 Welcome. Thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Cultivating a Library Techno Culture. We are tech workers. My name is Crystal, and I'll be your host. I'm very excited about our guests today who are going to share what they did in their library to establish a culture around technology and learning new tech skills. I'll introduce our guests in just a few minutes. But before we begin, I have a few announcements to share. We will be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting today. Please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will be tracking your questions throughout the webinar, and we'll answer them at the designated Q&A section at the end. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters. But if you have comments or ideas to share, we will forward them back out with the entire group. You do not need to raise your hand to ask a question, simply type it into the chat box. Should you get disconnected during the webinar, you can reconnect using the same link in your confirmation email. You should be hearing the conference audio through your computer speakers, but if your audio connection is unclear, you can dial in using the phone number that we've shared in the chat. If you're having any technical issues, please send us a chat message, and we'll try to assist you. This webinar is being recorded and will be archived on the TechSoup website. If you're called away from the webinar, or if you have connection issues, you can watch a full recording of this webinar later. You will receive an archive email within a few days that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during the session. If you're tweeting this webinar, please use the hashtag TS4LIDS. We have someone from TechSoup live tweeting this event, so please join the conversation there. 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We collect and share stories of libraries that are using technology in creative and innovative ways to meet the needs of their communities. To stay up to date on the TechSoup for Libraries news and events, please be sure to visit us at TechSoupforLibraries.org. If you have a story to share about your library, you can click the link on TechSoupforLibraries.org that says, Tell Us. We'd love to hear from you. Now for today's webinar, we have two guests joining us, Pam Saliba and Andrea Chichetto, both of whom are joining us from the Markham Public Library, located in the province of Ontario, Canada. Pam is a branch manager, and Andrea is the Manager for Learning and Growth. My name is Crystal Schimpf, and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and Twitter, we have Ginny Mies and Becky Wiegen from the TechSoup team. We'll be on Twitter using the at TechSoupforLibs handle. We will have time for questions throughout the webinar, so please send us your questions using the chat as they arise, and we'll address as many as we're able to. If you ask a question that we're not able to answer during the webinar, we will follow up later via email with a response. Now this webinar is being recorded, and all of the slides, resources, and materials will be included in the archive of this webinar, and you'll receive that within 48 hours. So now I'm going to hand the controls over to Pam and Andrea. They've teamed up on this presentation to talk about what they have done to shift culture at their library to develop innovative new service models centered around technology. Pam and Andrea? Great, thank you Crystal. So welcome everyone, thank you very much for joining Pam and I today. This is Andrea starting us off, and probably you'll notice Pam and I sound a little bit alike. The good news is we also think a little bit alike. So we're going to take you through our presentation on how we've gone about kind of reconceptualizing our organizational culture so that we really embed technology as sort of a core feature of the work we do. To start though, we wanted to kind of get a sense of what everyone's thinking was at around this question. So if you were asked, are you a tech worker? I'd like to know how you would respond. So you'll see a survey up on your screen. You can just click the answer that you think best describes if you feel you are a tech worker or not, and then we will start collecting some responses. Pretty cool, you have to see this live actually. And it's interesting because we've done this survey each time we presented this at a conference as well as with our own staff. And the results seem to have been fairly consistent. Pam and I were really curious to see kind of where people thought they were at because depending on the nature of the library that you work in, technology may or may not be seen as sort of a central feature. So it looks like we're kind of slowing down on the results. So I'm going to call it. It looks like the majority of you would say yes, you are tech workers. Followed shortly behind by maybe. And that's great. That's really cool. We think we are tech workers. And that's really what we're talking about for the rest of the day. For staff, and there are lots of them who would not consider themselves technology workers. It can be a barrier. There's sort of a sense of identity around their role. For those of them who are tech workers or who see themselves that way, then this is an opportunity to discuss a little bit about how to share that energy with others in the organization. So to just give you a bit of context about who we are and where we're from, I know we have a lot of our American friends on the line today. So if you don't know Markham, we are a city of I guess currently about 340,000 people. And we're located just north of Toronto, which is Ontario's capital. Markham sort of has itself as Canada's high-tech capital. And that's because we have a disproportionately high number of technology and information science companies located in Markham. There's about 900 companies that work in the sector here. Our community is very diverse. We have I think over 70 or close to 70% of our population are visible minorities. And many of them were born outside of Canada. So we do have a very diverse population, most of whom are very highly educated. For the library, we serve that community across currently seven branches, soon to be eight, with about 200 unionized staff members. So technology is something that we've considered part of a major focus of the service that we provide for several years now. But it is something that we're still struggling to make sure that we're meeting our customers' needs in an effective way. Hi everyone, Pam here. I'll just take it over for a little bit. So as we started to acquire new technology at the library, we noticed that some staff were really excited about our services, things like 3D printers and robotics programming, digital media labs, but many were hesitant or reluctant to engage with technology period, even widely used technology like tablets for mobile service or public scanners. So it was clear that we have a very wide range of abilities and comfort levels with technology, from staff comfortable with 3D design to those who are still learning to use word processors. So we gathered feedback from staff in the form of a self-assessment survey. By asking staff to evaluate their own comfort levels with technology, we recognized three myths in the way of their engagement with this technology. One is that technology