 All right, so our second presenter of the day at Big Talk with Small Libraries is Rosemary Cooper. She is the library director at the Albert Wissner Public Library in Warwick, New York, and they are the winner just announced about a month ago of the Best Small Library in America Award for 2016 by Library Journal Magazine. Congratulations, Rosemary. Thank you. That's awesome. As I said, I am here in Nebraska, but New York is my home state. I'm originally from upstate New York. So I was really happy to see someone from my home state win the award this year. We were delighted to. Being the first library in New York state that actually has won the award is special. Yeah, they go there all over the place with that, which is great, I think, yeah. So and I invited Rosemary to join us here on Big Talk from Small Libraries to talk about how they did it, how they got the award and what went into that. So I will just hand over to you, Rosemary, to tell us all about your library. Great. Thank you very much. I'm really very privileged and honored to be here to talk to you about this. We're still in the honeymoon glow from this. We're completely unexpected for our little library to receive this award, because we've worked very hard on the application. And I have to say, having listened to Kathy earlier, the enthusiasm and the creativity that abounds in public libraries all over our country and our continent is pretty inspiring. So I do this very humbly as well. I'm here really, Krista, to just share our story with you and all of the other folks who have decided to listen in on this and that they may be inspired to do not only the best they can, which I'm sure all of you already are doing, but to tell that story and tell that story as widely and loudly and enthusiastically as possible. Our story really began when I came to this little community in upstate New York, or with New York, 60 miles from Manhattan. I was a librarian. I'm just trying to move my slides here. What's going on? Are you with me? Yes, we are. You might have to click on the slides to get there. There we go. Okay. Sorry, folks. There you are. That is me right there. I am a live human being. I have actually grew up in New York State in Westchester County. I got my library degree in 1979 at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and worked in small business advertising libraries until 1980 when I moved to Burlington, Vermont and began working my public library career at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington, Vermont. The very same year that Bernie Sanders, some of you may know, presidential candidate, was elected mayor. That was 35 years ago. I started in Burlington, Vermont, and then Chris crossed over to California, spent some time over there in Pasadena, in San Bernardino, and then went up to Idaho, to Boise, and then found my way back home here in 2001. Right after, as many of you will remember, something terribly horrible happened to our country and the World Trade Center was bombed and the planes flew into the World Trade Center. Excuse me. And it was a really pretty scary time to be back here. But it was also, for me, a pretty challenging time because I moved from a career in public libraries that had spanned from the 80s now for 20 years, and I was mostly in medium-sized libraries and administrative positions, larger-sized libraries, certainly none that would qualify as a small library. And here I came upon an opportunity on my way back home to take over a challenge here at the Albert Wissner Public Library in Warwick, New York. And that challenge was that we were a community growing in these reaches of Orange County. Our population was just exploding. Our library, as you can see here, this is our old library. This library was built in 1927, and it was the library that I came to in 2001. This library had a small expansion on the back of it but had not really been updated or was able to keep up with the fast-changing demands and pace that this large, at this point now, semi-suburban rural community was demanding of its library. And I was pretty daunted by the challenge myself as I figured who am I to make a difference in this town if this library was satisfactory to everyone. But for a variety of reasons, I took the full mantle and the full challenge on, and though I went in somewhat reluctantly, I quickly embraced the challenge of trying to bring this library, this beautiful, well-loved traditional building and the library and its services into the 21st century. And I began that in 2001. Shortly after 2001, the library journal decided to initiate this award for the best small library in America. And I remember very distinctly sitting in my little office in this very building saying to myself, well, that's something that we should try for. I know we need a new building and that's going to be the focus of my next six or seven years here. But we really should be thinking long-term and the reason we want to bring this new library into our community is because we want it to be a wonderful place for people to center of their lives and a place that really has some kind of impact and meaning to every single person who lives there. So just to give you a sense of our community also, I have a couple of other slides here. Here's a picture of Warwick in 1887. It's a little fuzzy, but Warwick hasn't really changed that much since 1887, and accepts that all of those vacant spaces there are now filled in with homes. It's still very beautiful and pastoral, but there are lots and lots of homes. It's 108 square miles, so while we are a small library, we're by no means a small library district. As I said before, we now