Linda: Good afternoon everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Linda Gillon from Tampa Public library. And I’m charged this afternoon with welcoming with you to the start of TBLC’s new planning process. I am so thankful and I do truly appreciate you taking your time away from your worksites to come and participate what I will think will be a really exciting process and that the outcome will be something that we will be able to live with and share with all the member libraries for many years to come.

I’ve worked with Nancy, and I know she’s got some great things here planned for us. So welcome and if there’s anything that I can do to assist any of you at any time, please let me know.

Charlie: Thanks Linda. Linda is chairing our effort, and we appreciate her leadership. There’s a tradition with TBLC’s planning processes that the immediate past president chairs the planning committee. It’s like you do all that work and we reward you with more work. What we’re going to try to do today is get you into the process of talking fast. We want to do as little talking at as possible, and let you start this process of telling us where the bus needs to be headed. Again thanks to Linda, and thanks also to Nancy Pike who’s either come out of retirement or starting a new career or just having some fun, by working with us as facilitator of this process. Most of you probably know that Nancy retired fairly recently as the director of Sarasota county, and she also served as TBLC president and has been real active with TBLC and is just a wonderful person and wonderful resource. But she’s going to be the one guiding us through this process, facilitating. I’ve got a couple of things that I need to do here today, and I’m going to try to be take up as little space as possible. This is about you guys and not about me by any measure.

Nancy: You have a document that you have received that describes the planning process. I just want to briefly run through that, so that you know where today’s effort hits in the scope of the whole thing. We are at the part that’s called “planning the plan,” and we’ll be doing some brainstorming and prioritizing today but it’s really just to give us an overview and a place to start from because over the next few weeks you’ll be having lots of opportunities to get input from a variety of sources.

Among those are Denise Davis who’s the ALA Director of Resources and statistics and she’s a cooperative trend spotter. She’ll be providing us with some really great insight into the national perspective on what library consortium cooperatives are doing around the country. She’s coming March 23rd so hopefully you’ve got all these dates on your calendar and I hope you can make all of them.

That’s toward the end of March, and then during April we have a lot of things going on: focus groups in TBLC area, talking to staff of various sorts, lots of input from local folks as well as getting ideas on national perspective. We also have another expert coming April 27th, Linda Crowe. Linda is the executive director of the peninsula library system in California. She actually heads several cooperatives in the San Francisco bay area. So she’ll be providing us with some insight into what they’re doing. And she’s been involved some interesting and exciting projects in some of her other jobs. She came from the mid-metropolitan library system in the Chicago area. And while she was there, they did some very unusual and interesting things that she’ll tell us about.

We also added one little thing that we had not thought about earlier, and that was we decided to get input from the TBLC board. We have board members part of planning committee, but we decided to do in an input session with the board members as well to get that perspective. Along with the regional folks throughout the region and we’ll have a staff focus also, so we’re trying to get as many perspectives form the region as we can and all of that information will be shared with you then before we have our next meeting in May.

That’s when we’ll get together for the expressed purpose to discuss issues and what should go in the plan. All of those kinds of things plus you have a great list of resources. Lots of interesting material that Charlie’s put together; feel free to contribute ideas of your own to this process. Beth has setup a wiki on the web. Place to input all of this information and our ideas. Then what happens is once we’ve put all these ideas together, we’ll turn these things over to the staff to consolidate, organize, and fit into the format of a plan. That plan will then come back to the planning committee to review, and then it will go to the TBLC board.

The time frame for complete process by completed by September. In July, staff working on it. August, planning committee reviews the draft, make any changes, look at exactly what we want to turn in to the TBLC board. September, preset to the board. Our job is to as a group come up with the content of this plan to give to Charlie and staff to work with. My job is to help you all put that information together, keep you on track, everyone participate, do those kinds of process things to help move this along.

Charlie: Thanks Nancy. One of the things about the process that we’re using is we’re trying to be lean and respect your time. We’re assuming that we’re going to be focusing on changes, things to do differently, new things, and things to stop. Not start from scratch working with a new plan document. Get together a couple of times for sessions like this, but not lock you in a room for four days. There are some processes that work that way, but we think you would probably kill us, so it’s entirely selfish. That’s the approach we’re looking at, think about things we need to change or do better. Incorporate those and Go forward. A lean process but one that works. Nancy pointed out that Beth has put up a wiki. Thanks to Beth for taking the lead and helping us with this. We’re going to try to incorporate some of the 2.0 things as we go. Please suggest things that we might do that will help our process along. We’re all learning as children some of these technologies.

Also I guess, never really trusting to technology entirely, you couldn’t really call it a meeting with paper. We’ve provided you with some significant defining kinds of documents that folks doing what you’re doing might want to take a look at:

Conclusions section to the OCLC perception study. I come back to this pretty regularly. Awful lot of value for us. Nancy talked about how we’ve started a resources page. Collecting stuff. You encourage us to add things to it. Build more here. Blogs. Documents.

Slides from George Needham’s presentation to the SWFLIN annual meeting. George did a good job putting in table form key findings of perceptions report. Telling us what we need to know from perceptions report.

A list of 2.0 things. List form one of Steve Abram’s presentations identify things that constitute 2.0. Ellen will tell us more in a minute about this.

Article: Times person of the year piece. Grounds the 2.0 in the broader social framework.

TBLC’s Last plan. TBLC’s Annual report: how we think we did. Guide to our programs and services.

Questions about materials we’ve provided? Go over TBLC context information, the plan, the businesses, and talk as little as possible. Provide enough information but not take up too much time.