is scary. Two is that it's difficult. And three is that it's just not their job. So let's bust these myths. We wanted to help staff overcome their fears and bust for them these myths. Technology is fun. We have to recognize that some people have emotional barriers stopping them from developing tech skills. I'm sure we've all heard colleagues say, I'm afraid I'll break it so I can't help you with this. And like any other learning experience in life, learning how to use a new form of technology is scary because of the learning curve and or fear of failing. This is particularly challenging for adults since we don't want to appear incompetent in front of our colleagues or our customers. The second myth-busting is that technology can be learned just because it's sometimes challenging or it doesn't mean it's always challenging. It's not impossible and it's absolutely worth your time. It can be learned but we have to be open to this learning and have a willingness to engage with technology and fail and try again and fail again and be comfortable with that cycle of trial and error. Some folks think that only the young can be truly comfortable with technology and there are undeniable differences in how different generations interact with technology but I think this myth is often used just to justify not having to learn a new skill. So by individuals who fear change, having been offered the help they require to update their skill sets. And the third myth-busting is that technology is an integral part of everything we do at the library and in various non-profit organizations. When we teach tech skills to our community or provide access to new devices, we're just extending the age-old mandate we've always had around developing literacy skills. It's just what we do. And speaking of tech in the library, you're looking at here a picture of HitchBot hanging out at the Toronto Reference Library. HitchBot is a robot that Hitch hiked safely across Canada on its own. I don't know if anyone here heard about what happened to HitchBot when he tried to travel across the U.S. but he was actually found decapitated in Philadelphia. No comment there. We feel bad for HitchBot. But just to say that bringing this robot into the library for people to see and engage with is just another type of literacy that we're encouraging in our community. So this didn't come out in any of our discussions with staff or any of the self-assessment surveys but we know we can't help but think of the stereotype of the tech worker, usually middle-aged gentlemen who's asking you whether you've turned it on or off again. It's working against us. This is definitely working against us, particularly in libraries when we are one of the industries most dominated by female workers. So it's another layer of complexity to deal with in learning about technology. So Tim and I were both really passionate about taking a look at how we could make technology more accessible and feel more comfortable as part of staff's roles. We needed to kind of take a step back and identify what's the problem we're trying to tackle here. And here's what we came up with. So to Pam's point about the myths that staff tell themselves and I think that stereotypical image of a tech worker, that was something that we really wanted to tackle head-on. So I think what we heard from staff is that when they think of technology workers they think of someone who's highly specialized, who's obviously highly technical, who works in a specialized field specifically around computers or computer engineering. A lot of people said systems and networks. So they're thinking of it in terms of very narrow conception of the kind of work that happens in IT. But we work with technology every day. Our staff are completely dependent on technology and different IT platforms in order to do the job that they do for the customer. So with that level of integration if we're that closely bound together with the technology we use we need to really consider what's the barrier there from us thinking of ourselves as tech workers. The second problem that we wanted to look at was this one of training. So something that comes up very often and I manage training services for the system so this is especially when it's dear to my heart. If staff feel uncomfortable with a certain area of service or something else very often the go-to response is around training. When we talk about training and technology a lot of the time what we hear from staff is that they're looking for kind of step-by-step instructions or an opportunity to learn a process. They're thinking about it in terms of operating equipment. And I think that's because for the most part the language around technology used to be about it's a tool. And I think we've really evolved past that. Really it's about it's integrated so fully in the services we provide. In the nature of the technology we work with now and the nature of learning is not something that you can provide step-by-step instructions for. So we really wanted to look at how we can make a shift from staff wanting training to staff wanting learning. And we see those two things as fundamentally different and we'll elaborate a little bit on that I think. The last piece is this thing that Pam mentioned around tech anxiety. So the fear of breaking it, the fear of not being able to do something in front of a customer, the fear of looking stupid. And I think that that's something that we all intrinsically feel. No one wants to feel like they look foolish in front of someone else. Especially when a customer comes to us for help and sort of cast us in the role of an expert willing to help them. What we wanted to really shift away from is that working with technology we know there's going to be failures. What we really wanted to encourage was that sense of experimentation and a comfort learning side-by-side with customers. We don't expect our staff to know everything. We do expect them to be open to learning about them and being curious about how things work and being willing to use their knowledge of information searching to find the answers. And that's something that we really wanted to stress that failure is totally acceptable and okay. It's just something that we want people to feel more confident in terms of being able to experiment on the job. What we really began thinking about is that we need to look at our organizational culture. And the reason why is that ultimately what we're talking about here is the mindsets that people have. If we're going to make a shift around mindsets then we really need to start thinking about changing the culture and making sure that we have a culture in place that supports the kinds of learning that we want to see happen, the kind of service that we want to see happen, and the kind of comfort with technology that we really aspire to for staff. And we decided what we needed. With the techno culture, one where technology is seen as an integral part of the service and something fun and something playful, something that's worth experimenting with. So this was our challenge. How do we set up out trying to shift our culture to a techno culture? When we're talking about culture we're really talking about a collection of values that the organization holds as important and how these values really shape and sort of guide the decisions we make about what's acceptable and what's not acceptable in