serve 23 to 24,000 people, which I know is on the upper end of that requirements for even this award. The limit is 25,000 service population. Here's a map also that shows for those of you who are living west of the Mississippi. This is a map that shows where those of us who are east of the Mississippi shows us where Warwick is, and it's sitting really very close to some pretty big places, but we are really pretty small. That being said, I'd like to move on to show you our new library. This is our brand new library. It was opened in 2009, and I'm going to show you some pictures of it, because it's a beautiful building that reflects the architectural quality of our area. In fact, our weather vane at the top of this building has a cow on it because there are cows in the field directly across from us, and we actually have a cow. Her name is Alberta, who is our mascot. This gives you another view of the front of that building on a lovely day, which today is similar outside here in Warwick, New York. This is one of our reading gardens on the side. This is the backside of our building, so some of you may say, that doesn't look like a very small library, but it is 20,000 square feet. It is two stories. It is completely heated with the geothermal heating systems, but it has lots of those fancy efficiencies built into it, but it has an outdoor performance space, which we are enhancing this year. As you can see, there's a little platform there. We're going to be building up that, and here's the backside of the windows, which are one of my favorite shots of it. But anyway, so that's who we are. That's who I am. I've got a little bit of both. I want to tell you a little bit about how we got to be on the cover of the February 1, 2016 issue of Library Journal, which was pretty exciting and still is. We've got thousands of copies of this made all over. This features some aspects of our application. The application process sounds like it's pretty simple, and for those of you who may have undertaken it already, you may resonate with this. We are actually required to complete a two-page application that answers questions related to why your library should be nominated or should be awarded this award and what are some of the special things that it's doing as far as technology and community centers. There are various few things that they list, and they limit you to two pages. So we decided, when it took us a while to decide when we were actually ready to apply for this award. We knew when we opened our building in 2009, we were nowhere near ready to do that yet. We needed to grow into the building. We needed to adjust to it. We needed to adapt to it. We needed to figure out how our community was going to respond to it and what it is that they wanted. And all that time, though, we were holding this out there as a long-term goal to present ourselves and share our story. So we spent the first several years and actually continued to spend a great deal of time listening to our community. And initially, when we brought this new facility into our library, we live in Orange County, as I've told you, it's a relatively conservative area of the country. Regardless of what many of you westerners might think about the East Coast, New York City, it is not, even though it's 60 miles north of it, and there's lots of resistance to taxes and tax increase, and that kind of fight was something that we faced when we were building our building. And because it was also the early 2000s, we still were getting some of those residual concerns that what do we need libraries for now that you have the computer and the internet. I think those arguments are harder to make now now that the shine is off of the computer and the internet. I mean, we still obviously are using them. We're using them here today. They report to our lives, but they don't completely meet all of our needs. So we listened to our community. We opened it up, and wow. That's all I can say. Well, we surprised. We have a parking lot for 60 spaces. Our previous library had two spaces, and the first complaint we got was that our parking lot wasn't big enough. We are now working actually on it, doubling the size of that parking lot, just as that's our major priority at the moment. But we had so many people from so many different parts of our community who came in and said, wow, this is incredible. We really want to be a part of that. So some of the things that we did and that we highlighted in our application were, I'm going to start here with a few slides to tell you about that. We highlighted the basics, which those of you who have been in libraries as long as I know and in public libraries know that service to children, young children, their parents and their caregivers is kind of our bread and butter, I think so. I hope I'm not offending anybody by saying that. And we do an outstanding job of that. This is just one of many, many programs, story times, toddler times, infant times programs we have for parents and children with special needs. If someone comes to us and asks us for something that they'd like to see happen in the library, we jump all over it and on it. So this is just a picture of one of the many programs that we offer here is a picture of our baby music program that we have. Well, in this music, I could probably spend my entire time here just sharing you pictures of all the programs we have for children. But we understand that this is our bread and butter, but we don't want to ignore the huge part of our community that is not focused on young children and their care and their education. So we have, in our community, have identified a large group of seniors, retired