 Okay, so next up in our lightning rounds, our fourth lightning round for Big Talk from Small Libraries 2018 is Julie Penel. Hey Julie. Hey. She is University Librarian at Nebraska Wesleyan University, right here in Lincoln, Nebraska, just a little base away from me. She's here in town. And she's been talking about strategic planning that she's done at the library and how it is a efficiency for a small academic library. So go ahead and take it away, Julie. Okay, thank you. Thanks for having me. I want to show you some very retro looking pictures of our library. These arrived in our office like two weeks ago that apparently the architect was moving their office. And so they were cleaning out their files and they sent these very 70s looking pictures of our library. But I thought, well, this is better than I can take. So I'm going to share these with you just so you have an idea of what our library looks like. I'm very lucky for you that they had, did you even know these are out that we're out there until they showed up? And the really wonderful thing is there were some interior shots from the early 70s and it has changed a lot on the inside. So it was very fun to see the original plan of the library. So it's really been fun to get those. We really appreciated it. I am fairly new actually to this library. I've been here just under a year and a half. So I started in September of 2016 as the library director. And when I started, I started the day after Labor Day. So the school year was already off and running, and I missed opening week, which is always a great introduction for new people. So I was thinking, how can I get to know, you know, my staff, the library staff, we have three librarians, including myself and three library specialists. And I will tell you that it's just been a delight to work with these people. I feel like they, I have the dream team here, but I wanted to get to know them and their vision of the library. And I wanted to know from the campus stakeholders how they viewed the library because I was coming in totally cold to this university. So I thought back to a year previously at the Nebraska Library Association conference. I had heard a really great presentation about strategic planning in public libraries. And I was really inspired by what I heard, and I had been really wanting to, you know, try this process out. I attended universities before where the university, of course, had their strategic plan, but I really hadn't worked at a library that had its individual library strategic plan. So I thought this was just the perfect combination. And the reason I thought it was so perfect was I think that a strategic plan is the perfect communication tool really it's a really strong communication tool. Building one, you build strong connections with the stakeholders. So I really had a really strong desire for that. And I always feel like I need an elevator talk. And this is a great way to polish your elevator talk to actually create it. And it's actually pretty compact so that if you do give it to an administrator, a board of governor, something like that, they can tell at a glance what your goals are. So I was very excited about this process. So I talked to my staff about it. And one month in we started out creating our, the process of creating a strategic plan. I went to Padlet and set up basically a bulletin board. And I just put up the mission, the values, and whoops, I just lost my screen again, Krista. Anyway, I can't see the right side of my screen, but we have mission values. And this is basically the outline of what we are going to use for our outline for our strategic plan. And the wonderful thing is I gave the link, the URL to my staff, and they were able to anonymously contribute what their thoughts were on this. And that was important because with me being new, they might not feel comfortable giving negative comments. So I thought that having an anonymous feature would be really very good. The following week, we went ahead and did another padlet board for SWAT, basically strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats. And once again, I really wanted them to be completely honest about, for instance, what our weaknesses were and what the threats might be. And if you see in the lower right hand corner, by this time we had learned that our provost was going to retire at the end of the school year. So we didn't know who we would be directly reporting to because the library directly reports to the provost. So this was kind of a worry. I think that we are, you know, a possible worry that we all had. During this process, one of the team members had actually been part of a strategic planning process elsewhere. And she commented, you know, why are we doing this? We're just going to do all this work and then we're going to put it in a drawer and we'll never look at it again. And I really did assure her that we would be reviewing this strategic plan every semester, and then it would be our map for the future. This was our plan. So with a lot of teamwork, we came up with our strategic plan. And included in that is, you know, we wrote our mission statement and our vision. We looked very carefully at the university's mission and vision and made sure that we had the two connect because of course we exist in partnership and in service of the mission and vision of the university. But we wrote our own, and then we listed our goals and you can see two of them here. The first is encourage knowledge creation. The second is to make meaningful student experiences. And below each one of the goals we've listed, you know, the actions that we are planning to take. And in parenthesis, you can see that we list the start dates or the anticipated start date and the team members who will be overseeing that particular sub goal. So you should see