Access the full set of podcasts and transcripts here: http://www.imls.gov/resources/podcasts_Jun09.shtm
Summary of Podcasts
by Jennifer Peterson, WebJunction Community Manager
Top partnerships mentioned throughout:
- secretary of Cultural Resources
- Department of Commerce
- Job Link Career Centers
- Community Colleges
- Department of Labor
- Small Business Administration
- schools and the academic and special libraries
- Department of Education
- state police
- health care
- community colleges
- Private sector, corporations, companies
- Department of Labor and Economic Growth
- Work Source (state employment security department)
- Hospitals
- Schools
- State parks service (promoting parks)
- Museums (free passes from library)
Mary Boone, State Librarian of
Transcript: http://www.imls.gov/resources/transcripts/Boone.pdf
- We came up with the idea, in fact, our secretary of Cultural Resources, Linda Carlisle, came on the job in January after the election of our governor, Beverly Perdue, and Secretary Carlisle said even though we are cutting back on our budgets right now at the state level, this is too important for us not to address.
- North Carolina Department of Commerce, we put together a small funding package that enabled us to provide nine workshops across
- I think what really created the most success for this program was then we went to our colleagues at the job link career centers. one-day workshops…we brought together not only public librarians but also people from the local job link center of the local employment security commission office… after lunch we had a panel at which these people whose job it is to help people find jobs, talked about what they do, where they are located.
- We also included community colleges in this because we find many people who become unemployed often will go back for additional job training and there are some special programs at community colleges around our state.
- What happened after that is what I find particularly interesting. All across the state we have stories now of local public libraries partnering with their 4 local job link centers or their local employment security commissions… a partnership that I think will last long after this immediate crisis is over.
- Another important partner in this program that I want to make sure to mention is NC LIVE. NC LIVE is consortium of electronic resources that is available in our state to all public and academic libraries…available to anyone with a library card in North Carolina is the learning express library, which is wonderful for helping people do practice tests and tutorials for taking tests that they may need to pass in order to enter a new profession.
- We fully realize that as long as NC LIVE is there their resource is there. But if you don’t have good broadband you can’t use them all. We have videos from PBS, for example, on our NC LIVE and if you don’t have good broadband you can’t look at a PBS video. A teacher can’t show a PBS video in her school, for example. We are very, very interested in the broadband stimulus package.
- We find that people coming in looking for jobs are also looking for skills. They need to know how to use the computer.
- We have created a model that not only is available to other states but that we will use again because we want to do additional training programs like this that will help with things like small businesses, development, and personal finance development, this kind of thing. We want to do more training programs.
- We have heard from several states all over the country as far west as
Bernard Margolis, State Librarian of
Transcript: http://www.imls.gov/resources/transcripts/Margolis.pdf
- material from the Small Business Administration, from economic development corporations, from think tanks, anything from the Federal Government, Department of Commerce
- [emphasis on] how libraries use the information base, the knowledge industry support to help people who are envisioning new businesses and as a result of those businesses creating new jobs…critical aspect of what libraries are doing in New York State is helping create new businesses, helping people with business plans, helping people understand the laws involved in creating business enterprises, what it takes to create a payroll and put people on the payroll, what insurance you have to get, what services do you have to engage and I think that’s a very critical and important role that libraries throughout the state and small towns and large cities are doing to help respond to the economic crisis.
- Department of Labor
- We also are working on some of the traditional areas around literacy not only English language skills, but GED exam preparation work both with adult literacy and family literacy as well.
- How to write a resume, how to fill out an application, how to use today’s Internet resources to apply for work which is necessary for even the lowest paying jobs today.
- All libraries have Internet access but in some places it needs to be beefed up. It needs to be much more robust and we are working on several programs to increase broadband capacities in that way.
- The libraries in
Sheryl Mase, Library of
Transcript: http://www.imls.gov/resources/transcripts/Mase.pdf
- Huge hit because of the auto industry, as you know, and manufacturing because that has been the primary source of economic stability in
- Learning express library through
- Broadband summit with not just libraries: schools and the Department of Education at the table… state police and the health care, community colleges
- Department of Labor and Economic Growth has asked through me to assist them in sending out a DVD (and to stream) about how to file for unemployment.
- Many libraries have career centers. They have small business support centers, but need more collaboration to get the word out
- frontline staff dealing with the stress, depression and frustration of the public
- Private sector, corporations, companies that are willing to support our programs: one children’s book program called Michigan Reads. It is a great early literacy program that we send out to all the libraries and the schools and Head Start programs. We send them a kit. We choose a book and then we write a guide to go with that that has all kinds of early childhood literacy program ideas and concepts and we mail it out to all of them and our sponsor is retail store. Then we have another program that is called the
- We also have a Michigan Notable Books program that we get a lot of private support for and in Michigan we have a large committee that selects 20 books every year that are either about Michigan or by Michigan authors and then we get the authors to tour around the state and we have a lovely program, again, with the sponsorship of the private industry. That has a very nice partnership because it highlights what the public library offers but not just the public library but what the schools and the academic and special libraries have to offer and sort of gets people aware of the resources that are available.
Jan Walsh, State Librarian of Washington, and Randall Simmons, Program Manager for Library Development in
Transcript: http://www.imls.gov/resources/transcripts/Walsh-Simmons.pdf
- All library dev funds are LSTA, no state funds
- Hard Times in
- Looked at libraries statistics of June 2008 to November 2008. That was the most recent six-month period.
- Surveyed public libraries: http://www.secstate.wa.gov/office/osos_news.aspx?i=7mGFpzDxwXmjyN4wEGiiVw%3d%3d
- Attendance was up 7.5 percent. Circulation was up 11.22 percent. Virtual visits such as the visits to a library page up 20.21 percent. Reference transactions were up 4.41 percent. Percent of time, public, Internet, computers are in use up 9.74 percent and the number of public Internet computer users up 13.77 percent.