terms of behavior. So we knew that this was going to be a big project because if you think about it what culture is is a collection of mindsets. Think about the last time you tried to change someone's mind about something that they valued very strongly, believed in very firmly and had years of habit thinking about it in a certain way. So then take that and multiply it by 250 or however big your staffing is and that's kind of the challenge you're facing. Obviously it's a huge amount of work and it's something that does take years but it's something that's completely worth it because ultimately if you have an organizational culture that values and supports creativity and problem solving and experimentation and the acceptance of failure you can start shifting people's outlook on the way they interact with technology on a daily basis. And that's where we really saw the potential to make a difference in terms of how staff thought of themselves and hopefully started to think of themselves more commonly as tech workers. All right. So after talking a bit about some initiatives we took to help get to a techno culture. So our first initiative was to create an easily accessible online space to help staff locate information about technology in both a fun and interactive way. We chose Pinterest as our platform due to its popularity and ease of use and curated content with relevant how-to articles, tech news, inspiring videos and much more. So you can see an example here of our section on the Internet of Things. This is all geared towards staff but it can certainly be accessed by the public as well. So when doing something like this don't assume that staff know how to use social media just because it's a popular platform. So we provided training in the form of a how-to infographic which you're looking at a part of here. And at a leadership forum which is a meeting we have every quarter for our supervisors and managers. We also presented hands-on training on how to use the platform so that then they can take this learning with them and encourage staff back at the branches to access the resource and help them out as issues come up if they do. A second initiative that we took on as part of this project were Technology Lunch and Learns. And this is an initiative that I especially loved because staff delivered these presentations themselves. So we were able to tap into internal expertise that already existed with the system. And staff could come out, share their lunch, and listen to your presentation on a variety of different topics delivered by their peers who had gone through a learning process themselves. And most of the people that presented in these lunch and learns were not experts. They weren't people that came out of technology fields or anything like that. They were other library workers that had learned how to interact with different kinds of tools. So they presented on a range of topics, some of them very practical. So for example, how our systems work, how our maker technologies work, some of them were very high level. So more about how technology is useful in learning, how the internet of things works. On the next slide, what we have here is a diagram from one of the lunch and learns that our systems librarian presented. So she does have a specialized background. I will admit that. But what was interesting about this is this is all technology. These are our internal systems that staff work with every day. So it's all technology that's familiar to them. But this was one of our most talked about lunch and learns because so few people understood how our systems connected with each other and how they interconnected, you know, how something happened and why it affected the others. So with Nikki presenting that information, she was able to give a perspective from the higher level in terms of how all of these things work together. They kind of filled in the pieces for staff. So it was really interesting because again, this is technology that's very familiar to them that they utilize daily, but they didn't have necessarily an overarching understanding of. So another exciting initiative we worked on is TEDx Markham Public Library. We applied for a TEDx license because it is a brand recognized as a source of reliable, exciting, and inspiring, often technology-related news. On top of this, we know that staff were already sharing and talking about TED and TEDx videos amongst themselves. So this was also a brand that resonated with them right off the bat. So we chose Spark as our theme. TEDx provides guidelines, and it's about 100 pages of rules to be more precise detailing requirements of the license to maintain brand integrity. One rule is you can't have a specific theme like technology. The theme has to be abstract. So we chose Spark, partly because we wanted to spark excitement in staff around technology, but also a spark starts small but grows into something transformative and huge. And this can be used for a metaphor for technology in the way a lot of applications and uses for technology are developed. We selected speakers from a diverse background, health, philosophy, design, but really emphasize technology's impact on these fields. So for example, we had Dr. Julie Lynn Wong discussing her project with NASA to launch 3D printers into space. We also had a designer who theorizes that he can use technology to communicate with plants. So we made sure that every topic related back to technology, some of these are very high level and don't necessarily affect our day-to-day, but are inspiring, and that's part of how we get people on board with a techno culture. 25% of our audience members were staff. We released additional tickets to staff as required because we didn't want to turn anyone away, but this was certainly an event we held open to the public because we wanted the public to participate. Staff responded with a lot of enthusiasm. Many came out to say they just wanted to help us with this event, so we had a lot of staff helping us out. And we sold out of tickets very quickly which demonstrated an interest from the public as well. While this was culture shifting for us, we were doing the same for customers as well. We showed them that there's a new library out there, one that drew in folks who may not see the library as a place for them. We even heard one of our favorite comments of the night is when our Samba dancers came out. Someone said, whoa, this is not the library I grew up visiting. An organization of the event itself was an opportunity to learn about technology used in stage production, which is a type of technology we offer through our digital media lab. So for example, lighting, mic setup, projections, all of that contributed to learning for our staff team. And then part of TED's mandate for TEDx organizers is to surprise and delight our audience members with giveaways. So here's just a little bonus. We created a little TEDx Mark and Public Library Lego Army as a call for the great engineering skills that can be developed by playing around and having fun with Lego from a young age. The next initiative we'll talk about a little bit was our staff conference. So many of your libraries might have professional and development days, or some opportunity to gather your staff together, to learn together. We don't have that tradition, and because of our opening schedule, we basically open everything except for statutory