folks, older folks, more active seniors. And this particular picture is just one of the many programs that we offer, which is a senior improv acting group. And that's basically all community supported and run by a community volunteer. And it's just one of many. We have a Monday afternoon movies for seniors that we show that 70 to 80 people come to every week with a film discussion. It's just a lot of things going on. We have music from McFarland Drive and creative cultural programs. We offer something just called the Warwick Cafe Reading Project, which is a project where we put free copies of a particular book quarterly into all the... We have eight cafes in our community, and we leave them in there on a special shelf and encourage people to read them and share them and talk about them. And they usually relate to programs that we're offering to the library. Right now the book that's in the cafe is Brooklyn, which is the novel based on the Academy Award nominated movie Brooklyn. So we're in the process of selecting our spring 2016 one, and that's done entirely by the community on our website through a voting process. We have a Warwick Children's Book Festival. We invite 50 children's authors and illustrators to our community under a big tent, and they meet with anyone who's interested in children's literature, and we sell our local books, sell ourselves books. And that program typically attracts to 1,500 to 2,000 people. Each year we do it every year now. It's been so popular. As I mentioned before, we have the music from McFarland Drive, a quarterly series of music programs that in the nice weather we do outside to audiences of three and 400 people. All of these things would not have been possible in our previous facility. Obviously not the reason to build a library isn't just to build a library, but it's to provide services in a place for the community to enjoy their lives together and explore new things. Nothing you need to hear from me. This particular program is something we call Library Out Loud. It's actually podcasts where we interview people who are doing a program at our library or a topic of interest in our community, and we make these available to 10 to 15 minutes off of our website. We get close to 100, 200 listeners to each of these programs, and find that they're very helpful for folks who can't actually get to the library, but like to hear a little bit about all the things that are going on in it. Another important part I heard Kathy talking about this earlier is we can't do all this. We didn't actually increase our staff tremendously when we moved from 4,000 square feet to 20,000 square feet. We added three new part-time clerks, but we now do thousands of programs a year. How do we do all that? We do a lot of it through community partners who actually provide the programming and we provide the support for it, and that's something in our application to the best small libraries that we highlighted, and that was actually noted by them where they said when we got the award announcement that we work so effectively with our community partners. This slide has two programs of the 15 different community partners that we work with. Family Central provides an array of parenting support programs at our library. Again, we don't need to either pay for these programs or have our staff do them. We just need to provide the support for Family Central to bring them in, and they're very, very popular. Very grassroots kind of group and always have large participation. The BYOB, which is an effort of the Warwick Sustainable Warwick Group, they actually had this big kickoff at our library for this banning plastic bags, and actually we're successful here in our community to doing that in our local towns, and so we were a part of that. We certainly didn't do all of it. The library became the central place where people in our community want to share ideas or find a forum for discussion. They would know to come to the library, and they didn't ever think of us that way in the past, and that's something we did highlight in our application. Another thing we highlighted is, this is a nice clear picture isn't it, is that collections, libraries of our bread and butter, I believe of course is our content and access to collections and materials, and here you see a picture of the gentleman reading underneath a piece of artwork that's part of another aspect of our library that I'll talk about in just a minute, but I felt it was really very important that our collections be updated, be weeded, rigorously be clean, be attractive, and be accessible, and that we expand our concept of what it is that we think a library should be lending, we lend whatever is reasonable and what people ask of us to lend, we right now lend a variety of kits for people to do crafts, we are in the process of putting together a tool lending program with some gardening programs that we're doing, so we are, libraries are the initial shares in this new sharing economy that we are, and this concept of sharing, we've been really good at it, and I think we need to sell that idea, and we certainly need to make sure that our collections reflect what it is that our users want and that we find not only the paper books, but also the digital content that they're interested in. We have the largest circulation in our region here of e-book content, and we have subscribed to Hoopla, and we have streaming audio and video content, so we give to people what it is that they want. So better collections, I think we really need to focus on making those collections something that people want to that reflect what they're interested in. I think another area that