 So hello everyone, and welcome to our round robin discussion with the members of the SDSU iSchools Leadership and Management Program Advisory Committee. I'm Deborah Hicks and on behalf of myself and Sue Alman, the co-chairs of the pack. We welcome you to this discussion about crisis planning, a conversation with our an expert panel. In today's schedule we're just going to very quickly welcome and introduce all of our panelists will then have a round robin round robin panel discussion of four questions and then a quick wrap up at the end. So our panelists are Annapurna Dandu, the interim library services manager of public library services at the Saratoga library in Cupertino, California. Amanda Folk from the Ohio State University. She's the head of teaching and learning there. We have Melissa Frazier-Arno, the chief of integrated reference services at the Library of Parliament in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. We have Calvin Watson, the executive director of the Las Vegas Clark County Library District, and Daphne Wood, director of library services planning and engagement at the Greater Victoria Public Library. So let's get to our first question. So, starting with Anna, the question is supervising managing and leading people during a time of crisis is different than normal times. What qualities or skills are necessary to successfully lead a team through a crisis? Good morning, everyone. I have the pleasure of going first today. So going back almost a year when we started being in this pandemic situation, I would say in this crisis I would say change was the only constant thing like you are now. And the most important thing for this crisis management was flexibility. Flexibility is key. Be ready to experiment and adapt. We had seen many changes or updates to the health orders, guidance as we received and everything related to the pandemic. Nothing stayed true or accurate for more than a few days during these times. And in any crisis, that's how it's going to be. We did not have a lot of answers to give our staff or patrons or anyone else. In times like these, honesty is very important. And there were a lot of times when I did not have any answers and I told my staff, I'm sorry, I do not have an answer to this, but I will get an answer to you. And then I tried to find answers in some situations we did have them in others we did not. And we were experimenting with our services and modifying as needed and adapting new working methodologies as we needed to keep business going. And during this time, some things work and from some others we just learned our next steps, what to do and what not to do. So during this time, one important thing was creating a connection. You have creating connections with your staff, with your members and all that is very important. So communicate and listen to connect with yourself, your staff, your peers or managers. Show compassion and empathy. The first thing you want to do for yourself, your staff and your peers is ask them how are you doing and show your vulnerability. We're all going through this and learning from it. Just ask how can I help, or how can we help each other in this situation. Make sure you're available for your staff. I shared my personal phone number with my staff and I asked them to reach out anytime they can. I had virtual office hours and was available through Teams as well. And when you make goals and set priorities, stay consistent. Map your team's path. Be flexible as goals might change from the day to day or from hour to hour. And just adjust and adapt as needed. Follow through on things and when needed, create consistent opportunities for your staff to complete their tasks. Be very clear. Clarity is very important during these times when there is a lot of gray and we're all trying to navigate this space. Have honest conversations. Clarify your goals again and again and stay connected with the organization's mission. Explain how your goals are connected to the organization's mission so everyone understands the importance of what they are doing. And also understand the impact and the benefit of the services that we are providing to our community. Share your thoughts, clarify your roles, responsibilities of each person, and state your expectations really clearly. So clarity is very important and in the same process, find out what your staff needs and give them the tools they need to complete their tasks. So the most important things I would stress is flexibility is very important. That is the key to working with your staff, with your community members, and yourself and your services. So, and besides that, create a connection, stay consistent and be clear about what you need, what you're trying to do. Thank you so much, Anna. Amanda, what were your thoughts on this question? Perhaps not surprisingly, I have many of the same thoughts that Anna Perna did, and I also agree with flexibility and adaptability and honesty. Related to that, however, I think what was most important to me over the past year was the ability to be empathetic and compassionate, which is something that Anna Perna also mentioned. There will be some crises that are specific to your library. For example, something happens to the HVAC and there's a flood in the collections and that's something that you're dealing with just in your library. But there are other crises like the pandemic that we're experiencing right now or natural disasters where people are really trying to manage not just their professional lives, but also their personal lives. And it's almost impossible to disentangle those two when you're going through a crisis such as this one. People are scared at work, but they're also scared in their personal lives. They're figuring out how they're going to take care of their children or their family members, how they're going to go grocery shopping, how they're going to protect themselves. And in many cases recently, we've been grieving the loss of loved ones. So empathy and compassion has been critical, I feel, for managing my team over the past year. I regularly recognize that we're not in normal times, that a lot of this does not feel okay, but we're in this together and we'll find ways to move forward together. Part of that has also been, as Anna Perna mentioned, flexibility. So it's really key that you identify the immediate priorities and be willing to let other things go to the side while you figure out how to move forward together. And in addition to that, making sure you take time to celebrate small wins, whether that's an individual having accomplished something that they had been working towards, or a team working together to move forward a program or service during this time. It's really important always, but especially now to celebrate those wins moving forward because it gives folks a sense of accomplishment and some normalcy. And finally, just patience, patience with yourself, patience with your team, patience with society. It goes a really long way, I think, in helping to not become burned out by the situation that we're living in. Thank you. Thank you. Melissa, what were your thoughts on this first question? Well, I first off would echo a lot of what Anna and Amanda have said. These are excellent points and I absolutely agree. These connections, flexibility and communication are essential in