holidays. We don't have a lot of opportunities to bring the staff together as a group. We wanted to try an experiment and say, you know, everyone goes off to conferences and comes back full of amazing ideas, full of a lot of energy, and then they kind of, it's hard to make that transition to their everyday life and back to their workgroups, to their colleagues who didn't necessarily share that experience firsthand. So we wanted to try an internal conference that would get at some of that. So we chose the theme of technology fitting with our overall project and brought staff together over the course of three days. People came in different groupings and had a chance to listen to a combination of different presentations on a wide range of topics that would allow them to have a better understanding of some of MPL's strategic initiatives around technology. So for example, we had a lot of hands-on demonstrations that were actually run by our summer camp staff who came in and talked about some of the ways they were using technology and STEM-based learning opportunities in their work with children. Our staff, including in this picture here, it's two of our borrower services clerks, got a chance to get their hands on those different technologies and start exploring building and kind of having fun with it. We also had, again, an opportunity to call our internal experts to come out and speak about their own experiences with technology. The slide here, this is one of our staff, and Faisal is the sound artist in addition to a library techno worker. And he came and talked about how he had used library technology to produce a record that he had made called The War and got to play some of it with us. So it was a really excellent example of someone who, again, he's self-taught and he embodied a lot of the principles that we were trying to support our staff in terms of experimentation and learning. But he's also their colleague, so hearing from their peer directly about his experience using some of the library's resources in the pursuit of his art was really powerful. And then lastly, we also had external experts come in to do presentations in each session. And these, again, ranged in topics. Some of them were very directly related to libraries and some of them weren't at all. So for example, in this presentation we had from the University of Toronto the Technology for Aging Gracefully Lab. So this is an organization that works on developing tech that helps support elders in the community learning how to connect and kind of use technology for better social cohesion. So there was a really wide range of topics. For many of our staff, you know, the feedback that we got fairly consistently was that they loved the opportunity to think about technology from a different perspective. So rather than just thinking about the photocopy is broken, how do I fix it, started thinking about, you know, what is it that our customers are looking for? What are the trends in society that technology are going to help shape? And more than anything, we really wanted to emphasize how fun technology could be. So a lot of the days over the course of the conference were focused on how much opportunity there is in terms of what's out there for us to learn and experiment and basically play together. We have a little video to show you of our staff programming their first robot. Many of the comments that we heard first were, I can't do this. I don't know anything about this. This isn't my jam. As soon as they got their hands on it and had an opportunity to start pushing those buttons, it was a totally different story. I hope you heard the sounds of excited squealing and carrying on that happened. And I also love how our staff showed up to everything that's matching shoes. One of the more recent initiatives that we took on as part of this project was the Digital Artist-in-Residence. Many libraries I think have experimented with writers-in-residence and other kinds of artistic projects, essentially. We wanted to explore what it would be like to have a digital artist working at a library space. So we took on in a residency a Markham-based artist, Stephanie Wu, who works primarily in the medium of GIFT. So again, she had attended, I can't remember what she said in her background note, but I should have checked beforehand, some kind of arts degree, basically, from McGill University in Montreal, and came to us really excited to contribute to the artistic development of the community. She had pitched us a project, basically, that looked at how we can engage communities in a project that explored the concept of escape and looked at kind of the process of being present. So her theme was around, you know, people came in, they took a picture of themselves, and then illustrated a background of the place that they want to be, either a place that they already are and want to be, or a place that they want to go to. So we were exploring lots of concepts around identity and things like that that are really important questions in art, but doing that through technology that's available in the library. And because it's a local artist as well, Stephanie is very accessible and open to customers of all ages and our staff to be able to share her learning and experience. So it was a really wonderful initiative to start bringing the sort of emphasizing link between community and staff and the role that technology plays in combining those things. So another initiative we launched was called the e-book Blitz. So the e-book training Blitz came about from feedback from staff about the amount of time and anxiety they spend helping customers with their troubleshooting in terms of e-book downloading specifically. So we made this training a requirement for all information services staff regardless of their comfort level, and we also opened it up to borrower services staff as well. So we framed the training around troubleshooting both Android and Apple devices and had people come together to go through the typical troubleshooting process. So our goal is to help them understand that the process to troubleshoot e-book issues is no different from running through the reference interview. You ask a lot of questions, you research the issue in depth to help the customer as much as you possibly can. And e-books may add a layer of complexity in terms of the technology used, but it's certainly a very similar process. So now this all sounds great, but we received a lot of mixed feedback from this initiative in particular from staff after it was done. So although it was valuable to review the troubleshooting process, many staff found the training was just too simple. In fact, in many of the sessions, staff transformed the training themselves. So they transformed our planned content into more of a support group style discussion. These discussions were rich with examples of the most common or most challenging e-book issues. And by coming together and engaging in conversations amongst themselves about these common issues, staff shared tips and tricks, and they developed confidence in their own abilities and confidence as well that they can call on their colleagues for assistance as it's required. So although those conversations were great, we still took our initial plans to something we have at MPL called Fail Camp. So Fail Camp is another initiative we have developed by one of our superstar employees, Megan