all of our goals that we came up with. I just kind of want to lead you through the process that we went through and then, you know, see how it all comes out. But so you've seen the first two, and then the next one is to be a campus magnet or center for learning. The fourth is to provide access to high quality information. We want to be a leader on campus for information literacy. We definitely want to collect, preserve and promote the history of Wesleyan because we do have the archives here and we find them to be quite exciting. And we think that primary sources are great teaching tools. So then we turned outward and started talking to our stakeholders and for our students, we bought whiteboards and put them on each floor of the library and solicited, you know, we put questions up that were related to our strategic plan and solicited their answers. I think a lot of institutions, institutional research really tries to keep the number of campus wide surveys down so that there isn't fatigue, what they call survey fatigue, so we knew we couldn't really do that, but we could do this and it was very, very successful we thought for getting student input. I took the strategic plan to the chairs and directors group. This was the leadership and asked them to break into small groups and just read and discuss and then answer these four questions and they could either write it out, or they could do it on this Google form. And so I basically asked them what they would want to change about the library, what they wanted to have stay the same, what they saw as unmet needs at Wesleyan and how they would describe the library. And that fed into a Google spreadsheet, and I manually entered all of the, you know, printed, you know, the longhand answers, and we learned a lot of really, you know, great things from this process, great suggestions. I then took it to a division meeting of the full faculty and showed them that on the faculty lip guide that we have in the far right lower corner, we actually have the strategic plan I had them click on it and look at it, and then we had those survey questions again link from there and the beauty of this is they can come here anytime. And I told them they could they could answer this frequently if they wanted to whenever they have an idea they can come back to the survey and you know, give us input. So, that has worked well. The, at this point, we had a pretty good handle on our strategic plan, and it was June, and our new provost had arrived. So, I actually wasn't scheduled to meet with her until fall after school started again. So, after a couple of weeks, I did send her the strategic plan and our assessment plan and curriculum map and just said, you know, these are just for your perusal. If you're ever curious about, you know, what we're doing, this should, you know, help you answer those questions. And she sent me back an email that was just really so nice. She thanked me and said she was thrilled to see that we'd done all this work. And I love the fact that she said it made her tingle with excitement. And we're also going to use it for external review, which is coming. It was very cute when I did talk to her in person, she put her hand in front of her eyes and she says, I kept thinking, dare I look anymore. So it's very cute. But for external review purposes, I think this is just best practices in in higher learning, you know, you go through external review every, you know, five, seven, 10 years, whatever the institution designates. And that's our external reviewer. And part of it is every academic program has to use the form that's on the right for part of they have to do a self study, and they have to talk about a plan basically for continuous improvement. And if you see, look, there's mission statement, explain your departmental mission and relationship to the university, we've done all that it was all done through our process. And for strategies for continuous improvement, all I had to do was basically link to the strategic plan, super efficient. So just to wrap up with the efficiencies. I thought that it helped me be just very quickly introduce ourselves to the provost prepare for the external review as a dream. I learned very quickly about the library staff. We heard so much from our campus stakeholders, and we were really able to identify a lot of matches between our resources and unmet needs on campus has been very exciting and very fun. So, thank you. I'm over my 10 minutes. So I guess I better stop. No, actually, I've been timing things. You're perfect. Just break. All right. We do have two questions are actually the same question. The virtual bulletin board pad site use. Can you, what was that again called? It's padlet padlet padlet. Yes, I've heard of people. I've seen places people use that before. And you, there are all different themes that you can use, but I really loved it. You can use it in a number of ways. I've used it also in information literacy instruction sessions to have students, you know, participate in certain things. But I really liked the fact that in this case, I could get anonymous feedback from the staff, you know, very low risk for them. It's very slick. Definitely. Yes. And free. That's part of spring. Absolutely. I love how I love part. I mean, that's great. The strategic plan for some people it's very overwhelming, but all the different other things it can feed into a certain officially for you as just you maybe didn't even plan that, you know, that external review. Hey, just one short sentence. Boom, we're done. It's just been so worth it. And I guess, you know, I just kind of wanted to show how it played out here. I know people do the strategic planning process in different ways, but it has really been very fruitful for us. Awesome. Great. Well, thank you very much, Julie. Thank you.