 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.