- Work Source (state employment security department)
- staff is just overwhelmed with the amount of work so for training needs they need to come to us. It either has to come to us online that we have been doing a lot of at the state library doing online training or regional trainings. We don’t have the money to send people to one point in the state so we have been working on that too.
- Created resources for library users http://www.secstate.wa.gov/library/libraries/projects/hardtimeslibraryusers.aspx
- for library staff: http://www.secstate.wa.gov/library/libraries/projects/HardTimesLibraryStaff.aspx
- We also put a page out on WebJunction, http://wa.webjunction.org/691 which is an OCLC (
- Helping libraries track the stimulus money and how they can get a hold of it. Specifically, the broadband funding -- we have been blogging that like crazy: http://blogs.secstate.wa.gov/library/
- Helpful for us to put out a number of press releases and just talking about the increased use, the economic downturn, the financial struggles that libraries are having right now…come out from our communications office and the Office of Secretary of State and they have been picked up locally by so many newspapers.
- We have a grant cycle which will be unrolling and is called the Hard Times Grant Cycle. We have $400,000 in LSTA money. We wanted to do some fairly big grants not small mini grants. So we are offering up to $50,000. So, we could probably fund eight or so of those, but libraries are welcome to tell us how they could use the money to meet that phenomenon of the impact of people coming in because of the recession.
- State budget probably 20 percent cut.
- The most immediate thing that we have done is to put together a broadband stimulus funding response task force.
- Every hospital, school, and library should be fiberized, that there wasn’t enough money to do all the residents in the
Kendall Wiggin, State Librarian of
Transcript: http://www.imls.gov/resources/transcripts/Wiggin.pdf
- Turning to their libraries both as a source of entertainment, programming, free inexpensive programming. (cancelling magazine subscriptions, stretching dollar with cookbooks,
- In our state, there are a lot of insurance and banking jobs that people are losing after 30 years in the business, haven’t written a resume in a long time. How do you write a resume? What are some of the resources that are out there?
- WebJunction: There are things there for libraries and coping in hard times and tough times from a perspective of managing their library, doing with fewer resources, but also how do you help those people that are coming into the library.
[I thought this was a great description of WJ!]
WebJunction is a resource that was started several years ago with a special funding from the Gates Foundation now offered through OCLC (
- Department of Labor: offered seminars. They had a lot of resources that the library could tap into. Many of the libraries have brought those resources to the library. We have been developing some training for library staff in working with the Department of Labor so they know more about what those resources are, who to contact, and that has proven I think very valuable to libraries that just all of a sudden have all these people in looking for job information and don’t really know where to turn.
- Many of our online databases have proven helpful.
- People are looking to develop a new career. They want to go back to school. How do you get some scholarship money? You have been working and not saving up for college because you didn’t think you were going to college. What are some of the opportunities? How do you apply to go to college?
- People are looking to create new jobs for themselves. Maybe they are going to become a consultant. They have worked in the banking industry for years. Maybe they can become a consultant. I think everybody thinks they are going to become a consultant at some point in their lives. Well, how do you do that? How do you start a small business? It’s really a small business.
- Some are setting up their little office in the library. Sometimes they are doing recruiting at the library. All kinds of activities are going on that the library may not have envisioned when they were first developing their services.
- Parks in our state…developed some nice programs with libraries and making the public more aware of the state parks that they have in their own state.
- Our governor has been promoting ‘stay-cations.’ Stay at home and do all the wonderful things that are available in
- Our state budget was cut 5 percent at the beginning of the fiscal year. The governor’s budget looked like we might be losing some of our service centers. Those libraries that are served by our service centers really came forward and built a great case to legislators for the need for that kind of service and so far have been restored in their budget.
- We have done some survey work with our communities: http://ct.webjunction.org/ct/stats/articles/content/42001913
- The state library itself is looking at an early retirement program, which may cause us to lose a lot of employees. Unfortunately, in our library development area we don’t see as many but what’s going to be happening throughout the state government in our state is a loss of lot of institutional memory, a lot of people who knew where to go to get information so we are going to have to figure that out, I think, as we move forward in that area.
- Children’s programming again is very popular. I think we will probably see a large increase in summer reading programs this year, attendance of programs.
- Communities have invested a lot in
- One of the problems we are having in a lot of our buildings is just not enough computer terminals and not enough space to put those computer terminals.
- We are worried about having enough Internet access so we are looking forward to at least, at the state level, applying for some of the broadband stimulus funding.
- Actually, in
- I think one of the things we need to do is make our governors more aware that libraries are filling this role and legislators as well because I think there is a perception that you have the Department of Labor. They take care of that. Libraries are doing their thing and don’t realize that while –in our state we have a lot of one stops and where people go to the Department of Labor. We are seeing a lot of people have not been unemployed for a long, long time are out looking for job in maybe 20 years. There is some stigma to going to a job center. They just don’t see themselves doing that and then they really don’t know where to begin. They are more comfortable often going to the library first.
- Statewide database licensing. We have been trying to point out that some of our licenses are there for business resources for other kinds of material that may be able to help people that are looking for jobs.
- The governor wanted to cancel all subscriptions in state governments. So, while we have online databases that have access to these so we have been promoting with state agencies to say well you had to cancel your subscription but you can use Icon, which is our statewide database program.
- And not overselling libraries. That is another issue I think. While libraries are doing yeoman’s work, we can’t put more expectations on them than they can handle. I think we have to be realistic. Sometimes somebody will have a great idea, a legislator, and we have to advise them. Well, without more resources the library really can’t do that. It is a balancing act. We want libraries to be busy and well used. Unfortunately right now funding isn’t following that.
