Children's reading can have deep impact

from the Post-Crescent APPLETON — Best-selling author Alice Hoffman observed that she often writes about writers and readers in her books, perhaps because writing and reading are what have sustained her through tough, trying times.

Photos: Author Alice Hoffman at Appleton Public Library

One of the short stories that makes up Hoffman's "Blackbird House," one of two official selections of Fox Cities Reads 2008, describes Violet, a young girl living in a Cape Cod farmhouse who loves to read so much that she sneaks out when her family is sleeping and reads by lantern light in the horses' stalls.

In Hoffman's young adult novel "Green Angel," the other Fox Cities Reads selection, a teenager, nicknamed "Green" because of her penchant for helping things to grow, shuts down after a family tragedy and only opens up again after she's able to tell her story on paper.

"I do think that what you read as a child influences not only the reader you become, but the person you become," Hoffman said to her audience Thursday in a packed lower-level meeting room of the Appleton Public Library after reading aloud from her books. "I write very often about ghosts. Not ghosts like 'Boo, Casper,' but how the history and the past come to stay with you in a way."

Fox Cities Reads, the second effort to get residents reading and discussing the same book, is a collaborative effort among the Appleton, Kaukauna, Kimberly-Little Chute, Menasha, Neenah and University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley libraries. Hoffman's talks in Appleton, Kaukauna and Neenah also are part of the first Fox Cities Book Festival, which began Wednesday and ends Sunday.

Many people who came to hear Hoffman carried copies of her books. Some wore Fox Cities Reads 2008 T-shirts or buttons.

Hoffman's visit is the culminating event of the three-month community read, which drew adults and teens into book discussion groups at various public places.

Pat Milheiser of Appleton, a media specialist at Madison Middle School, said many of her students have been reading "Green Angel."

"One of the things my reluctant readers like about 'Green Angel' is that it is short but powerful," Milheiser said. "It's good just to get kids talking about sad topics. Communication is really so important and so vital, and sharing with people is a really healing thing."

Tammie DeVooght Blaney, who works in Green Bay area schools and was able to finish the first story in "Blackbird House" before Hoffman's talk, said Hoffman's appeal lies in her ability to mesmerize readers of all ages.

"I'm in my 30s, I'm reading her, and my daughter is 10, and she's reading her," DeVooght Blaney said. "My students are between 14 and 18, and they're reading her, and I have a college student working with me, she's 23. And we're all really intrigued by the writing."

Kara Patterson: 920-993-1000, ext. 215, or kpatterson@postcrescent.com

Encourage the Heart

Not a bad message for National Library Week. Not a bad thing to remember as we plan for next week's public meeting on our library's facility needs... part of a presentation “Transparency, Planning & Change: See-Through Libraries” by Michael Stephens and Michael Casey at the Computers in Libraries Conference. It's 154 slides with lots of 2.0 examples, some cautionary notes, and some good advice. This is one of my favorite slides, because it speaks simply to the transformative power of libraries, and the need to be mindful:

Encourage the heart

• The physical space
• The “feeling”
• Interaction with staff
• Discovery...Curiosity...Self-Actualization
• Emotion...support...enrichment

Other slides include "rules of innovation", "five things I never want to hear in the library", etc. Worth a read and reflection.

Fox Cities Book Festival & Community Read: Author, author!

"Books are dangerous in the best way"

Alice Hoffman
APL staff with Alice Hoffman

The first ever Fox Cities Book Festival is in full swing, and we've reached the culmination of our community read with the appearance of Alice Hoffman at our library. Alice is hitting three libraries in 22 hours, and earning every penny of her speaker's fee.

This evening we held a reception here for some of the book festival folks, particularly for Alice's visit. Many of the reception attendees were part of the over 200 people in the audience for Alice, others went across town to hear poet Billy Collins, planning on catching Alice tomorrow at the Neenah Public Library. From the many and profuse "thank you" comments our staff got at the end of the evening, I know people here really enjoyed Alice Hoffman, and I'm sure the other venue got a good crowd for Billy Collins. This is what you call your embarrassment of riches.

It's been an exhausting but wonderful ride doing the community read and the book festival. The festival runs two more days, with many things happening at our library and elsewhere on Saturday, but thus far it's a big success. In an interactive information world, I'm glad that we're devoting so much energy to books.

