.
If your library does what it wants to do, how would it be described in a tweet or in a headline or in a crawl in just a few words?
How would you describe it?
Maybe it's hooterville public library wins first award.
The source for life-long learning.
Hooterville wins 10 best organi organizations list.
How do you work backwards from there to get to that point?
What do you need to do six months from now?
What do you need to have accomplished a year from now?
Two years from now in order to get to that in instead of forecasting, you're backcasting.
You're thinking backward to what you need to do.
You start with that end in mind, which I believe is a Steven rule.
It's easier to determine the road you need to get there.
To stay focused, you have to be disciplined.
And you may recognize this picture.
I stressed earlier that successful libraries take risks.
The first time I used this picture, the cat's taking a risk walking in front of the German shepherds but the dogs are showing incredible discipline.
Successful libraries avoid mission dilution.
Trying to be all things to all people.
Being really mediocre is not a recipe for success or long-term viability.
Jack welch had a rule, if we can't be number one or number two, we're going to get out of that industry.
So, that's very simplified.
Very simplistic.
It gave them a focus at general electric.
We have limited resources.
I don't care if you're Boston public or Harvard or the university of Michigan.
Stanford, New York public library, you have limited resources and so what you need to do is think about your community and think, are there any services that we're offering that are duplicated or similar to services offered by other agencies in the community?
Is there any reason why you would be offering those?
With the limited resources we have, does it make sense for us to do the same thing that somebody else in the community is doing?
There may be odd instances where that's true.
For the most part, I think it's pretty unlikely.
And when we start to try to meet every community wish, dream, whim, hope, then what we do is we spread ourselves so thin that we can't focus on the things that we really need to do and do well.
So, one of the things I'm going to mention Columbus metro again.
They have three basic strategic initiatives.
That is, where they put their money and where they put their time.
The first one is to make sure that the kids in the district, preschool kids, are entering kindergarten ready to learn.
They've been focusing a lot on preschoolers -- excuse me.
I'm very sorry.
They're focusing on preschoolers in at-risk homes to help them learn their colors, their numbers, their letters so they can be ready to read and they have a measurement of what percentage of kids in their district pass the kindergarten readiness test.
The next is to work with teens.
Whatever they're going to do for the next stage of their life and improving the economy.
They put their money where their mouth is and work in those areas and make it clear to the community that's what they're working on.
It doesn't mean you can't find the best-seller there and there aren't programs there.
The thrust of the library is those three areas.
Just because the public would scream out loud because something gets taken away, that does happen.
I miss certain things in the world.
But I realize that there's only so many dollars to go around and we just have to make choices.
The community that offers us an unlimited budget can have whatever they want.
I don't think there's a lot of communities that are offering us that unfortunately.
One of the ways we can avoid dilution and focus on the things we need to do is as my former colleague at oclc used to say, that we leave the twiddly bits alone.
Karen calHOON did research on when records were downloaded from oclc, what kind of changes were made between the master record and what got loaded into the catalog?
The vast majority of changes had nothing to do with findbility.
They didn't change the title or anything like that.
They were changing a semicolon to a comma.
Putting an extra space in somewhere.
What little tiny things that don't affect the end-user whatsoever.
So, if we focus on that knowledge rather than information, if we focus on the long-term learning in our communities, then we're going to be more successful because learning is something that doesn't go away.
Information has become a commodity.
You can't swing a baseball bat without hitting information these days.
It is everywhere.
What we need to do is focus on that -- that building, creating new knowledge, helping people learn and develop their own knowledge and move forward with their own lives.
We also need to eliminate frustrating policies.
[LAUGHTER]
outdated limitations, outdated rules and regulations.
Hours that are set for the convenience of the staff and not the users.
Couple of suggestions -- I know a library who had their Mickey Mouse rule contest.
If they found a rule that was the most Mickey Mouse and could suggest a way of getting rid of the rule won a Mickey Mouse watch.
The Halifax public library in Canada has a form called, today, I bent a rule.
If you helped a patron that may not have been within the letter of the law, what you did and why you did it.
Not for disciplinary reasons, but so you could get rid of bad rules.
The library here in Ohio, for a long time, had a policy where if you had to say no to one of your clients, you wrote it up and you said, why you said no.
The idea was that then the staff and administration would look at these things and say, is there some way we could have said yes here?
Is there a rule we could change?
Is there a policy we could change in order to say yes?
So, with that, are there questions here?
>> Jennifer Peterson:  People are excited.
You're definitely inspiring folks.
Let's see.
I'm trying to think.
I didn't see any other questions come through.
There was a question about what the 2793 rule is and, as George mentioned, it's talked about in the learner guide.
The goal of the exercise requires you to take persuasive points -- helps you come up with the elevator speech in 27 words within a time frame of nine seconds that includes no more than three points and it's a fascinating exercise.