we focused on in our award application was local history. You see, there's a picture of me here in front of a fundraising project that our library had where an artist created three-dimensional hand sculpted tiles that reflected the history of our community, and it was enormously popular. I often say that public libraries, the only unique thing or probably the most important unique thing about each of us is our local history, and that we have a responsibility of an important one to make sure that we do all we can to archive, present, promote, and talk about that and make things available for people who are exploring and interested in that, and we have created a lot of digital resources or regionally acclaimed database on local history material, our local history programs. We have one a month that we're usually attended by 100 and 150 people, and then there are some of our most popular activities. There's a picture there again of our old library, and we feature that on this tile mural that is now installed in our library, and you can't see what behind my head is actually a tile sculpted of new library. Yeah, Rosemary, I did have a question. Is your old library one of the Carnegie libraries? It looks so. It does look similar because it was built in 1927, which of course is the era of the Carnegie libraries. Yeah, but just happened to be at the same time, but just not related to his project. Not related to his, but a very similar one. The Wissner family, Albert Wissner, who our library is named after, was a very wealthy real estate tycoon from Chicago who settled. They had family roots here in Warwick, and when he died, there was left money for the library to be built with the stipulation that the community support its operation, which is almost a carbon copy of the Carnegie formula. Well, it's not a Carnegie library. It was as well good. Inspired by Carnegie. Indeed, indeed. So here is a picture. This is my section here where I talk about another component of what we were working on this application, and I have to say this application took us probably, I would say, a really solid year of just meeting. We had a committee that worked on it. We talked about it. We said, look, you know, what are the chances of us actually winning this award? Well, maybe they're not that great. So let's not worry about that so much. Let's just say, what would we want to be doing, and what would we want to be saying about ourselves in an award application? And let's start tweaking things a little bit and make sure that everything we do, if we put it through the lens of applying for this award, would it come up? I mean, would it come up? Would it make sense? Well, that's kind of a vague wishy-washy thing, probably, to say. What I'm trying to communicate is that if you start to look a little bit differently about what it is you're doing, how it is you're prioritizing versus, and you think, I have to stand up and shout this from the rooftops, you might change your response to it. A little example would be, I'd often be in a staff meeting and someone said, well, you know, somebody wants us to have a paper shredder here. Simple like that. And then someone would say, what do they need a paper shredder for? Can't they just rip their paper up or go through these haul-on conversations about what do they need a paper shredder for? So I would often, to the chagrin, some of my staff say, well, is that what the best small library would do? Ask why do they need it? Well, maybe you just go out and buy a paper shredder because it doesn't cost you that much money and people would like to have one. So, I mean, that was, maybe it got a little annoying and hopefully the rest of my staff isn't listening to this, so they'll chime in later. But that was kind of how we tried, we prepared ourselves to write this application and put it forward. We've been our focus for many, many years, to look at all of our policies and make sure that our staff remember that their reason for being here is not to safeguard material but to provide a service to everybody who walks in to ensure that those people who come in feel welcome and it's a place that they'd like to come, whether it's to hang out, to find a homework help for their kids or just look for a good book or attend a program where they're going to feel that this was a really nice place to be. Our new building construction has created this very warm and inviting at my physical space, but we really needed to make sure that those things can often get in our way in public libraries, which are our policies and our staff who are not focusing always on the main purpose for them being there can sometimes get in our way. And so we went through a fairly rigorous process this year to check out library material with an Outer Library card. Some of you will probably laugh when you hear that because you already do it, but others of you may know that it's sometimes we get a little hung up on having to have everything just the way that it was and things being more of the DMV experience than as I like to call my, talk to my library staff about then a real service and friendly atmosphere. We did a lot of policy changing and a lot of customer service training as well. We also focused on what we call here our online branch which is our website. You can all go to it at this is our URL here after the after my talk and you can look at it, but we try very hard to make sure that there's information is easy to find that it's current it's updated. We have like many of you online registration places you can you can reserve material and all that is pretty typical for most libraries. But we made sure that we didn't ignore it