supervising and managing and leading during a crisis. So I don't want to repeat what they've said. They've expressed it very well. I would add self-awareness and self-care to the list and really emphasize those. We often focus on our team, making sure our team are all right, making sure we're there for our team. But we also need to take a moment to step back and see how we're reacting to the crisis and make sure that our own reactions aren't impacting how we're communicating and how we're interacting with others in the workplace. These crises are stressful for managers as well as they are for employees. So you want to make sure that you're able to preserve some of your patients, that you're not snapping at people, that you're not making judgments rashly. If you find yourself being triggered by something in the workplace, take a moment to stop and consider that. It might mean that you might need to model behavior about work-life balance even during a crisis. Our first impulse is to be on all the time, to be available all the time, and certainly you need to be available to your team. But you also need to take time to take care of yourself. And so that's something we always emphasize, and it's something that's very important in crises situations as well. Because if you aren't taking care of yourself, you're not listening to your emotions, you're not seeing your reactions, and you're snapping at people, or you're making rash judgments, that's not going to help anyone in your organization get through the crisis. So make sure that you don't forget that component of managing. There's a self-management component in there as well. It's very important because at some point the crisis will be over. Hopefully you'll get a chance to recharge and to process what's happened. But take some time in between to process what's going on with you, to acknowledge what's going on. And as mentioned, admitting those vulnerabilities, there might be times when you don't have the capacity to do everything you want to in a crisis. And that's all right. These aren't normal times, they're crisis times. So the expectations, you would have different expectations for your staff, acknowledging the limitations on their time and energy. You need to also be aware that there are limitations to yours. You're not, you know, nobody's expecting a manager to be a superhero during a crisis. Thank you so much, Melissa. I love the idea of not expecting people to be superheroes. It's good advice for life in general. Kelvin, what were your thoughts on this question? Well, going last, everything's pretty much already being said. Second to last. Second to last, we're close to last, okay? So I would say, you know, I would just reiterate what's already been mentioned and probably just add, you know, coaching through this time is definitely critical, focusing on, you know, individuals, you know, personal as well as, you know, professional aspects, because as mentioned, you know, this is definitely been a trying time with COVID and everything that's been taking place. But that the libraries and the work that we do, it's, you know, continuing and continues. Something else that I like to throw in is, you know, as leading through this time, you know, having that emotional intelligence is something, you know, also that is helpful during this time. Empathy as mentioned already as well. And just teamwork and working and working together. That's some of those are a few of the things that I would that I would add. Thank you. Now, last but certainly not least, we have Daphne. Was there anything you wanted to add to this question? Sure, thank you. I would add just a sliver of popular culture reference here. I was thinking about this question in terms of the movie Apollo 13. It's from quite a quite a while ago, I think it was 1995. Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, and it's about the space mission. And when the crisis occurs, there is a team up in space and their, their spacecraft is, is malfunctioning. Meanwhile, there's a team back at NASA headquarters, and they're trying to figure out in a very real time constraint how they're going to get themselves out of this situation. And so some really great leadership qualities are basically the ingredients to getting the team on the ground together and the team in space together to solve the solution. One of the key qualities there is to be decisive. So in a normal time, of course, it's good to be decisive. We must be decisive to move forward. But in a time of crisis, we often, as everyone has said on the panel, we have incomplete information or we have information that is changing constantly. So the rule of thumb in a crisis is to go with what you've got, go with the best information that you have available at the time to make a decision to move forward. Don't be caught in a state of paralysis and a tendency, perhaps that's a strength that we have in our sector to provide very good quality rationale for our decisions because we're professional researchers. We base our decisions on best practices. In a time of crisis, we do all of that, but in an accelerated time frame in which we take what we have. We move forward based on that information and we be prepared, as others have said, to change that decision or direction based on new information that comes forward. Also, in reference to the Apollo 13 movie, I was talking about also bringing in the skill set from different areas to apply really novel thinking to problem solving that often comes to bear in a crisis where we don't have a manual. We may have a crisis communications manual or a procedure on what to do, but everything has to be tailored to the situation, of course. So it will tell you the types of things that you'll need to take care of, but not necessarily how to take care of them depending on the context. And that's where all the great thinking and perspectives come from individuals inside an organization. The best ideas can always come from anywhere. And some of the solutions that you will be seeking when you're experiencing a crisis and you're trying to get either to the next step or to a longer term solution will, I would say, involve a process that can bring in thinking, not just from those who are around the table making the decision, but also those that can inform that decision to always a great experience for organizations to to dip into the experiences and the perspectives from the strength of their organization, which which remains people in good times and bad, it's always the strength of staff and the, the perspectives that we receive from those that we serve that will inform us and help us move forward. Thank you so much, Daphne. So just before we move on, I'm going to quickly wrap up what everybody was saying just to sort of put a lovely bow on it, which is the, the importance of flexibility was really highlighted with everyone I believe this idea of experimentation that was supported by some Daphne was just saying about bringing skills, all skills from all all throughout the organization and the community into the organization to help it complete those experiments and get that novel thinking really rolling the importance of communication. There's much, not so much sharing information as well as listening, particularly with a deep sense of empathy and honesty, so that decisions are