We've been using it a lot within our team and come up with many different ways to think about the audience you're talking to, as well as the topic of what you're trying to put across.
So, I encourage people to explore that further.
And then, I just -- I've been posting other links in there.
I encourage folks, if you have other questions you want to ask, be sure to ask those before we get to the top of the hour.
I think you can keep going, George.
>> George Needham:  Okay.
A lot of this comes down to making thoughtful, mindful choices.
I'm going to give you -- oh, I don't know -- seven or eight here that I think are really important.
This has nothing to do with money.
This has everything to do with attitude.
How do we make decisions and how we avoid knee-jerk reactions to new ideas.
Here are choices we can make mindfully.
The first is the most difficult because frequently, we have long-term staff.
We have people who stick around a long time.
As you're hiring people, you want to be very careful about who you're adding to your staff.
It is better to leave a position open than to fill it with the wrong person.
You hire for attitude and train for skills.
These choices get back to what the attitude is.
So, you want to choose optimism.
You want to work with people who have a can-do attitude and believe there is a reason for doing this work and don't feel like Eeyore.
Who create an excitement within your work environment about what you're doing.
You want to -- optimism is a choice.
You can decide that you're going to look at the positive side of these things and you're going to work towards making them move forward.
And the reason I show this picture on here is because I don't think there's anything more optimistic that someone who plants a tree without delusions that they're going to be the ones that will be shaded by it.
You're building things for another generation, the the future.
The next choice want to make is to choose civility.
The only thing I could think about in the campaign was a Canadian flag.
[LAUGHTER]
you want to have people who respect one another, who are willing to work together in a positive manner, towards a common goal, that are working as a team -- I'll mention that again in a moment.
Doing it in a way that respects one another, that is friendly with one another and have a laugh with one another and don't take themselves too seriously.
You want to choose generosity.
Not just financial or fiscal generosity, but generosity of spirit.
We play gotch-ya.
Someone makes a mistake and we're on it.
We're nasty on our Listserv and things like that.
Generosity of spirit will get us much further along than any kind of snarkyness will.
You might get that little free zone of joy when you can get somebody in a gotch-ya.
But it doesn't do as good as building somebody.
If your rules are so ridged that you can't account for a kid who's lost a book or a teacher who needs one more thing in order to finish a lesson or a home schooler who needs a little more time on some materials to finish the unit with their kids, then you're feeding back into the old stereotype of librarians as being rules-based and ridged.
I think we can use as much flexibility as we can in our field and we need people who are working in libraries who understand that, who can use good judgment and moving the library forward and being cooperative with the communities.
It requires us to back one another up.
It requires us to think of each other as teammates instead of being a lot of individuals working individualistically.
Even Johnny depp couldn't sell a lone ranger movie anymore.
We need to choose laughter.
If you're not having a good time, you're missing the point.
You need to break up the tension with a laugh once in awhile.
We're not doing brain surgery here.
What we're doing is creating a better community for everybody and generally, you don't do that through creating more tension.
We want to create relationships over transactions.
Transactions are so [Indiscernible].
Be part of people's workflow.
Accomplish their missions.
That requires forming a relationship.
Yes, we need to do the transactions and move the stuff in and out and answer the reference questions.
We need to build relationships with the individuals in the community and the community itself.
you need to be a group that's willing to act.
There are five crows sitting on the fence and three decide to leave.
How many are left?
Five.
Three decided but they haven't done anything yet.
You want to make something happen with the choices you're making and thus move your library forward.
With that, I'm going to wrap up my formal remarks.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  We did laugh out loud with the crows.
[LAUGHTER]
I think that's the story for a lot of us and if not, you know, at least in some part of our life, for sure.
[LAUGHTER]
oh, dear.
There was an interesting question, really, to the full group, around libraries supporting self-publishing and I don't know if you've had that experience in any of your libraries?
Has that been a success?
>> George Needham:  We haven't done it yet but we want to make sure that anybody that does self-publish, that they get collected in our catalog and we make them visible.
We have a book rack, which I can see from my office, of materials written by local authors.
We have been known to download, print and bind local materials.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  We are at the top of the hour and if folks have other questions, George, I know you shared your contact on the next slide.
>> George Needham:  Which I will advance right now.
So, if you need to get ahold of me, you can.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Feel free to reach out.
>> George Needham:  If anybody wants to contact me directly, I'm more than happy to talk to you and thank you very much for being part of this presentation and thank you, again, to Jennifer and Sharon and Kendra for your support.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  
Absolutely.
And thanks, George, for all that you've done and all that you're doing for your communities and all those you reach around the country and thank you, all, for joining us.
It was great having an active chat and thank you to our captioner, as well.
Everyone, have an excellent rest of your day.