Garza. Fail Camp encourages staff to take their work failures to a safe, fail camp fire, where they can share their failures with staff, share their learnings, and celebrate the failure for what it is, a solid attempt at making an improvement. So for example, we recorded our fail camp discussion and distributed to staff like a podcast. Staff told us they were impressed that three managers were willing to share their failures with them. And technology is scary to some people because they're afraid of failing at it like we brought up a couple of times before. Maybe if we realized that not much is accomplished without a string of failed attempts first, we can learn and improve from our failures and tech can be a little bit less intimidating to us. And so we had another initiative. This one wasn't necessarily under our project but ended up sort of like a spin-off from the project that Andrea and I worked on. It's called Media Mentors. And it's organized by one of our community librarians, each branch identified two media mentors, one each from the Circulation and Information Services Department. These individuals were selected because they demonstrated that they were not afraid to play around with technology. And the media mentors went through weekly technology assignments to help them better use and troubleshoot commonly used products, things like Microsoft, products, Google products. Then they used their learnings as well as their previous knowledge base to help staff when tricky tech situations came up in the branch. So here what you're looking at is a screenshot from Yammer. Yammer is our enterprise social network. Think of it like Facebook but for work. And you can see here media mentors discussing their assignments with each other. So they're all very engaging initiatives but both for the organizers and for the participants. But a very important question here is have we made a difference? We surveyed staff and they told us 96% of them learned something new about technology from the initiatives that we put forth. 32% of staff, perhaps more importantly, reported being more confident in their abilities to resolve tech-related issues. And confidence in one's abilities is crucial when providing awesome customer service. Because you can really tell when a person feels uncomfortable that is very visible in the way that they deliver messages and the way that they go through with their help. Here's some feedback we received from our staff technology conference in particular. There was a lot of buzz and excitement around these learning opportunities. This is not always the response we received from staff. And our goal was to get staff excited and happy about learning technology. And we're certainly continuing to work towards this goal every day. It's not an overnight process. But this type of feedback is encouraging. It lets us know we're heading in the right direction. So we thought we would, in the spirit of fail camps, talk a little bit about things we might have done differently or improve on where we should take on the project again. Because as much as we did feel this project was definitely success, there are some things that we learned from that were really valuable. So one of the things that we were looking at in retrospect was around the team and who's going to be involved in these and initiatives like this. Something that I think can be very challenging is bringing people to the table in a consistent way because ultimately we're very leanly staffed as many libraries are and time is precious and most staff are engaged in direct customer service. So it can be really challenging to kind of pull people away from that. But having said that, the more we involved staff in initiatives, the richer those initiatives became. And I think the more resonance they had with their colleagues. So definitely thinking about who you put together at the table around creating a culture change. Definitely consider involving as much frontline staff as possible as many people who can speak peer to peer to each other. The parts of the project that I think were really effective were when we had candidates, not candidates rather, but staff from inside the system who was able to speak first hand about how they learned and explored for themselves how technology worked in their job and in the community. Scopecreep is a common problem on basically all projects, especially one like this because it's huge. And there's so much in our work that technology touches. And it also created a lot of energy. And so this is a really positive thing. Pam talked about media mentors and how that was kind of a spin-off project. Ultimately we kept seeing that kind of like, hey, we should do this thing next, right? And that desire to kind of continue to grow the project. It's a really nice problem to have. But it was something that in terms of being able to resource the project effectively, being able to manage scope with something that we probably could have improved on in retrospect. And kind of similar to that was the ability to pace ourselves. So as I mentioned before, we knew going into it that any sort of organizational culture change work takes a huge amount of time and effort and really becomes an immersive experience. So being able to give yourself enough time to allow things to take root, to allow momentum and energy to build was something that we probably could have left more space for. Partly that was honestly, we were just so pumped to work on this. So again, a nice problem to have, but one that we really, in retrospect, we probably should have been less aggressive with some of our timelines. And last but not least, there are always going to be people who are going to hold out and who are not going to buy in, who aren't going to be interested in an initiative like this, who firmly still feel that libraries are libraries and technology is the thing they have to deal with in the library. And that was something that we did encounter. It was not a 100% buy-in, nor did we expect it to be. If we got 32% on this first year of staff feeling more confident, because this is a work in progress, if we can get another 32% this year, we're going to continue to see that positive momentum work in our favor. Realistically though, we recognize that there's always going to be some staff who are never going to see themselves as tech workers. And if that is what makes us, I think it's a good opportunity to kind of reality check expectations. So those are some of the things that we learned. We also wanted to share a little bit about how this might work in other library contexts. All right, so let's talk a bit about how you can get this started at your library. So how to start your learning journey. Now this is certainly not supposed to replace formal project management training or an in-depth knowledge of what it's like to manage a project, but there are some big high level things that you need to get started on. So one is you want to identify passionate staff. Before the project launched, we held an unconference style day for staff across the system from all positions. We gathered feedback on what type of technology they were excited to learn about in the library context. So that got people excited. And then the unconference model allowed staff to identify those topics that they wanted to talk about and learn about. It wasn't us forcing topics onto staff. It