transparent, given the limitations of a moving crisis such as a pandemic and even in a smaller sense, you know, a flood in the as Amanda pointed out the, you know, there's still class moving situations, the importance to show vulnerability, and to, and that sort of the, the, the support of that, the self awareness that and the emotional intelligence that's needed to support that, as well as focus on self care so that you can model the importance of work life balance. And then finally the one thing that really caught my attention was the, the focus on the intersectionality of the professional and the personal lives of not only staff but also managers and leaders and really keeping at the heart of, of what's going on so that the mission of the organization can be met in a in an empathetic way for everybody involved. So let's move on to our second question. So, will this time we'll start with Amanda. How do you effectively communicate with your team or with other colleagues during a crisis. Thank you. So I think for me at least at the beginning of the pandemic and as we shifted to telework. We had regular check ins, almost on the daily with our team, which was not our typical way of operating previously. We had all been in the same office space it was very easy to casually run into one another and share an update or ask a question if we needed to but we had to be a lot more intentional, intentional about creating the space for folks to share information and to ask questions related to that too I think I may have become a little bit of an over share. And on the one hand you want to be careful because there's so much information as folks have mentioned and it's constantly changing and that can be a little overwhelming. But I know it also helped my team to trust me a bit more because they knew that they were getting the most up to date current information about the situation, and could start making decisions about their own programs for programs and services based on that. And also encouraging them to really ask questions or raise concerns because I have my own perspective of course and I'll go back to folks my boss, our library administration and ask questions. But as Daphne was mentioning everybody comes to this with a different perspective and I had some really great great questions for my team that really allowed us to get more information questions that I wouldn't have considered previously. So to summarize that more intentional check ins in a way that folks can get together as a group and talk through some things in addition to information sharing and encouraging folks to ask questions or raise concerns. Thank you so much. Melissa, what were your thoughts on this question. I really agree with Amanda's approach. The check ins are very, very important. I want to give a little bit of a different angle in this question. I'm sure that we're going to hear a lot of great advice on communications at the interpersonal level with your team. I want to talk a little bit about information management within the organization during a crisis as well. You want to make sure that you've got strong information management processes in place. These are important at all times, but they're especially important during a crisis. Things like making sure that people have access to all the repositories where your key documents are going to be is going to be important. That might mean that as part of your backup plan, maybe you have certain key documents that are outside of the repository. Maybe there's a certain copy that's kept somewhere that people can take home on a stick drive or have with them. His access to your systems is going to be, it can be a big challenge during crises. So you want to make sure that the key people can access the most up to date versions of documents. You want to be careful how you're managing decision documents too. You don't want to have a situation where multiple copies of decision documents are floating around in email. So people don't know what's the final version of a decision or which piece has the most up to date content from the various operational teams. So work with your information management team. Make sure that everyone is on the same page in terms of how those communication processes should go. Where documents should be saved? Who should have access? Where the emergency backup copies are? These are all going to be very important. And these are questions that you really should start thinking about for the next crisis as well. Think about them in this crisis. Think about what you can do differently in the next crisis. So this will really make everything else much easier to handle. If you've got good practices in place, if people know where they should be saving, where should they be retrieving? Where can they go for the most authoritative versions of things? It's going to make everything else go more smoothly at a corporate level. And I think I'll let my colleagues talk about more of the team aspects because I'm sure that's where a lot of us have focused in this COVID crisis. Thank you for that perspective, Melissa. It's easy to overlook, I think, particularly as information professionals. We think that we have that stuff down Pat, and sometimes we don't. So Calvin, what were your thoughts throughout this question? So having previously been in Broward County, a lot of my comments are going to be on what we did there. But so one of the things that we had because of the hurricanes is that we had a continuation of operational plans. So we called it a coop. So we continually kept our coop up. It's an annual exercise that all of the agencies go through, including libraries. So when we have a crisis or any crisis such even as COVID, we actually relied on our coop to make lots of decisions. And the staff are already familiar with that. So any diversions that we made from the coop, of course, we had to be flexible because COVID-19 was certainly not something that we had planned for. And so the communications with our teams then had to be very intentional about what it is that we plan to do, what were we doing, and also why we were making some of the decisions. I felt like I certainly am a transparent leader, but I even probably increased my transparency in the conversations that I was having with individuals. Because of, you know, there's for making decisions about their safety, you know, were they comfortable coming to work. We also did in Broward, our libraries were open to the staff, but not to the public. So we worked every day during COVID. So our communications were constant email, phone check-ins, even in-person meetings. I still was having in-person meetings. But the piece that we also planned for in the coop was that connectivity. So we talked about making sure that people had their devices. We had a phone tree list already that was established. And so that was, and all of that was necessary because hurricane season was still going to be taking place even during COVID. So, you know, just having some of those two beforehand can certainly be very helpful when you're working to communicate during any crisis. Thank you for that, Calvin. Yes, we forget that crises can happen in the middle of crises often. So, yeah, keeping those communication lines open is super important. Daphne, what were your thoughts on this question? So I have a few