Big Ideas

At a meeting yesterday, in addition to the suggestion to remember what excites us about our jobs, we were asked to ponder what about the library we would change or create if we had the chance (meaning the time, the money, the permission, whatever it would take).

I'm sure most of us instantly thought, "Hire more librarians! Go back to 6 and 7 day service! More staff development!" And definitely, we want and need all those things - and will get at least some of them if Measure L passes.

More intriguing is to imagine not just improving what we already have or wrenching our libraries back to the level of service we provided before all the 2010 cuts, but rather doing things differently than we've done them before.

In our system, we have a Youth Services coordinating office (consisting of a skeleton staff of one Acting Principal Librarian - moi, one Librarian III, one Library Assistant, and one clerk-typist), a Children's Literature Room in our Central Library (one Senior Librarian, one LIII, and three Children's Librarians, plus support staff), a Teen'Scape room at Central (one Senior Librarian, one LIII, two Teen Librarians, plus support staff), and 72 branches (one Senior Librarian, one Children's Librarian, one Teen Librarian, plus support staff and in some cases an Adult Librarian).

With such bare-bones staff, outreach is very difficult. Children's and Teen Librarians are finding it very hard to visit any of their local schools, preschools, early childhood centers, and youth organizations, let alone most or all of them. And yet these visits are essential if we are to reach out to our communities and especially to those who don't use our libraries.

Even if we receive additional funding and are able to increase our staff and service hours to their pre-2010 levels, outreach will remain difficult for librarians in branches. So much of their time must be spent simply making sure the information desk is staffed - and then there is programming, collection development, and so much else to consider. And let's face it, not every Children's and Teen Librarian is necessarily great at outreach. We all have our different strengths, after all.

So - I would love to see an Outreach office or department at our library. It might be totally a totally separate department with its own staff, overseeing outreach for all levels and all parts of the Library and the City, or it might be part of the Youth Services office, concentrating on outreach to youth ages 0 to 19 and their families, teachers, and caregivers, as well as the organizations that work with youth.

If a part of Youth Services (which I'd prefer, control freak that I am), a Senior Librarian would coordinate and supervise a staff of 3 (or 4? or more?) librarians - well-trained professionals with an enthusiasm for getting out into the community, a gift of persuasion and communication, and preferably Spanish-language skills - whose mission it would be to visit all those preschools, daycare centers, teen and family homeless shelters, WIC agencies, Head Starts, centers for teen mothers, Boys and Girls Clubs, and all the rest of the organizations that branch staff don't have time to visit.

And these Outreach Librarians would offer storytimes and early literacy workshops and information literacy workshops, and they would offer presentations on all the services and resources the library has to offer, both at branches and online. They would be the ambassadors of our library, bringing essential services directly to the community, but also luring the community to the library.

It would be SO AWESOME!

No, it's not a new idea - plenty of library systems have this kind of outreach department. But we don't. And we need it desperately, because Los Angeles is one huge and needy city.

So that's my Big Idea for LAPL. With some luck and hard work, it might even become a reality some day soonish.