that it was kept up to date that it was definitely was refreshed with new pictures and photos because we considered it just another place for people to come and meet us and be a part of what we're all about here at the library. Again, I talked a little bit about our warm and comfortable spaces people we have we never used to have this age group this demographic that's represented in this slide here just hanging out at the library doing work and now we're struggling to find enough spaces for just about everybody who loves to come in and do whatever it is they want to do. Here of course is a beautiful shot of a young child doing what we all love to see them do which is read a book. We also focused for this application on our technology making sure that not only our hard wired computers were up to date and the fastest we could make available but also that we had Wi-Fi and laptops available and gadgets available and all kinds of training available for people to learn how to use the newest and latest technology. Here is one of our tech partners which is a volunteer from our community retiree from a tech job with Verizon and he now teaches Excel at our classes and we have a variety of other people who do that as well. Another thing that we did was that we embraced in our community this online bulletin board that we have and it's called War Valley Commonplace which was originally started by the village and then it kind of lost its focus and lost its priority for a while and a lot of people in the community were upset about that and they wanted to see it continue and so the library rescued it basically and it's actually we're about to launch it we spent the last six months in developing it and it's going to be very exciting people. We've had focus groups here at the library to talk about it what people like to see and it's basically a community meeting place again online and it's called War Valley Commonplace. We have teams and tech which is also a very important part of our tech focus not just in terms of the educational aspect here we have some teams who are at a team program on coding but we also use our teams as many of you do to help some of our other folks who like to learn how to use their gadgets so there are team tech helpers. Another thing that we do and I hope I'm not going over too much time here so I do want to give you guys a chance to ask me questions I'm sure you probably have them. This is we focus on our community's talent we showcase it War Work is very famous for its large vibrant art community and so in our library we have art exhibits monthly art exhibits that rotate we don't actually accept donations of permanent art we just save our walls for rotating exhibits and this is exhibit right here you see some of our artists came together for this photo this is one of the exhibits we do which is a quarterly community showcase where each artist contributes one piece to a theme but in our lower level gallery we also have a single artist who can can show up to 40 to 50 pieces and they're done on a monthly basis we've been open since 2009 and we have that space booked for another year a year out for a new exhibit each month so that's pretty incredible and of course by showcasing the talent of all the people in our community we bring those people not only into the library but they feel really a part of the library as if you know that it reflects them and they take a great enormous amount of pride in that and then of course as we all know translate that into support and here's another one of our young artists who's created these are recycled farm implements that she's made into art so how do we accomplish this and how did we get to this place of course we did it through the help of an enormous amount of people and as I say here it takes a village to apply for the best small library in America award our village consists of our staff this is some of our staff we actually have 28 staff members but we have only 10 full-time staff members the rest are part-time we are open 7 days a week 70 hours a week so we really stretch people very very thinly across there but we are managed to do this because all of our staff are here because they are dedicated and excited to be a part of what we are doing and what we have done here in the community has done nothing but to fuel their dedication and focus and enthusiasm in addition to the staff we have our friends in the library we have actually over 2,000 friends but the core of our friends group is about 30 people who work they actually man a bookstore for use books which is very common I know in libraries but they do all sorts of other programs in the library as well here that you have them they were the ones who ran the World Book Night when that was an event that was still going on we also have our library board of trustees here we have a picture of them with our department heads and of course they are instrumental many of them have been on our trustees for some time but we do have some fresh blood as well and they really shepherd the library through a lot of some of the challenges that we need to get through and are very supportive not only of the staff but of me as well in addition to our library board and staff and volunteers and friends we have our community partners and they this is just a photo of some of them they include the mayor the superintendent the superintendent of schools principals of the schools our local bookstore owner our work historical society our town historian it's just our chamber of commerce I mean they all are a part of our library of our library success our foundation is also a big part of what we do here at the library they