tactical points I'd like to share. But before I do, I just want to say how much what Melissa said resonated with me about the file, the naming conventions, because how many of us have received the, you know, document that says final. And the next one says final, final, final underscore two. This is for real final. In a crisis, this is often the time when there's a spotlight that is shining on things that during normal times, perhaps the organization can absorb or, you know, you can accommodate those types of momentary confusion over which is the final in a crisis, but not the case. So I couldn't concur more with the need to have a lot of this thought out in terms of what process you're going to follow what channel you're going to use what, what frequency you're going to commit to communicating as the previous panelists have mentioned already. That's essential for the bedrock must have. So here's some tactical tips that I would like to share. One, when we're in the, when we're in the point in time of a crisis when time is seems to be speeding up, and we need to be very decisive and make decisions, but there's a lot of decisions that are being made simultaneously. So how do you communicate with multiple groups that need this information in order for them to make decisions. So one thing that that I found that works really well is, I have basically made the agenda of strategic teams available to the entire organization so that people can essentially audit a meeting that they would normally never attend so that they can hear live what a decision is if it's appropriate, or they can have background or context which then expedites the ability to to ramp up people to a current state of understanding so that they can go and do what they need to do, rather than having one person who is tasked necessarily with going and communicating the outcome of that meeting to multiple parties or, or trying to push that information out and hoping that that message will be received and then acted on. So it doesn't work in every situation, but in some cases it works very well. So you don't have to explain, for example, the state of your, your network that is going to be, you know, offline for 24 hours, you can write as many people as your tool can accommodate to listen to that message, and then with that information, they go off and make plans accordingly. So I would think about how you can incorporate more information with fewer meetings, just by increasing another tip that I would I would like to share as a tactical approach is to always think of information as a cascade. So, usually when when we're in a crisis we're looking at what, what decision needs to be made and how that will impact the audience that that we're going to focus on. So, let's say, if there is a hurricane, and we're thinking that a facility is going to be shut down, maybe the first thought is we have to have the safety of our staff, you know, first and foremost, and we're going to focus on that. In order for the staff to be the primary audience, who else needs to have that information to achieve that goal so that's where the, perhaps the municipality that is the in a shared facility, they need to be involved. Some of the service providers need to be involved. Vendors, you know, all of these other associated audiences to support your primary audience. So just thinking downstream, farther than just the direct audience that you're communicating with will give your message more detail, more context, and we'll cover more bases and answer more questions. Plus, you'll be engaging proactively with all of the other audiences that really have a piece in this as well. So, that's something that I found that works very well and when I haven't done it when I've just focused on. Here's a message for staff I found that I usually have to communicate multiple times afterwards, including information that I should have gathered before by communicating quickly with others to to get that information front and center instead of chasing. So, that's what I went at. Thank you so much. And last but not least with this question anyway we have Anna what were your thoughts about effectively communicating with your team. All of you have covered this very well and talked about everything so I'm going to talk about my personal experience. So first week of March I was interviewing for the like community librarian job. And the first week of April, I became the community library. So I went into this job as a new person having to manage about 40 people. So, when you've been there for some time, I think people know you they approach you to talk to you but in my situation, I didn't have that with 75 to 80% of my staff so I had to build trust with them so they could approach me if they had any issues. So I started out having a weekly all staff meeting so they could come talk to me and then I did virtual office hours because I just wanted to make myself available to them. And management was passing on things to me which I was passing on the same to the staff, but at the same time, I needed them to be open, which was a really tough challenge it didn't happen in the beginning but a month into this crisis. I kept meeting them, we would go there and start meetings every week say, what is something that happened to you that was positive this week or that you want to share with everyone else. So that's how we started our meetings, our communication process. So people would first become comfortable with each other and it was a completely different environment meeting everybody online through zooms teams or anything, or the other channels that we used. So my biggest challenge for communication at that time was my, all my staff didn't know me so I had to build that, and then communicate with them. So, I had to come up with my own challenge, I divided my library into three teams, and I had leads, and asked them to communicate with the staff directly stay in touch with them. And I gave my number to everybody, and I also was making calls made sure I contacted everybody made a personal contact call them, talk to them and let them know that I'm here. Anytime you need me please call me and then when we had to, I had to pass information I did that. And being a middle manager you have to go up and down both ways. So it was a challenge sometime, but I learned it the hard way during the crisis. I was just thinking that you definitely had a trial by fire this, you're taking on this management role, you had a lot on your plate and it sounds like you did a great job. So just to wrap up everybody's responses with this we had this one. This question actually elicited some great perspectives because there's this perspective of dealing with people and teams. You know, having regular check ins, the importance of building trust, the making sure that there are fewer meetings, and as well as more information but then also we have the importance of just the simple management of information. So, keeping in place you know naming conventions and making sure everybody has access to everything. So, let's go on to our third question and we will start with Melissa. So, Melissa, how do you prioritize limited and sometimes diminished resources during a crisis. When I was preparing for this answer I sort of took a look at what's recommended and prioritizing and working during crisis and