was them telling us what our customers are asking about, what they encounter most often, and what would be most relevant to their work. And so through this model, we were able to identify staff that could help us with the project as well, because they demonstrated either a knowledge base that would be helpful or enthusiasm that would certainly benefit a long-term project like this. Then you need to ask yourself, why do you need this project? And project management answering the why question is the most important thing that you can do, because it helps guide your decision making. And it helps justify your project as well. So what is it about your organization's attitude towards technology that needs changing? If you really want to get your senior team on board, you're going to have to be able to answer this question very well. So you need to ask yourself, why? Then, like any good project, it needs a project charter, a guiding document. Something that helps you maintain scope, that helps you make decisions. But let your project charter be a living document, because changes happen inevitably. Either funding you thought you had disappeared, or you realize that you absolutely missed out on a learning opportunity that needs to be incorporated. So allow this document to be a living document, but of course be mindful of scope at the same time. And that sounds very challenging, and it is, but it's something that any project manager has to keep in mind. So long-term projects are going to change. There's no doubt, especially when technology is involved, and that's part of why you might keep it flexible as possible. You want to find your sponsor, of course. So you need to get your senior team on board, and that's why I mentioned earlier, answering that why question. So getting your CEO as your sponsor, for example, will hopefully help your senior team be aligned in how they approach this project, and ensure that you have the resources needed to complete the project. You have to advocate on behalf of technical learning in the library. It would be great if we didn't have to, but we absolutely do, and so if you're going to embark on this type of journey, you have to be able to advocate. And staff time is very expensive, so you have to understand from the senior team's side, of course, they want to make sure they're making most efficient use of our resources, and so being able to answer that why question is going to help them decide what resources are allocated to you. And lastly, this is certainly a bit cliched, but I think it rings true. It's not about learning. It's hard for people to turn away fun. If you frame your learning activities as fun, include challenges, have some hands-on activities, not just a PowerPoint slide at the front of the room, you're going to get people excited and engaged in what it is that they're learning. And it's especially important when folks are scared of technology. If you show them how fun it can be, that can illuminate some of the fear as well. So first and foremost, our project is about culture. It's not about training. It's about culture. It's about embedding in individuals a comfort with technology and a willingness to experiment, a willingness to fail. You'll have staff who are more comfortable experimenting with technology. You'll have staff who are more comfortable learning the skills and with more confidence in their abilities. Hopefully they won't dread those technology questions. Hopefully they will embrace eBooks and all kinds of new technology in a library. And hopefully they'll be more resilient and happier as well. So that's it for presentation portion. Thank you guys very much for being here. I get to see all the questions. I realize you don't get to see each other's questions yet. Sorry, Crystal. Sorry to answer some of them, but I stopped that. But we can certainly begin answering some questions since we've got some time. Absolutely. And we have had a lot of excellent questions coming in. So Pam and Andrea, thank you for such a well-thought-out presentation. I know you've delivered this in person before and now bringing it to the online environment. We've certainly seen a lot of questions coming in. Before we start answering them, I just wanted to remind everyone that you'll actually get a recording of this in your email. And some of the links that we've been sharing in the chat will be included in that archive. So we'll make sure to get you those links if you're not tracking them right now. We'll get those to you. And I think a good place to start off with this question or with the questions is maybe to work our way backwards. And you were just giving some great advice on how to get started at your library. And I know we've got people joining from all different sizes of libraries and organizations. And they've had some really good questions. And the one I'd like to start with is you mentioned how important it was to have some – you called it a sponsor. And sometimes people refer to that as buy-in or support from senior administration. But I don't recall. Did you mention where your support came from within your organization? Did you have full support of your administrative team or did it come from a specific department? Could you tell us more? And Pam, maybe we'll start with you. It's actually Andrea. I'm going to respond to this. So something that's kind of unique at MPL, my role as part of the senior management team is to work on organizational development. So that includes training, but it also includes change and different kinds of initiatives that affect the organizational culture. So there was kind of a tradition in place or sort of a nice platform, I guess, to launch initiatives like this. So a lot of my work will look like these kinds of projects. My role in that is really providing a connection between Pam and the project team and the senior management team. Having said that though, I mean ultimately our sponsor is our CEO. And our CEO capturing this is always very open to initiatives that we undertake that look at issues of organizational culture, which is sometimes kind of rare to find. They tend to be long and hard to – like the results aren't immediate so it can be kind of hard to talk about it in terms of ROI or what am I getting out of this right away but recognizing it as a long-term investment in the staff is something that Catherine is really savvy about. So we had a lot of support for this initiative I guess partly because of the waiver structure but also partly because we have a senior team who sees the value or sort of understands the importance of making sure that we're developing staff in order to provide better service to our customers and that's ultimately the path to sort of maintaining our position in the community and continuing to provide services there. Excellent, excellent. And then just a quick question about your staffing. I saw earlier that you have about 220 staff and do you know a rough percentage of what staff are part-time or is it – if you just have any rough idea there that you could share? Yeah, it's pretty high. So that 75% of our staffing is part-time? Wow. And so I guess that begs the question, was that a challenge for you to have so many part-time staff involved with this initiative and how did you address that challenge? Yeah, this is Pam here. Yeah, it was certainly a challenge of it, particularly in terms of scheduling