So, farewell, so long,  it’s been great.

Our library is 3300 square feet. We serve a population base of nearly 7,000 in the town and about 1/3rd of 30,000 people in Sturgeon County. We are desperate for more space, but with funding issues and delays in building by about 2 – 4 years, we are looking at remaining in this space for another 2 – 5 years. That’s a little hard to swallow, but we must.

How do we handle it? To start, we look at what we can do make the space more appealing and more meaningful. Not just to the staff here but to our patrons. We plan to reorganize the physical space to make it more family friendly and to better organize the collections.

Our biggest challenge that we are facing however, is that our shelves are overflowing with books. It seems wrong somehow to say that we have too many books, but right now we do have too many books. So we cull. We weed. We have become ruthless in some areas, just so that we have room to move around and our patrons will have some level of comfort while visiting.

Many librarians have fears about culling: What if I’m removing the only copy in existence? As soon as I remove this, someone is going to ask for it! etc. True, we do ask these questions. But if the bottom line is that we can only move sideways in the library and it’s going to be this way for sometime, then it becomes easier to make those decisions.

And, in some ways, it can be somewhat liberating! As a very smart librarian said to me: Why have 70% circulation when you can have 100% circulation by removing those items that are not moving off the shelves? I tell you, that question helped me find my resolve. It’s so much easier to tell the staff, yes delete it! I tell you, it feels good in so many ways. The staff and volunteers who shelve don’t have to fight to find a place for a book; patrons can actually find what they are looking for.

One final bonus: we have awesome book sales! So at the very least, while we are removing something, we are generating some much needed revenue back in to the library.

Every two months, we are sent a variety of catalogues with book titles that we can order from. We can also order online, which I do but I also like to see the hard copy as I search.

We have hundreds of choices and sometimes it’s quite challenging to know what to order. It’s fun, but it’s also a gamble at times. We do belong to a regional library system and we share our resources with dozens of libraries, so we don’t have to purchase everything, but our patrons do expect us to have certain books.

So every couple of months, we do the “yes/no” thing. Thankfully, we can say yes to many of the popular books and yes to the occasional obscure title, but sometimes I just have to be tough and say no.

A few years ago, when I first started here I conducted a patron interest survey. It really helped me to prioritize my purchases based on the needs of the community. I highly recommend this as a way to help determine purchases. There are many helpful resources online.

1. Have some fun activities planned throughout the year: a bowling or mini golf party; potluck dinners; an afternoon craft session.
2. Involve your staff in fund raising activities. We have sold raffle tickets for gingerbread houses that the staff made; we had Brian Lehman spend the day evaluating antiques. Many of our staff quilt so a few of us formed a quilting group geared towards raising money for the library
3. Don’t take your self too seriously. Yes, you do have to take your responsibilities seriously and carry out your duties efficiently and effectively but take time to enjoy your staff, patrons and community. You have a great job and appreciate it!
4. Embrace change! New technologies, new ideas. You really can enjoy your job much better if you can happily deal with changes.

I think I can see why it’s so popular.

That doesn’t mean to say that I am going to give up html and javascript!

But I do like that it can be fun. Check out our new library web site.

Luckily for us, we also belong to a regional library system – Northern Lights Library System (NLLS). Where we are part of a much larger group of libraries (about 42). Through the region, we have access to training and as a result, we invited James MacDonald to come to one of our meetings and teach us a little about blogs. And here we are. This is a fairly simply template that provides us with everything we need including designs and layout. It’s a little strange for me since I am used to designing web pages using html, and I had to get used to this concept. But it’s easy, simple and fast. And for a lot of busy people, just what they need.

This leads me to my intro: that we Sturgeon Librarian’s rock. We wanted to utilize the training in a fun and friendly environment and James was happy to help us out. I don’t think any groups of librarians meet in this region the way that we do. It’s a shame, we learn so much and are better at our jobs for it. Hence, we rock.

Check out James’ Information Overload.