sort of the field of crisis communications and public relations and the general rule that's provided in prioritizing is people, then environment and community and then the money. So, so that's sort of it that's a good rule to go by start with your people. And that's, that's your staff it's your users it's your it's a community or you're sitting in, and that should guide kind of your first actions in the immediate aftermath of the crisis of course are your primary concern is everyone safety and well being. So prioritize things that that make sure that your people are safe and well. And once you get on beyond that, you know a lot of the crisis literature we look at is looking at short term crises where you're kind of dealing with something that's, that's, you know, that's happening in sort of an intense speed intense intense way for short duration and then we've got COVID where we have. We're now at a year. So it's sort of it changes our perspective on managing these resources it's not suddenly prioritizing your time in the first couple of days. It's prioritizing a whole years, a whole years budget. And prioritizing your staff over time. So this is where, when you have some, whether whether you're dealing with a short or a long term crisis. You're going to look first at your at your organization's priorities look at your mission and your mandate, and those should guide what you prioritize when you're dealing with with managing resources over a longer term. So you want to, ideally you should have done some planning prior to crisis to identify what are your essential operations what are the things that need to happen on a daily basis for you to keep running. So that should be that should be first, first priority. And once you've gone beyond that that's when you're going to get into negotiations about what are what are the second and the third and the fourth priority after that. It's there should always be a link to you know keep that that value of people first in mind there should always be a link to priorities. And these are going to be, these are potentially going to be challenging discussions is everyone's going to have a piece that they consider most important when you're setting those priorities in the list. And as a leader, Daphne mentioned this very well and in our earlier question, you're not going to have all the information you need our tendency in this in this field is is to want to have the best information to be evidence based to be well informed. And that's not always going to be something that we can do in a crisis. So it's very important to be, you know, to, to, to, you know, yes justify your choice link it to your mission but once you've made the decision stick to that decision. Be firm in in identifying what you've prioritized be firm in having channels where people need to go if they want to, if they want to add things to your priority list if they want to make changes to any of your, any of your plans. Make sure that that that that authorization sort of hierarchy is very well defined, and it's being followed so that there's no kind of Q jumping as people attempt to put their their projects forward. Stick with what you've prioritized. If if there is something that you know sometimes there are new priorities that are going to come to the forefront in a crisis. For a lot of us, I telework and digit and online service delivery became very important there might have been projects that were online service delivery base that were kind of nice to have projects before COVID hit that were suddenly essential and that the justification for that was was easy to make because we knew that in order to deliver our essential our essential services in order to meet our missions we had to make those those projects key. So it's really a matter of having that that clear definition of what's a priority having clear process for defining priorities and sticking to priorities once you've had them. Thank you so much, Melissa. Amanda. No, sorry, I was going the wrong way on the list kelvin what were your thoughts about prioritizing limited resources. Well, I'll reiterate a lot of what Melissa already shared. Definitely prioritizing what's most impactful to the community and that's leveraging the staff, you know, accordingly, making sure that, you know, safety is definitely always key, making sure that you're protecting, you know, life of your staff. And again, of the community. So, you know, thinking, you know, long, long term in that in that short term crisis like, you know, that and that's where I mentioned the coop earlier that content that you'll continue a continuation of our operational plan, which really is helpful is more like a hot. It's a how to guide right so it's really not exactly what you should do just kind of gives you some guidelines how to handle situations. And, but still is required you to make some the leaders to make decisions based on what is actually happening at that time, but at least you've actually thought out some some things and actually you've actually thought about those limited resources. You know, ahead of time what what could you know what buildings, for example, could be closed, we close libraries because of the hurricane but we still we had the same thing when we reopened where we had to close libraries, because of COVID-19. And so we then had at least something to, to, you know, to fall back on some one of the other things that I'll mention and this isn't necessarily about prioritizing the limited limited diminished resources. But what we saw work during this was that those partnerships that we had with with schools, for example, in businesses. So, as as our, the use of our digital resources was continually rising that that those partnerships that with the schools actually helped us, because, interestingly enough, we had done some pre plant, you know, I won't call it pre planning for COVID or crisis. But whereas the school actually supported our digital resources financially. So as we saw more schools using those resources and students signing up for library cards, the school was actually help financially support us during that during that time so some of those partnerships, you know, throughout can also be very helpful during, you know, during the crisis. Thank you so much. Daphne, what did you have anything to add to the importance of or how you prioritize resources. I really enjoyed hearing kelvin reference the, the strength of the community and partnerships. So, with, with reference to the question, how do you prioritize limited and diminished resources. kelvin's basically explaining how you can leverage some of the strengths you had prior to the crisis and then ultimately meet more of those needs you don't have to go it alone. Of course the partnership is something that you had to have in place before it's not the time to rush out and make random cold calls and try and get support. But at that moment in time, so definitely something to do that is is an ongoing nurturing of those, you know, mutually beneficial relationships and partnerships for sure. And I would add is, when I, when I look at the question and I see diminished resources, I can give a very real life experience right now of being the interim IT director. When COVID necessitated the closure of our physical branches in the public library system, we had