It will be the best of times and the worst of times

At the end of the year, it's traditional to look back at the highlights and low points of the last 12 months. This year, I can't help but reflect on all the changes that will be coming in 2010, and there will be plenty in my library system.

Already, an unprecedented City budget crisis has made it necessary to furlough most employees 3.5 hours every other week. Because this has stretched our already thin staffing to the breaking point, we have also, as of yesterday, cut back on Friday hours at all our branches - from open hours of 10 am - 6 pm to 1:30 pm to 5:30 pm.

Our staff is about to get much smaller. Due to the passing of a City early retirement incentive package that is hoped to save the City money by encouraging retirements, we will most likely lose about 20% of our library workforce in the next few months. All of these folks are of course experienced and most are in frontline and/or crucial managerial or administrative positions. It'll hurt to lose them.

We'll survive - and we may even thrive - but it will mean a lot of change and some tough decisions. What exactly those changes will be is probably being hashed out even now in the highest levels of the library's administration. Input has been encouraged by our City Librarian Martin Gomez, but as yet no one knows who exactly is doing the decision-making, what the decisions will be, and when they will be made.

All that is too scary and uncertain for me to dwell on right now so I think I'll focus on the positive, and there is plenty of fodder for me even in these dark times. Mr. Gomez gave a presentation to Senior Librarians and other staff members last Wednesday, during which he made some extremely encouraging remarks.

The first had to do with two items he felt we should focus on in order to strengthen LAPL's performance: staff development/training and performance measures/evaluation. Yes! These are two issues that are dear to my heart (here's my lament on so many training needs/so little time and one of many posts on the beauty of outcome measures) and to which our library system has not paid much attention. Staff development and training almost disappeared the moment the budget got bad, and we have yet to adopt a system-wide method of measuring performance or outcomes. According to Mr. Gomez, a staff that is trying to do a topnotch job with fewer resources needs more and better training, not less. And in a time when we might be cutting back or streamlining services, we'd better be darn sure the services we do offer are performing effectively.

I was also extremely glad to hear Mr. Gomez announce that he feels we should focus on 3 main goals rather than the 8 or so in our strategic plan, which is luckily expiring in 2010 - see the outcome measures post I mentioned above for some comments on that. Those goals are:
Invest in reading readiness
Help students succeed
Bring the benefits of technology to all
This is balm to my children's librarian's heart, let me tell you! We're already doing much in these areas, and we can do much more with every level and part of our library (not just the Children's Services department) working toward these goals.

So - we may have a much smaller staff in 2010 and we may have to undergo some possibly painful reorganizing and cutting, but I sincerely believe that the result will be a more effective and efficient organization with its resources and energy firmly focused on some very crucial goals. I'm so happy I'll be a part of it - in whatever capacity I end up serving after all the reorganizing shakes out!

There's something to be said for Fearless Leaders

I'm so excited! In two weeks, the Los Angeles Public Library will have a new City Librarian, almost a year after the retirement of Fontayne Holmes. All I know about Martin Gomez are the bits and pieces I've read in articles and online, but I have very high hopes.

First of all, Mr. Gomez is a big supporter of the library out-of-school-time (OST) movement, which he helped to develop as president and CEO of the Urban Libraries Council. Partnering with other neighborhood youth agencies to offer services and programs based on sound research about what kids need and the best way to meet those needs - it just makes so much sense. And Mr. Gomez's obvious interest in youth services can only mean good things for LAPL.

Mr. Gomez also seems, to judge from an interview that ran in the December 2006 American Libraries, to be a proponent of outcomes-based planning and measuring. LAPL, like many library systems, currently measures the effectiveness of its programs and services mainly by output - how many kids sign up for the Summer Reading Club, for example - rather than outcome - figuring out the goal or outcome to be achieved and then figuring out if that outcome was achieved. As Mr. Gomez says in the AL interview, "We also need to take on the rigor of acountability and not be afraid of where that might lead us. Funding requires accountability. you may have programs in place, but the challenge is to benchmark your outcomes." We need to plan our programs more effectively, targeting specific outcomes based on our community's needs, and then be rigorous about collecting data about our programs. If we do this with thought and care, our community will benefit - and our funding agencies and donors will be impressed.

I'm also hoping for a wee bit of innovation. We are one of the biggest library systems in the United States, but we are far from being on the forefront of innovation. Early adaptors we are most emphatically not, and (like a huge and unwieldy ship), we don't change our course easily or quickly. What we need is a strong leader who can set us on a course toward the future and encourage us to try out new technologies and ideas. Right now we are cautious to the point of outright fear, and it makes us look bad. We shouldn't have to pitch, over and over with absolutely no luck so far, the not-particularly-outrageous idea of an internal wiki for the children's librarians in our farflung 71 branches. This is 2009, for pete's sake. Let's embrace technology that helps us do our jobs better, not push it away out of ignorance.

What does Mr. Gomez say in the interview about innovation? "Maybe there are things we can let go of so we can embrace new needs. In some ways, our traditions encumber us. We need to balance tradition with innovation." Yeah, that's a little scary - but it's also rather thrilling because our need to change and grow is so great.

There are many ways Mr. Gomez could take our wonderful library system and make it truly great. Communication would be my own number one priority - if our powerful administration could learn to feel comfortable with sharing the decision-making (or at least the rationale behind the decision-making) with the rest of us and and with inviting real input from the truly talented, smart, and creative staff members who don't happen to inhabit the upper echelons of our organizational chart, LAPL would be a much stronger institution.

A library system that look out at trail-blazers in the field to observe what other libraries are doing and then adopted and adapted the best practices for our own use would be a wonderful thing, and I get the feeling that Mr. Gomez is aware that a whole amazing world of libraries exists outside of LAPL. We are so big - and so good at many things - that many of our adminstrative folks seem to forget that books, articles, conference programs, and blog posts are regularly promoting new ideas about everything from library management to strategic planning to early literacy to AV formats. I comb professional literature and the internet voraciously and read up on everything I can - and sometimes I feel that LAPL lives in a separate, alternate universe from the rest of our profession. It would be nice to utter the phrase "library 2.0 for kids" and not have folks blink at me with incomprehension or alarm.

Mr. Gomez, I suspect that LAPL and Mayor Villaraigosa did a truly wonderful thing when they hired you. It's going to be hard, sweaty work shaking up this venerable, stodgy institution - but it will be worth it. We have three huge assets - our excellent library buildings (Central and the branches alike), our strong and diverse materials collection, and (most of all) some of the best librarians you'll ever find anywhere. Harness these assets, treat them with the respect and honor they deserve, and there is no limit to the greatness the Los Angeles Public Library can achieve.