Alice Hoffman, who proved a personable presenter and excellent speaker, touched on this. Though she writes three blogs herself, she wonders if people, especially young people, are spending so much time online that they're spending less time reading. Speaking for myself, books are a slow pleasure -- and work best when you can set time aside for reading. You can't multitask your way through a good read. So this has been a good activity for National Library Week.

Ellen Kort, former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin and Book Festival organizer,
with YA novelist Alex Flinn

...or we could be dynamic...

Thanks to the Librarian in Black (and a bunch of others) -- can't be said too often (alas)!

National Library Week: Library Workers Day

Since 2003, the Tuesday of National Library Week has been used to recognize the contributions of library workers. Good idea!

While we depend on a lot of community support, volunteers, and donations, the backbone of what we do is provided by our library staff. Here at the Appleton Public Library, we have 114 people on the payroll -- most of them part-time and non-benefited.

Sure, it's a job and they're working for the money. But we also know that they're working for the rightful pride in their accomplishments, in what the library does. Many could be making more money working elsewhere: the job market says libraries don't pay as well as other sectors of the economy.

But they do a heck of a job for our community and our patrons. All the truisms about the value of libraries, that we:

• change lives
• build communities
• promote economic development
• build family literacy
• connect people to ideas
• enable lifelong learning

are true because library workers make them happen. We have an amazing team here, and it takes the whole team, every person, every position, to make it happen. I'm profoundly grateful to be part of such a team and to work with such people.

So we'll put a "National Library Workers Day" poster in the front door, and we'll hand out small acknowledgments to the staff. But I hope some of our users take time to say thanks to any of our workers: they all deserve it -- and spoken or unspoken, I believe the appreciation is there.

To all my co-workers: thank you.

PLA: From Awareness to Funding - a study of library support in the U.S.

Listen, this is important...

The best thing Bill Gates ever did was to marry Melinda. Now we've got this rich couple with a conscience and progressive ideas. They help libraries a lot. Thus we have, among other things, the OCLC Gates-funded marketing/advocacy study. The grant is to study "development of a potential national marketing campaign to increase awareness of the value of libraries, and the need for support for libraries at local, state and national levels." On the surface, this sounds remarkably similar to the Campaign for Wisconsin Libraries, which I'm proud to support. But given the scope and ambitions of the study, I think the OCLC effort goes deeper and has some messages that deserve a lot of attention, that may call us to change how we do some things.

OCLC will publish the study next month. But there was a preview at the PLA conference in a program:

From Awareness to Funding
Join Cathy De Rosa, OCLC Global Vice President of Marketing, for a presentation of OCLC’s advocacy research program, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Learn who you should talk to in your community and what messages can help your own advocacy and marketing efforts.

In an environment where libraries continue to face major cuts and even closing, the study is a follow-up to 2005's Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources. I took pages of notes at the program, but we only scratched the surface -- it will be necessary to read the full report.

Selected highlights:

• public impressions of libraries are positive but inaccurate -- there is a lot that people don't know
  
• library referenda are increasingly failing to get on ballots, or where they do the success rate is dropping
• without action, critical funding for public libraries will erode
• sufficient latent support exists in local communities -- 80% of funding is local, but there is high competition
• it is key to position the library as a vital part of the community infrastructure and a key to transforming lives
• most people will claim to support the library, but fewer are truly committed to doing so
• elected officials believe that they support the library more than their constituents do
• there is no correlation between those who visit the library and those willing to fund it
• the desire to fund is related to belief in the library as a self-actualization tool
• perceptions of the librarian are highly related to support -- valuing a passionate librarian is very important -- qualities include:
• advocates for the library
• is knowledgeable
• has a commitment to life-long learning
• is passionate about making the library relevant
• everybody consistently lies in surveys
• there is a spectrum of perception and value, and we should make efforts to move the perception of the library from information toward transformation -- if we're perceived as being for information, we lose to Google
  

There was a lot more about the segmentation of our market, identifying super supporters, probable supporters, those with barriers to support, and nonvoters. A key will be to identify those segments of the probable supporters who can make the difference for us, and tailor our messages to them.