simultaneously a huge need for staff to be working remotely. So the IT team had to suddenly come up with all of these laptops that with the global supply chain were no longer available. To find those source those prepare those for a remote workforce that had not largely been working remotely at all. We simultaneously had to switch to service delivery for our patrons and prioritize what they could access and to help the, the librarians who are now shifting program delivery to digital. So all of those different needs, plus the communications department now relying, you know, most exclusively on on social media and through our virtual branch to try to directly communicate with patrons without the in person contact. You can see all of these needs that were all prioritized by individual areas all basically came back to the same department, the IT department who had to try to manage how all of these were going to go forward and how they could be successful. So the takeaway to that experience has been. I wish I had the, I wish I had the creativity that that Kelvin is demonstrating that that I probably should have looked beyond our own resources to see how we might have facilitated something that that could have helped maybe on the program delivery side instead of trying to do everything on our own. Another takeaway would be with diminished resources. It's essential to distinguish a need and a want. If anyone has had the experience of I absolutely need something, I would say go through a structured conversation with that individual if they're trying to, to make a case and determine, is this something that's critical to our mandate. Is this something that is essential for this moment, or is this something that is going to go on a list of no doubt important, but not critical and not essential. So it's hard sometimes to take off when we're wearing a hat as, you know, as a function of a certain department, but we all need to put on the hat of why do we exist what's our mandate what's our unique, what's the unique value that we provide. And with that lens approach, the top priorities and where resources will be allocated in the immediate term, short term is more negotiable and then longer term, you know, everything can be on the table at that point but in a crisis. It's just really what do we need in a moment based on our mandate, and that's the deciding factor so again being decisive and making some tough calls. Thank you. Now before I move on to Anna and Amanda, I want to just quickly note that I'm being cognizant of time or we're coming up to the top of the hour for everyone. But I want to make sure everybody has the an opportunity to speak, particularly about our final question because it's, it's an important final question. So if you need to leave because you are busy people with busy lives and lots of different competing priorities which is the, you know, an appropriate topics given the question we're talking about. Feel free just to leave and if you have anything that you'd like to share about our final very important question, just send it to myself or Sue and we will make sure that it is included. When we post this for the the iSchools community to view so thank you very much just to let us just to just to let you know that, you know, this isn't the end of the world if you don't get a chance to answer the question. You'll be given the opportunity later so Anna what were your thoughts about prioritizing limited and sometimes diminished resources. Yes, sir Kelvin Kelvin everybody covered this really well I wanted to say we've always had limited resources. And this time we just had to prioritize. So I just quickly I'm going to touch upon some things that we did. I can Kevin Kelvin talked about leveraging resources and that is what we had done as soon as the pandemic hit we were closed we had. We started teleworking we redirected our material materials regular materials budget to resources budget, and then we revamped that collection and with the, with the help of our ref chat tell ref services, we were able to help patron access those materials. So there was a large number of people that went from using regular materials to materials during this co with time. So that was one thing that we had done immediately to improve our services because our patrons stakeholders everybody was asking us what are you doing we were closed how are we going to do this. So that is what we had prioritized to do. That was one of the things provide a reference and then Egypt sources make those available for our patrons, but the other things all of you have covered it so. Thank you. And Amanda, what were your experiences with prioritizing resources. The team again like an apartment mentioned, we're always under operating under limited time constraints in particular. We only have 40 hours a week for each individual and so we need to make decisions about how we're going to prioritize our time. And that was especially true for a teaching and learning department in this shift to an online learning environment, where we had to make really big decisions and pretty with limited information, big decisions about what we were going to switch from primarily face to face to online learning. And of course, staff were really overwhelmed by that that's a lot of work, even though we had the expertise to do that. And so it was important for me to have coaching conversations with each of my staff members are the small teams to consider what was reasonable because not everything could be converted to an online learning environment. So think about what are the two or three things that we can do now in order to accommodate needs in the fall semester, and then think about if there's more that we could do for the spring semester. So coaching conversations about what's reasonable given the time constraints of a 40 hour work week. Yes we sometimes forget about the constraints of time when we're talking about resources so thank you for that. Just again to quickly wrap up before we move on. So the question really had to do a lot with sort of thinking about what the organization's mission and mandate and priorities were and keeping those in mind when decisions were being made. In addition to ensuring that you know people's safety was was centered and protecting life, particularly in the middle of a pandemic, but also focusing on community needs and the different ways that partnerships and services could be leveraged in order to both protect life, meet community needs and stick to the mission of the organization. Now we have our final question, which is a really big and important one, and it is how can we manage a crisis while still prioritizing equity and social justice among our communities and employees. And so with this one will start with Kelvin. What are your thoughts about this. My thoughts are about this question, and actually it's going to be somewhat of a continuation of adding some things from the previous questions that the previous question actually and probably all the questions but this at Broward County libraries was really continuing to focus on our mission, our message, and the method that we that we created as a framework from which all of our library staff are stakeholders and supporters knew that we were all working towards a common goal and so that common goal even continued, you know, in in