in fact have an annual very successful annual appeal that raises over $70,000 a year to help us put all these programs that we're able to do that are so successful so that is my story I know I probably was rambling a bit there but I would like to I know I don't have too much time I would like to encourage you to tell your story I mean we are no different than all of you folks out there and I'm a little hesitant to say that if I have some special secret here about how to accomplish this because there really is no secret it is just dedication and passion and hard work and persistence and then the most important part is tell your story to your community to get the support you need and then keep broadcasting that as far and wide as you can so can I ask if there's any questions or yes absolutely thank you of course yes definitely thank you very much Rosemary yes if anyone has any questions there's a couple right now but if you do have questions just a reminder in your go to webinar interface there's a questions section the little tab you can open up and you can type in there and ask any of your questions to Rosemary and any of other speakers throughout the day so go ahead and type right into there someone wants to know Rosemary how much did your patron activity increase once you built your new library our patron activity increased by about I would say ten fold wow we had a very little library before we had no room to do anything we had no program space we did our story times in this basement area we had to move the tables and the bookshelves and everything else just to get ten people around it and so when I came in 2001 part of building support to build a new library was what I did was I just started doing programs all over the town I just went to the school I went to the town hall wherever they would let me go we would do programs and you know they were limited they were at least a way of you know connecting with people and beginning to show them what we could do and I've been a firm believer that people have asked especially with our new building how did you manage to get from that little place to this big place so anyway that was huge a tremendous increase and like I said we have to build a new parking lot when we only had two spaces before 60 spaces are never enough and you said that's already not enough they already need more that's the only thing what is your what is your population served or how many registered users do you guys have are there two different numbers yes it always is I think maybe some communities are able to get every single person in a library car but we have 23,000 plus residents in the War Valley Central School District which is our library's district it's 108 square miles we have probably close to 16,000 library card holders and you know the number we often ask then about those how many are actually using the library you know it's probably a smaller number but a large group here a lot so we have you know maybe 2,000 visitors a month that comes through the library I'm not so great at all my statistics hopefully there aren't too many too many more of those questions because we'll have to look them all up the only other one is actually about funding what is your what are your funding sources where does the money come from I know you mentioned some things it's all over the place but largely our funding is public support we have an annual library levy vote and we ask for support from the community which translates into taxes 90% of our support is public support and we get it 90% of it through taxes but that being said we also write grants for programming and we have a foundation that raises funds for us and we use those we have a $1.5 million budget for some you probably sound like a ton of money and others are hardly not enough but our budget when we were in that tiny little building was $500,000 so huge change yeah big change big change but 23,000 people that meant that from people were paying maybe $80 more a year for a new library because there was just so many people to spread that across that cost across from that person yeah and once they got a sense of that this is the tough part because they thought oh my gosh an $8.5 million building that's so much money but then when they got a sense of that everybody's paying for it and then they realized that somebody has a $5 million home which there are very many of those around here they're going to pay a little bit more but the average person was paying $80 extra a year they thought oh wow this is definitely worth it and this might relate to a couple of questions a couple of people have asked about your friends group if you can explain more about that and how did you get 2,000 friends of the library right well 2,000 not active friends I've been accused of hyperbole but this is I just have to review the list because we're doing an advocacy for our annual vote here in April and there's 2,000 people on their list which means 2,000 people respond to their mailing for becoming a member of the friends when I came here we did have a friends group but it was actually disbanding because the library had a failed referendum in 1996 which was very demoralizing and folks were still kind of depressed and friends group just just wanted all the put their heads under a pillow and go home so they did and we just started all over again I met the president current president of our friends when I first started working here in the lobby of the library with her baby and a little baby carrier and now he's about to graduate from high school so but she's a dynamic leader she together we're able to involve them in a lot of things I made sure that I