We need to:

• create a brand selling library support, not selling library use
  
• craft our our brand to reflect the beliefs of our most avid supporters
• re-frame the library when we lay out the case for support
• change perceptions to reflect:
• transformation NOT information
• infrastructure NOT institution
• necessity NOT nice to have
• the future NOT the past
• "return on investment" NOT altruism

This will turn into a national campaign, requiring scale and endurance. But local efforts will be critical: we need to be passionate, know our base and motivate our base.

I don't know that we want to jump right on the bandwagon -- letting go of the idea that we're about information will go hard with some. But we'd better think about it and discuss -- it seems that if we keep on doing things the way we have, support will continue to erode. Our library may be better off than many, but it's an ongoing struggle to maintain support.

National Library Week: I love my job

What can you say? Some days the serendipity just gets you. I had a call late this morning that the Children's desk was going to be short-handed due to a family illness. A few quick calls did not get us anyone to cover, so I went in, grumbling, to work it until we could get somebody.

I was grumbling because I wasn't thrilled about going in on my day off -- especially since I got called in the previous morning at 4:30 AM with a security system problem -- and because I was pretty sure that I couldn't do very good work for the patrons. What if I got a tough reader's advisory question about current children's lit? What if somebody needed to book a group tour? Their tough luck to get a supposed librarian who's more of a bureaucrat, and who knows more about budget spreadsheets than how to sign up for story hour.

Of course, my fears were -- as usual -- unjustified. Vicky, my colleague in Children's, covered for me admirably. We were able to find another worker who graciously came in and covered (and did know how to work Children's). In the meantime, I was able to help a fifth-grader and his mom with a homework question, and discussed with them the uses and limits of Google and Wikipedia before pointing them to some books in the collection. I managed to quiet a rowdy group of twelve-year-olds fairly gracefully. I got a truck of adult DVDs shelved and got in some reader's advisory: "Yes, there were two versions of Wicker Man -- most critics consider the first one better, but they're both pretty strange." It's nice to feel like a librarian sometimes!

And then there was the barbershop quartet singing in the atrium. Dozens of people stopped to sit in chairs downstairs or just paused in the entryway to lean over the rail and listen to a song or two.

Most of all I was impressed with the very large and diverse group of people using the library. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, sunny and warm and the nicest weather for the past several days. But the library was jammed. Half an hour after we opened, there were about fifty people just in the Children's area. There was a long waiting queue for the Children's Internet stations. The adult nonfiction stacks had lots of browsers. Almost every table was full. There were lines at the checkout. The public services staff was hopping, answering questions and helping people find stuff.

Needless to say, this leaves me a lot more fired up about what we're doing than committee meetings or budget spreadsheets ever do. I'm impressed with how the community uses us, I'm impressed with how our staff comes through, and I'm impressed that we're doing the right thing to study our facility needs. It's great, but it's crowded!

No grumbling here -- I'm glad I got the chance to go into work today.

LSTA: allocating federal funds

I'm two days in Madison for the Spring meeting of Wisconsin's LSTA Advisory committee, which advises the Department of Public Instruction on allocation of federal grant funds. The annual appropriation of funds for Library Services and Technology Act, under Wisconsin's five year plan, has the committee reviewing DPI staff proposals and making recommendations for grant categories and amounts. Each state has its own allotment, based on population, and its own approved plan and distribution of the funds. The program overview of Wisconsin's LSTA info on the web notes:

The LSTA funds in the states grants program provide seed money for projects that improve library services throughout the United States. The program is designed to ensure that everyone can have the information resources they need for school, work, and daily living.

Funds in the LSTA state grants program can be used

• to improve library services through the use of technology
• to encourage libraries to establish consortia and share resources, and
• to target library services to persons having difficulty using a library and to underserved urban and rural communities.

Some states may use all their federal funds for statewide programs, but I like the balance we strive for in Wisconsin. With a bit over $3,000,000 to allocate, some of it is designated to support statewide programs, some of it is allocated to library systems, and some is designated for competitive grants for systems and individual libraries. There's a list of this year's Wisconsin grants on the state website.

Naturally, any time you strive for balance, there will be strife in determining that balance. Grant funds supporting literacy projects, disability access, digitization and innovations in library automation fall short of needs and requests. As a public librarian, I appreciate state and system level support, but would like to see more of the funds designated as competitive grants to individual public libraries.

