Day 11 of my Practicum

Today was an interesting day - I tagged along to some meetings with my supervisor, Emily. In the morning we met with one of the Americorps VISTA employees to talk about some of the challenges she was facing with getting conversation circles off the ground at different locations and organizing a program called "People and Stories." People and Stories is an eight-week program that uses classic literature excerpts in an adult basic education environment - students read the stories together and then discuss the ideas, formats, and writing styles as part of their learning experience. They are hoping to offer this program in partnership with several locations (schools, learning centers, etc.) starting in January. They have offered it in the past and had good success....

This afternoon, Emily and I went out to Ridgedale for a couple of meetings. Hennepin County Library and Minneapolis Public Library merged about ten months ago, and they are working together to iron out all of the details involved in such a huge change. They are completely restructuring their staff and working to create a strategic vision for service together. I work in a large library system myself (Columbus Metropolitan Library), and it is amazing how each library system has their own culture and habits - trying to merge such different cultures is such a challenge! It would be like if CML tried to merge with Westerville Public Library - but on a grander scale since both systems are so large. To put it in perspective, CML has one Main Library and 20 branches, while Hennepin and Minneapolis combined have 41 branches and a Central Library (I think that is the number?). To make it even more difficult, they are in the process of hunting for a new library Director. In the interim, they have Hennepin's former deputy director acting as a temporary director - who I had the chance to meet this afternoon. Believe it or not, she said "Are you Nerdfighter Librarian?" - I guess she had picked up the blog through Google alerts since I tagged the posts as being about Hennepin County Library! It was pretty funny, and I have to say it was the first time I was ever referred to as "Nerdfighter Librarian" in person.

My first meeting was with the Partnerships division, and the discussion was about how the department should be restructured. It was interesting to see the "behind the scenes" discussion of this administrative group as they hashed out the issues. There were strong opinions on all sides, but the conversation was in an "atmosphere of respect and dignity" - as the healthy workplace initiative recommends... :)

It will be interesting to see how this works itself out in the future.

The afternoon meeting was about the merge, as well - they talked about merging the websites and plans for moving forward. There was a chance for staff to ask questions and for them to hear some updates about changes in general.

Before we left the Ridgedale branch, I got a tour of their automated check-in/ sorting area - I am so jealous. As a circulation manager, I could only dream of such a system. At my branch, we still manually check everything in and sort materials...I would love to shift some of that responsibility to machines so we could have even more staff out on the public service floor! Maybe after the levy passes (it will pass! it will pass!) we will do this when we renovate buildings, or go to RFID tags.

Tomorrow I attend the annual Somali Family Services conference and I'm looking forward to a great day!