crisis they it continues in crisis and particularly the crisis the COVID-19 pandemic. So, our mission at Broward was inviting the uninvited. That's a mission and that we came up with in 2017 where we focused on increasing access to technology expanding digital resources and making it easy for anyone anywhere to access our library resources and services. And so inviting the uninvited. And that's the focus in that was definitely to serve the under the underserved and making sure that we were providing the tools needed for economic and educational success. So we created programs that were more equitable tool, for example, our veterans, helping them get jobs, teenagers, focusing on them and making sure that they had the chance at college, for example, we work we open up and develop programs for primarily minorities the inmates though that were coming out of the jail so that they could have a future. We expanded the these uninvited and non traditional resources or things to non traditional library users. So we put libraries on our buses, for example, the primarily targeting that audience who is in driving. Again, to make sure that we were sharing equitable library resources across the county. We put library resources. We opened a airport location in the in the Fort Lauderdale Hollywood Airport. We put resources in parks, hospital waiting rooms, as well as other businesses across the county. We focused on this through the partnerships and being flexible that that was the method. And so during a during a crisis, you when you're prioritizing equity and social justice, if you're already, you know, again, you're already doing it. The equity is part of this is in our DNA of libraries and so during the crisis you just pivot, you just pivot to proceed just change the, you know, being being flexible, so that you can, you know, continue to focus on what you're doing. Like training, for example, we were training all of our librarians. We were taking them through all of our staff actually not just librarians all of our staff through what we what we framed as lgbtq plus one on one so it was it was this was the training that we had, we had been doing in person, that we didn't shift it and still trained everyone online with with the partner that we were working with. So, the other thing that we did of course, and our libraries, numerous libraries across the country did this was that librarians had to become performers producers and playwrights so that we could again continue to do what we were you know spreading the equitable access to, you know, our resources, but we also through our resources with collection management actually made a created a resource through a vendor partner, so that people could actually submit their stories about how they felt about the crisis and what they were doing, and then also people could also provide their stories about equity and social justice. You know, because a lot of things were happening over this past summer that we wanted to not only highlight and archive that but we also wanted to focus on the community, so that they didn't know stories as well. So there's a lot of a lot more information that I can go on to share, but really the key piece about how you manage, you know, a crisis while prioritizing equity and social justice is that we all have to be what I'm going to call is co conspirators co conspirators to social equity and, you know, social justice and, you know, being up being a part of that and so it's a shared mission as I said that our libraries promote and serve the highest ideals of diversity equity inclusion and accessibility. And we make our libraries open to everyone inviting them to take take part in a library experience. So that doesn't matter if it's in good times or bad no matter what. That's what we're here to do. So that's my that's my answer. Thank you. I love this idea of being co conspirators. I hope that that one takes takes off a little bit. Daphne, what do you have to add about this? I just want to say I just received a master class in very practical and thoughtful and successful approaches to building stronger communities and hearing firsthand how one leader and one system with with many contributors successfully included everyone and put everyone in the role of being able to make a difference. It wasn't it wasn't here are people delivering a service and here are people who need a service. It was everyone working together to make sure that everyone received the benefits available to all. So I don't have a single I'm sorry. My laptop just fell. I don't have a single thing to add other than I learned a tremendous amount and think that if if libraries adopted that approach to always hold firm to who we are and why we matter. It will give us the everything that we need and able to go forward and do what we're capable of doing and do what we're ideally and uniquely, I would say uniquely created to do, which is to build stronger communities and to make all of the things that we believe professionally to be activated in individuals live so people can reach their their highest potential and achieve greater strength together. Thank you, Calvin. We are very lucky and fortunate to have Calvin on this but we're also very fortunate to have other really thoughtful people including yourself Daphne, and thank you for taking the hit for having the zoom snafu of the of the meeting. It's greatly appreciated from the rest of us. So how about you what were your thoughts on this question. Thank you very much for giving that message and that was really great you answered everything. I just wanted to talk about some things that we had done being there for the community was very important for us. So, we equipped. I'm just mentioning this because this was so important for us we wanted to make sure that a large part of our community has internet access but there is also a small number of people that do come into the library to access internet. So we immediately turned our parking lots into Wi Fi centers that had 24 seven Wi Fi access. And I know in one of the questions. Somebody we talked about crisis, mini crisis in a large crisis California went through that during the summer when we had the fires and the heatwaves and all that we wanted to be there for our patrons. So, in order to provide a socially just service for our patrons what we had done was even though the library was closed, and we didn't have staff in the building. Some of our staff went to the buildings to open our community rooms. So staff, so patrons are community members that didn't have the resources so needed things could come in on those heatwave days and the cooling centers and all that this was so important for us to provide to our community members that we're not so fortunate as to have those. So, we just wanted to be there for them and provide those services. That's it. Thank you so much. Amanda, what were your thoughts on this question. Mine aren't related specifically to a crisis situation but as Kelvin have mentioned, equity and social justice should be woven into the DNA of our systems but in our practices but it's also important to realize that North American is overwhelmingly white, and it's overwhelmingly female, and libraries of all kinds have very much a history of exclusion, particularly racialized exclusion. And so I think it's really important