training. So in every initiative we had to be mindful how could we make this easy on branch staff because we're actually quite leanly staffed. It sounds like we have a lot of people but because they're mostly part-time we don't have a lot of people every day in the branch, right? Yeah, we're extraordinarily busy. Like we're constantly in need of more staff to help with the amount of customers coming in through our doors. So we had to be mindful of that. And in terms of the project team, we didn't necessarily – we might do this differently in hindsight or next time, but we didn't necessarily involve a lot of the part-time staff in that. So we had full-timers helping on the committee and we were working together on projects that we could then roll out to the part-timers. Things like Pinterest, right? That can be done at the branch like when there are the very rare downtime or perhaps we can take someone aside and give them a chance to work in the back through a bit and look through Pinterest, for example. The Lunch and Learns, another good example of us working around time. Those were on lunchtime so we weren't taking away from floor coverage. And something like the staff conference, which was especially popular with staff and was very well-received, spanned over three days. Not all – the expectation was not that staff could attend all three days. We knew that was an impossibility. But by having different options for them like morning, afternoon, evening, and dividing up the days into portions where you could experience – if you come in from 9 to 1 or 1 to 5 or 5 to 9, a hands-on component, an external speaker, an internal speaker, you had a similar experience but it still worked with the schedule because we just couldn't. There's just no way that we could send everybody to the full three days. So it posed almost logistical challenges. Does that answer the question? Yeah, and actually it's great to hear some of the examples of how you dealt with that challenge. So thanks for sharing them. Another question related to time that has come up and actually a few people have asked this is what was the time span from when you started this initiative to kind of where we are right now or when you would say you had reached your goal? It was roughly a year. And so Pam and I sort of started talking about it and I think the seeds were kind of planted maybe a little bit further out than that. But from the time of kind of getting our project charter approved and then really starting to roll with the initiatives, it was about a year's time. It was like our digital artists and residents just because of the timing that we wanted to launch that initiative kind of fell into the next year. But the bulk of it was kind of done within a year. Now also speaking to staff and particularly the assessment that you referenced early on, I know you mentioned that that assessment gauged their comfort level and how comfortable they were. But we had a question about whether that also gauged their interests or their strengths and weaknesses in their technology. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Sure, so it did. It included how – it was a self-assessment I should say. So it asked staff to identify essentially where they felt their skill level was. We asked – I don't think we specifically asked about interests but we did have questions that spoke to how they used technology in their personal life. So do you have a smartphone? That kind of thing. It was kind of where people's interests were, how tech enriched their lives were, I guess, based on some of those answers. But we did get a sense of how they assessed their own skill. And it was interesting to kind of correlate that against what they saw as their comfort level. The other thing that was kind of interesting at looking at those results was we had a chance to discuss it with our management team. And in some cases, their managers assessed them differently, both more upwards and more downwards. In some cases, staff thought they were really good with technology and their managers begged to differ. In other cases – and more commonly, I think, is that managers felt that their staff exhibited a lot of comfort with technology and a lot of skill where the staff remembered themselves kind of underrated their abilities. So it was interesting to kind of see how some of those results played out. But it was kind of an interesting starting point to have to see how far we can move the needle, especially on the issue of comfort. Again, we were trying to really affect mindset and we thought comfort would be kind of a good indicator of that. Excellent. Now, we have had a few requests. I don't know if the assessment is in a format that you would be willing to share as part of the archive of that, but is that something we'd be able to include in the archive later? Sure. We can send the questions. We won't share the results necessarily, but we'll ask all the questions. Of course. Good. So we'll include that self-assessment with the archive then. And you'll have the questions for that assessment later on. So that was a great question. Now, we're also getting a lot of interest in some of the specific pieces that you talked about, and actually just another bit about the assessment. When you did the e-book training, did you do any specific assessment related to the e-books or anything related to that e-book work? We didn't do a formal assessment in that case, although the overall assessment we did at the start of the project asked about e-books, so we did have some data from that. The thing that we did with that project, because we do, we call them Bring Your Own Device, or BYODs, I think, it's a customer program where essentially staff make themselves available for an hour, I guess it is, or maybe a little longer, to work one-on-one with customers who have more in-depth, complicated questions or need to learn more about it, or how to use their smartphone or other device. So we have, after each session of that program is held, we have a staff debrief where they have an opportunity to exchange amongst themselves what the hard questions they were asked, what they learned out of the experience. So we do get a lot of feedback out of that experience where we keep our eye on what questions are coming up that staff find challenging or didn't feel like they were able to answer correctly. So we have a process in place that monitors that, and it's not a formal assessment in the same way. We're also getting questions about the fail-camp that you mentioned, and of course this idea of how do we support failure as a means of learning and growing in our libraries. So we have a couple of questions about the format of that, and if you have any examples you might be able to share later, or if you could just talk a bit more about what you did in the fail-camp to help bring that concept to the forefront. Sure. So I think this is actually, Pam mentioned Megan Garza, who's one of our branch managers, although she was, I think, a branch librarian at the time maybe. She came up with this based on an experience she'd had going to a fail-camp at a conference level for, I forget what, but it's something that does happen kind of in the tech sector quite often. As far as we knew at the time, that had happened in a library at an organizational level, because it can be really challenging to get up in front of your peers and talk