was that they had time with me that I didn't delegate this important relationship to someone else that they understood that they were central to the library's success and I met every single one of their meetings every single one of their events to reinforce that and it just grew and grew and then of course with the successful building there was more and more excitement and now we have a bookstore that they love they take ownership of and they really we have over 40 volunteers in the bookstore on a monthly basis we have over 100 volunteers actually work in our library so we're able to find opportunities for them to be involved you know I consider that a huge important part of building our advocacy and our support here which is to say yes we'll find some way you can be involved what do you like to do let's figure it out is that bookstore part of your new building or is that elsewhere located in our new building it's on the lower level by the children's room I didn't give you pictures of everything but it's on the lower level by our children's area and it's not huge but it's a space to call their own it's nice to have a separate dedicated space that's always there for that too I know lots of libraries do book sales when they can in wherever they can set it up pop up kind of thing but that's nice when you can have specific space set aside and dedicate to that purpose and you have to work on that relationship too it's their space but it's inside our library they're always asking me can we push this out here so I'm always working with them to encourage them to explore new things but our friends group is just a huge part of our advocacy our voter turnout is much larger than is typical for our region anyway they work very hard at making sure folks know how important that vote is every year to keeping our library as vibrant as it is someone wants to know if you do a volunteer appreciation for them absolutely absolutely you can't appreciate people too much and I'm one of ten children and nobody ever appreciated me when I was brought up it doesn't come naturally to me but I learned my lesson many many years ago it's extremely important so we do a lot of things for our volunteers but we have an annual appreciation luncheon in April and we get 60 to 80 of our 100 volunteers who come to that every year we have something called a pretty committee here in our library which basically does a lot of recycled book art and they often will make little things for them bookmarks out of recycled books and we have a luncheon and we have a speaker come or some of our leaders in the community just to express appreciation for what they do so yes we pay I guess if I were to call this presentation anything it's really about you pay very special attention to these relationships people in your community inside your library and out it's really important and you need to nurture those and if it's not your natural personality styles you're going to have trouble but obviously it's mine so it works pretty well great going back to some more specifics the new programming space in your building how large is that how much more space do you have now well we have space we have one programming area we call it community room and it seats about a hundred it's not huge it's not an auditorium with seating but it's just a big room and we have a projector screen and overhead screen where we show our movies and where presenters will present programs and we do our computer training in there we have a laptop cart with 12 laptops on it and we bring that in so it morphs into a computer lab and then we take those out of the tables and then the mahjong players are in there for an hour and then something else is going on it's very very busy in all space but it's nice having a nice even you said it was not an auditorium and actually I think that's good that it can be transformed into something else as needed absolutely whatever kind of setup that you needed and it is on a daily basis we had a little bit of trouble with the fact that we have a cleaner who comes at five in the morning and leaves at nine in the morning and at first we had some trouble with how we get in this room change four times a day for all of these different programs and I was laughing at something Kathy said because true to our staff and I think the success of our library is that our staff just got together and said okay this is how we're going to do it Monday to Friday Monday to Sunday whatever time period we're going to assign each department their job is to make sure the room is set up and is ready for the next group who's coming in so nobody it doesn't fall too strongly on one person and you know we're talking about just moving chairs everything's pretty easy to you know we don't want a heavy equipment and so that's how we do it when people walk in well what day is it whose turn is it it's a really nice it's just a very nice feeling and that actually kind of having your staff work together like that really I use this a lot you take ownership and care about the library that actually really some questions someone asked is how did you specifically address staff that always responded with things like why do we need a paper shredder why are we doing this and focused on programming and dreaming a bit bigger than being frustrated by the little things you know how did you I mean obviously you yourself you're just you're a gung-ho kind of person yeah well leadership helps leadership helps and you know how did I get them to do that because I have to say when I first came there was a bit of a challenge there I think it's just consistently voicing the message what is important I mean I still