if you find yourself to be a library leader, or any kind of librarian or library staff member who holds multiple privileged identities. And make sure that you're regularly doing the work you need to do to understand the lived experiences of your colleagues and your library users who do not have those same privileges. This is something that I've focused on over the past couple of years because for a long time, I was very much unaware that there were people in my life who's lived experiences when they walk into places like a school, or a library, or even the grocery store, or a lot different from my own. And so I was operating very much from a white female middle class, ableist perspective. And so I think if we're really attuned to doing that work and reflecting on what our identities mean and how that helps us to connect with our communities or may promote barriers to connecting with our communities. That is to do exactly what Kelvin mentioned before, and make sure that equity and social justice really are in our DNA and are a natural part of our response to a crisis situation. Thank you so much Amanda for for bringing up those important issues. Melissa. Last but not least, what were your thoughts on this final question. I just want to start with saying that I absolutely agree with what Amanda has shared. The first step in in sort of managing the price that the crisis with with an equity and social justice lens is understanding that not everybody is experiencing the pandemic or any crisis the same way. There are factors in people's lives that create different experiences. Some people are going to be suffering significantly more because of these these intersectional factors when they're when they're addressing the crisis. As library leaders just to understand that to acknowledge that to build that into our into our systems. Look at look at your structures internally look at the structures you have for your library users but also for your employees and see if they if they take these differences into account if there are opportunities for flexibility to allow to make that experience of the crisis easier for everyone. And certainly don't work on just your own assumptions. Take the opportunity to speak to people speak to your community speak to your employees create channels so that people can communicate safely about what they need and whether or not your your current structures are actually helping you to deliver to them or if they're or if your structures are actually serving as barriers. Thank you so much for that just a quick. A quick wrap up again. We had some very excellent as was repeated multiple times examples of putting this question into action through Calvin's work and his focus on focusing on to the mission of the organization and this idea that equity and social justice should be built into the the DNA of the organization which will just which ideally then should mean that there's an organic connection between prioritizing equity and social justice as well while you meet the mission of the organization. There was also the this important conversation around understanding how structures both inside and outside of the organization can hinder the delivery of services and our intentions as well as support them and this doing the important work of understanding the way structures and I'm talking both cultural and social in terms of identity, how these structures inform the work that we do, and how those of us who have privileged identities need to do the work, both within our organizations and outside of it on a personal note to ensure that we are understanding the experiences of others and how the structures that we've built as a profession impact their experiences. So this brings us to the final moment of wrap up which is just anybody have any additional comments about what it means to manage in the middle of a crisis whether it's a pandemic or a smaller seemingly smaller crisis of say a hurricane or fires or floods or anything like that. Well, before we open it up to the panel. This is Sue, I just wanted to thank you all so much, and this webinar is going to be viewed by our students and our faculty, and I just want to remind them of the expertise of these individuals representing public libraries in the pandemic, a special library in both Canada and the United States, and how they've come together and they've added on to one another, but it's the skills and the expertise that you have for leading in all times, especially in times of crisis. I wanted to thank you for being a part of our high school and being such fabulous role models for our students because they really like to have the real life examples, and to know what how they need to aspire in in all areas of the profession. So, thank you, but I don't want to have that be the end if anybody has some last thoughts. I have a really quick last thought. I just want to say that in a time of crisis, one of the unintended consequences can be, you can let go of the status quo. So, going forward, I think many, many library systems, public private academic, we all have the opportunity collectively to build back better. So, what wasn't working before, we don't have to necessarily restore that and continue. We can look at things as in some cases, a fresh start a way to introduce things that are long overdue to address things that are long overdue to incorporate things that we have long heard from the community that they would like to see from us. And we should not let that opportunity go to waste. Well, I will say here here to that Daphne. And does anybody else have any final comments that they'd like to share. I would recommend that, you know, take the time to celebrate getting through crisis. You know, it's, it is an achievement to make it through. But also don't forget your wrap up for crisis. Make sure you take, take note of the lessons learned. Think about what went well. Think about what could go better next time because I don't want to end pessimistically but realistically there's always going to be another crisis, whether it's a small one or a large one hopefully not hopefully not another one at this scale but there's always, there's always, there are always going to be future crises and make sure you're ready and learn the lessons from this one so that you'll be even better prepared to handle it the next time. Excellent advice. Melissa, thank you. Just Sue and I just want to say thank you again. It was a perfect ending. Thank you to Melissa, and thank you to everyone I've taken away so much from each of you, and we will be putting this. I will share the link with you before we put it online. We will have the transcript on the side will clean that up, but thank you for your time. And thank you for our listeners and thank you for moderating Deborah. Well, I would like to again extend my thanks to everyone just echoing Sue. This has been a really great conversation. And there are some really great ideas whether we leave as co conspirators who are willing to let go of the status quo. And I want to reiterate, Melissa's very positive point actually that the importance of celebrating and reflecting during times of crisis so thank you all. Thank you for our celebration of you. I think you've given our students as well as ourselves lots to think about and reflect on so thank you. Thank you very much.