about basically how you screwed up. What we wanted to do was, first of all, create some definitions around innovation and failure, and make sure that it wasn't seen as a license to do your job poorly. Rather, the idea with fail-camp is that if you're trying to innovate, if you're trying to improve something, if you're trying to introduce something new, there are going to be misfires, so we needed to take that apart and really look at what went wrong or what could have been improved so that we can learn from those experiences. So it's about reversing that tendency that I think we all have to try to gloss over mistakes or kind of squeeze them under the rug and do that at an organizational level. So we actually wrote a charter of fail that we had signed by our CEO that basically said, yep, there's no reprisal if for someone who fails if it's in the effort of improvement or innovation from that failure. So we have different ways that we implement fail-camp. We do have some different training initiatives as part of staff meetings. We've used it in even staff onboarding. A lot of the time, we'll connect it to customer service as well and say what kind of customer service fails have you had, where staff can exchange stories about customer interactions that didn't go the way they would have liked. We also have a person in kind of formats that we can tie into other meetings. Pam mentioned Yammer, so we have a virtual fail-camp where over our internal social media tool staff can kind of write up their fail experience. Very recently we started essentially podcasting our fails. So Megan will record us talking about fail-camps and sort of what's gone wrong. An example of one that I can share is we have this different culture change project around our customer service initiative that we call the Customer Service Revolution. And we were looking for a way to recognize staff that really did outstanding work in the area of customer service and build in this kind of recognition program. And one of the suggestions that we decided to run with was the idea of having gold stars and being able for staff to recognize each other for customers to recognize staff. It was one of those things where it's like, yeah, that sounds cute. Yeah, awesome. Who doesn't love stickers? The majority of our staff did not love that idea, right? So I had the opportunity to take that to fail-camp based on the feedback I was getting. And it was a lot of stuff like, you know, that feels really juvenile or like it made me feel a little devalued, that kind of thing. You know, it gave me an opportunity to kind of reflect on, you know, I think what I did wrong in that was not have a chance to kind of get some input from people, not really test whether or not that would be the kind of appreciation anyone would support. So fail-camp kind of let me take that apart a little bit and say, you know, what went wrong with this, right? Because it's a well-intentioned idea. It was not the right idea for that moment. So that's the kind of thing that might come up in a fail-camp. And like I said, we have a lot of customer service lines, a lot of learning. A lot of them come from me, which makes me feel a little worried now. But yeah, it's, you know, failing is all about learning. And I think that that's what we really try to stress with staff, that you're not going to essentially progress if you're not willing to stumble sometimes. If I could add one quick thing about failing. Andrea, are you saying a lot of them come from you? I think that's because Andrea really demonstrates a willingness to talk about failure as a tool or a process towards innovation. So like we're talking about fail-camp, we love it. Andrea and I both love it. It's not something that's loved across the board. So it's certainly something that if you take to your organizations, you have to be mindful a lot. Like Andrea was saying, a lot of people aren't uncomfortable with it. But I commend Andrea for all this. It's awesome. It's very supportive here. Great. And we had somebody share a link which we put back out in the chat about some more resources about learning to fail and that being part of a 21st century skill set. So it's great to see that you're addressing it. And I think those examples were very helpful. Now we're very close to the end of our time here. And so I think we are going to need to wrap up. We got so many great questions. And I just want to assure you if you ask a question and we haven't been able to respond to that live, then we will follow up via email with an answer. And some of your questions are very specific, so we want to make sure to get you accurate answers. So we'll follow up via email there. And the archive of the webinar will be coming out within the next few days. Now we have just maybe one more minute, and I have one last question I want to ask. And either of you want to address this briefly is how do you balance the need for human interaction to continue? That came up in one of our comments in the chat that with all of this technology and all of these technological services we're providing, how do you maintain that personal connection to your community and your library patrons? Yeah, that's such a good question. So I'll start maybe turn it over to Pam for her thoughts as well. My first reaction is that there's absolutely room for both. And I think sometimes that's about different people needing different things. Sometimes that's about using technology or technology solutions to enhance the human interaction. So one example, I think we have a lot of people in our community that are interested. I mean, our community is passionate about learning, and we know that from a lot of research we've done in terms of their needs and preferences. So the more we can use technology-based solutions to open up access to learning opportunities, we're fulfilling a need that our customers have. And staff play a role in that in terms of the way that they build relationships with our customers and kind of bring those resources to them. We have an entire department focused on community development that works embedded in the community that really focuses on, hey, what is it that we can do to create solutions around change in the community? And a lot of time it is about making sure that we're bringing the right solution, whether it's technological or not, to bear in a situation. Yeah. Actually, I'm afraid we are out of time, so I'm going to have to hold up the rest of that for later. But I want to make sure we get everybody out of here. But that was a great way to respond to that, Andrea, and a great way to wrap up our webinar and our topic today. So if everyone participating, thank you for joining us. Stay on the line for a minute because we've got a survey coming up. And thanks again, Pam and Andrea, for all of this information. Just one last word here. I want to let you know about two upcoming webinars that might interest you. Tuesday, August 9th, we're talking about Web Accessibility 101. And Wednesday, August 24th, almost a month from now. We're going to be talking about social media analytics for libraries. So mark your calendars for those and there will be more coming out in our newsletters about that. Thanks to ReadyTalk for being our sponsor today. And thanks again to all of you for joining us. It's been a great hour. And we hope you have a wonderful afternoon. Thank you everyone. Bye-bye.