Wisconsin makes a good effort, bringing together a cross-section of the state library community in our Advisory Committee to debate allocations in the Spring and make grant recommendations in the fall. The final determination is in the hands of the elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction, but the opinions of many who volunteer to review grants and the Advisory Committee are given a lot of weight.

There are tremendous disagreements, and good professional arguments. This is my third and final year on the committee, and though it is difficult and intense, the time has flown by. I appreciate the work of state staff, especially Peg Branson and Terrie Howe, the LSTA coordinators in the past three years.

Library staff "play more, learn more, fear less."

Project Play has come to its planned end. Even as I heard library leaders at the PLA conference encouraging more places to emulate the "23 things" library curriculum, a big chunk of Wisconsin was doing it and wrapping up this eight month effort. Part of what I learned is a model for an effective online training program for staff -- one that works even for part-time people who have trouble fitting regular classes into their schedules. Two groups I want to thank and acknowledge:

• Project Play leaders from three library systems, OWLS, South Central, & Winnefox. All three of these systems devoted a lot of time and effort to helping member library staff learn. A special thanks to our fearless leaders: Beth Carpenter, Jean Anderson, Stef Morrill & Joy Schwarz. They seriously rock!
  
• All the staff hare at Appleton Public Library who got involved. Most finished both semesters, though some, like me, did only part -- due to limited enrollments and other time commitments. I loved it that people from all parts of the library, and at all pay grades, participated. Big kudos to everyone who worked at it, including:
• Judy Abitz
• Kathy Beck
• Kathy Berholtz
• Carole DeJardin
• Kathy Dreyer
• Elizabeth Eisen
• Melody Hanson
• Sharon Harp
  
• Ellen Jepson
• Barbara Kelly
  
• Brian Kopetsky
• Sue Kempf
  
• Vicki Lenz
• Katie Scullion
• Kay Shearier
  
• Meg Shriver
• Lisa Smith
  
• Maureen Ward
• Julie Weyenberg
  
• Kristie Wilson

I know it's not always easy to take time out of our way-too-busy schedules to learn, especially new and intimidating things. But the Project Play leaders broke it up into bite-size pieces and offered hand-holding -- and the many participants explored fearlessly and learned. Way to go!

Volunteers of the Year

Remarks delivered at the City Council meeting, after Mayor Hanna delivered his National Library Week proclamation:

Thank you, Mayor. As we're coming into National Library Week, with the culmination of the community Read and the Book Festival, we at the Library feel very fortunate to be part of an effort that does so much to enhance the quality of life in our community. We know that the library makes a difference in people's lives, and I want to acknowledge and lift up the critical support of all of you, our elected officials, in making that happen. I also want to acknowledge and thank all the hard-working, dedicated people on the library staff, and tonight, I especially want to thank all the volunteers.

From the Board of Trustees to the Friends of the Library and Library Foundation, people delivering books to the homebound, people who show up every week to shelve, middle school children who help with the summer programs for younger children, the library is very dependent on our volunteers. In 2007, the number of volunteer hours grew by 22% over the previous year, and continues to grow in 2008.
So on behalf of the Library Board of Trustees and the Library staff, I would like to acknowledge and introduce to you our two volunteers of the year.

Roberta Bawden has been selected as the APL Adult Volunteer of the Year. She was nominated by the Circulation team for the following reasons:

• she has been coming 3 times a week for four years,
• calls if unable to come in,
• walks to the library in all kinds of weather
• does a great job of keeping the children's section neat and orderly.
• her work has been consistent
  
• she is dedicated to keeping the library nice for the patrons.

Ryan Nelson is our teen volunteer of the year. This is not an award we present every year, but Ryan's contributions in the past year have been exemplary.

Ryan joined the Library Board last June in a non-voting capacity representing the APL Teen Board, providing input to Board deliberations from a teen perspective.
In addition to serving on the Teen Board, Ryan also

• assists at library programs
• shelves materials.

Ryan attends Appleton West high school.

From left: yrs truly, Ryan Nelson, Roberta Bawden, APL Volunteer Coordinator Lou Hull