do it today and I started off doing it when I was here why are you giving these people a hard time what are you doing and you know I've been here for 15 years as long as anybody now so everyone knows but it's a consistent consistently reminding people why it is that they're here and then supporting them into doing what they're doing and giving them that complete power to make decisions that need to be made within the confines of the job that they have to do and to not and to talk to them and give them training and tell them yes you know this is what we're gonna do and this is how this is where we want to go so you gotta gotta help us with it I know it all sounds cushy but it's a day to day daily grind I just had to do it before I got on this webinar but he came in and wanted to check out a book for their wife that was on hold and they didn't have their library card of their wife and so the normal response we all learn in a library's privacy is huge it's a big deal we're not gonna check out a book for somebody else and the person left and I stood there with the staff member and I said well what else could you have done yeah privacy is important I get that but what else do you think you could have done and we talked about it and she said well I guess I could have tried to call her his wife and see if it was okay I said yeah that might have been nice because then you're not violating our privacy and then you want to help them and do the extra effort but we all forget to do that it's a constant sure now to do I would assume this is a yes but I'm gonna ask somebody to ask it do you have a strategic plan or long range plan that you have for the library to keep up with these things you're doing you definitely have something that large yeah and we definitely do as on our website the current one which is in the process of beginning an update to that and this April we've already contracted with an outside consultant to help us with that which I think is really important to have somebody from the outside leading you because you can't look at yourself and evaluate yourself as effectively somebody else look at it yeah but we definitely do and it's huge it's hugely important for me as a leader to have a roadmap like that really important a more specific question where to go the paper shredder that apparently caught people's attention have there been any issues? specifically like noise complaints I know you have a bigger building or there won't be that kind of problem no to be honest with you the paper shredder is a small example but I can see what people are focusing in on it it's I don't think I've ever heard of I don't believe I've heard of the library offering that as a specific service I know but it's such a tiny thing it's so easy to accommodate we have cases of staplers things out there by the copy so people can actually do stuff with their copy no it doesn't create I think that's an interesting question sometimes there are always thinking about why not to do something and why this is going to be so horrible and yes it might create an issue where someone says that's awfully noisy could you do it somewhere else and I'll say okay let's try and do it somewhere else let's react and respond try it out in the experiment just two more things to do because we are getting close to the end time here someone didn't have a comment we have a local husband trying to check out books for a wife someone here says that Seattle public library actually does an option that you can have a message added to your record that says who you are allowed to check out for I'm giving him permission to do this I'm giving her permission so that could be an option to help because we know about that thank you and your application for the best mall library in America for people to read I'm not sure how that is do you guys in the library journal have that posted I wasn't sure in fact that's a very good question because that's of course what I asked too when we were doing do you want to see what is the previous one submitted so we can get an idea they have never they don't ever make them available but I certainly can make it available I have it, I just have it there's no rules they can't share it there's no rules that tell me they can't so if somebody wants to just email me at our library at rcooper at rcls.org and I'd be happy to send it to you okay great thank you that actually grabbed all the questions for you thank you so much Rosemary for being with us I was hoping we could get the best small library in America on fits perfectly with our theme obviously talk small libraries I hope she wasn't a little too freaked out I was actually pretty last minute there stalking waiting for the announcement to come out because they wait until the very end of January library journal does to announce this award and that's when we are working on our agenda for this conference because we're at the end of February day searching and refreshing my search and checking my alerts and as soon as that announcement came out I found Rosemary's website, found her email and luckily she was available I'm only too happy I hope you all realize that I'm nobody special after listening to me for half an hour and that you know it's definitely all well within your reach and your graph so go for it and if you have any questions, if you're going to do it and want to talk some more give me a call can you repeat your email address again there? sure it's rcooper at rcls.org great thank you very much thank you thanks for being with us Rosemary it was a pleasure alright thank you that is our second session second session for the day we'll see you in the next session wrapped up