WebJunction

Thanks to her commitment to the technology planning process, Perry (OK) Carnegie Library director Danielle Shreve joined WebJunction staff members in a pre-conference session on Technology Planning at the Internet Library Conference in Monterey, CA, in October.  Her skill and enthusiasm translated wonderfully well into our conversation with her for this Library of the Month article.  Read on...

Joan Hubble, Perry Middle School Librarian (l), and Danielle Shreve, Perry Carnegie Library Director (r), help 5th grader Kristina with a special project, while Brayden practices his computer skills.   Photograph by Dawn Pennington.

The Perry (OK) Carnegie Library serves a population of about 11,000 in Noble County, Oklahoma, 60 miles north of Oklahoma City.  Set amid cattle ranches and wheat fields, the town's big business is Charles Machine Works, the world headquarters and manufacturing center for Ditch Witch trenchers.  The library started small, as a reading room in the upper story of a building on the town square; it became a public library in 1906.  The city of Perry obtained a grant of $10,000 from Andrew Carnegie to build the current Perry Carnegie Library, which was completed in 1909.  (Read the whole story on the library Web site.) 

Technology hit the library in a big way in 1998 when, as library director Danielle Shreve puts it, "we went from no tech at all to a whole lot of tech--in a very short time!"   The two Gates-granted computers initiated a demand for access that has led the library to expand to eleven public machines, ten of them with high-speed Internet access. 

Library customers pause while working on the public computers.   With Perry Carnegie Library adjacent to Interstate 35, travelers frequently visit to use the free Internet access.   Photograph by Danielle Shreve.

When Danielle, a former kindergarten librarian, arrived on the scene in 2000, one of the items on her desk was a notice that "something or other having to do with e-rate" was due.  She says, "I had to do whatever it was immediately to continue to receive the funding."  She muddled through that first round of e-rate forms, but the experience showed her that she needed to take technology planning more seriously.  Working with the library's previous plans (and WebJunction's Tech Planning section) made a difference, but things really started to make sense when she discovered Tech Atlas. 

"When you look at a 100-page tech plan from others, it can be overwhelming.  But when you start answering the specific questions on TechAtlas, you learn as you go."  She discovered that the tool enabled her to run surveys on the library's equipment (including all the little details, like what RAM is).  "I learned so much just by doing the survey itself.  For each component, the questions help you figure out what you don’t know and then take time to find out what it is."  Danielle was fortunate enough to have a technology consultant who really helped fill in the gaps in her knowledge.  Because of the structured TechAtlas model, when she ran into problems she could find people with answers and inform herself a bit at a time.

Assessing skills has become a key part of the planning process, and Danielle has found TechAtlas to be a useful tool for this as well.  "Since technology is now so much a part of everyone's job, you just cannot ignore it."  She's found the needs assessment component of TechAtlas to be nonthreatening and friendly: "And once you receive the results back-- once you know what skills staff has--you can assign tasks or training accordingly."

To improve the planning process, Danielle has assembled a technology team for the library.  Following advice she found in TechAtlas, Danielle recruited a board member, two frontline staffers (one adult and one children's librarian), a retired school administrator who had written the public school’s technology plan, an involved volunteer, and the library's technology consultant.  The team meets quarterly and keeps an ongoing agenda which includes not only updates to the technology plan but also decisions about new technology implementations, policies, and grant opportunities.  The team gives Danielle assurance that she's not acting on her own: “Just one person cannot make all the decisions on something so huge!”

With a plan in place, it's now much easier for the team to manage changes and new projects as they emerge.  "It's a living plan that we can continually evaluate and update."  For example, Danielle had added "we need wireless" as a tech plan item.  The tech team met and added a new project to develop a plan and timeline.  Not long after that, Danielle was at a disaster planning workshop put on by the National Library of Medicine (PubMed). While there she learned about grants for library equipment--including wireless equipment.  As she puts it, "I’m not that good at looking for grants, but when they said 'with very little effort, you can get some nice equipment,' I knew I needed to develop a program of which wifi was a part."  Because of the tech planning process, Danielle and her whole team were ready to take advantage of the opportunity: they created a program called “The On-Ramp to Better Health,” in which the library will install wifi, beam Internet access across the street to the local senior citizens center, and then teach seniors how to use computers as a way to access reliable health info.

Danielle credits TechAtlas with giving her the tools and structure to keep on top of her tech game.  "Unless you’re doing tech all the time, it’s hard to stop and think about your goals and how long they are going to take.  TechAtlas did all that for me."

During these times of technology change, it's easy enough to be defensive.  But that's not Danielle's approach.  During a session on Google Book Search at the Internet Librarian Conference, Danielle was impressed by one participant who said "We really need to focus on the positives--identify the negatives but don't stop there."

Danielle took inspiration from that exchange: "I try to be a good positive leader.  Digitization is a very positive move that libraries are going forward with."  Both Andrew Carnegie and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have transformed the library world--and that's a source of inspiration to Danielle to keep moving forward into the ever-changing future.

And Danielle is inspired as well by the tools that are becoming available to library staff: "I love WebJunction and TechAtlas!  They are heroes for the library!"

You can contact Danielle Shreve at (580) 336-4721 or by email at drshreve@perry.lib.ok.us.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.