Slides

TBLC’s Governance
Established 1979
Oldest MLC’s in Florida
One of 6 cooperative authorized FL statutes 257.41
Law passed authorizing MLC’s in early 90s
Florida non profit corporation
97 member libraries, 12 counties
13 member elected board which employs the TBLC Director

Business Lines, Activities
Things we do = things that define us

All Collaborative in nature
TBLC is this non profit organization but almost all business lines & activities are small collaboratives.
Small organizations of libraries come together to do things together for themselves.

• iBorrow – older brother of AlleyCat – resource sharing program
Grow statewide
• Legacy – digitization project
We provide platform USF library folks’ developed support local libraries in putting up their digital collections
• TBLC Grow your Brain – most people know us – CE program
Library staff especially
• Reciprocal Borrowing – network, structure of agreements
Amongst libraries of this region
Resident one jurisdiction borrows no charge in another jurisdiction
Over ¼ million people used it to check out ½ million items
• Bibliographic services – Ellen Cannon
Cataloging projects for libraries- backlogs or Special collections
Nation of cataloguers
• Group purchase
Libraries identify products to pool resources to purchase (better conditions, lower prices)
Purchasers make decision, what to buy, pricing, little collaborative groups
TBLC- business agent backing them up, writes checks & paperwork

Statewide services
• Ask a Librarian – Florida’s virtual reference service
Partner with CCLA college center of library automation
Diana Sachs & Jennifer Sullivan – AaL Team
Advisory committee for AaL
• Delivery
325,000 bags moved amongst 225 library sites last year
450,000 books moved a year
System supports resource sharing in Florida
ILL – DLLI bags, moving away from term DLLI
• SunCat – SunLine
10 libraries
• Library automation
• Horizon system managed by TBLC
Libraries decide how much to assess themselves & purchases
ILL
We brag about and you do
MLC’s resource sharing
Group access, training, IBorrow
Service provided by participating libraries
• Internet Services
Provided to a few libraries that need us to do that

Visualization

• Each of these items, and a spreadsheet column
• Numbers in those columns represent our budget
  Total budget
• Budgeting – collection of different enterprises
• Independent financial management
• Dollars that we receive for Delivery have to stay in Delivery, etc.
• We handle a lot of money, but we manage the money for the owners of those services.

TBLC Plan Document
Vision Statement
Updated? Planning Committee should contemplate this.

Mission statement – more legalistic
Glad to consider revising or changing

The Roles of TBLC
Joan Fry Williams

• Which roles were appropriate for TBLC
• How we would live up to them

1. Clear leadership role
2. Cooperation – collaboration = heart of everything we do
3. Training & CE – most known for
4. Forum & Catalyst – Library Issues: Judy Crew – Intellectual Freedom;
   Mary Minow – Issues; Disaster Preparedness; Upcoming E-Government
5. Trendspotter – Look over the horizon, see what’s coming, and develop appropriate responses to succeed in rapidly changing world
6. Trusted Agent
7. Technology Innovator
8. Diversity – Failed pretty dramatically
9. Some Training – Hispanic & other populations
10. Modeling Best Practices:Wonderful staff – bright people, young people
11. Embrace new technologies and new ideas
12. Advocacy: Charlie strong background
    State – policy and legislative
    Chaired FLA legislation committee
    FLA VP & Pres-elect this year
13. Member Values
14. Staff Values

• Web 2.0 / Library 2.0
• Second generation Web based services: social networking, wikis, communication tools: emphasize online collaboration & sharing among users
• Library 2.0 – coined by Michael Casey
• Libraries are at Crossroads elements of web 2.0 applicable value library community
• Principles
• Library users craft and modify library provided services
• BETA is forever: never at perfect moment, always changing
• Continue to examine and improve services. Replace any time with newer/better.
• Change & Collaboration
• Library 2.0 – Library space virtual and physical
• Interactive & Collaborative
• Driven by community need
• Blogs, gaming nights for teens, collaborative photo sites
• Library relevant to want and need in daily lives
• Destination not an afterthought
• Technologies
• Shared pictures (Flickr), Videos (YouTube), Bookmarks (del.icio.us), Knowledge (wikipedia), Everything (myspace)
• TBLC/libraries – blogs, Library 2.0 Challenge blog, TBLC internal blog
  Library’s blogs- Clearwater, St Pete College
• Wikis- Planning Committee Wiki by Beth
• Look at documents, make comments and share insights and change content
• RSS – blogs, RSS feed for all your blogs
• Providing feed for new workshops: another way of letting you know what we’re doing.
• Podcasts – Library 2.0 session on podcasting soon
• Recording this meeting for the wiki
• Instant messaging
• Ask reference questions – Clearwater IM Reference
• TBLC internally: Yahoo messenger
• Gaming: Pasco teens
• Customize content, bring it to users, knowing what your users are using their daily lives, library help them with that.

Agenda

ALA Process for developing National Agenda
Global – Specific

Brainstorming
Important ideas about Brainstorming
Fast, outside the box, no deliberation, speak up, thinking, no bad ideas, supportive of each other’s ideas, positive, as many ideas as we can, continue focus on patron, no wordsmith, spellcheck, easy button, common courtesy rules of allowing everyone to speak, no interruptions.

The Global Question
Goal: Deliverable to present to Charlie at end of process = New Plan
Add, change, keep the same, and remove
Keep in mind the patron

What are the global trends and issues that effect libraries in their development?

Global: picture an astronaut, big blue globe from the Apollo
What’s going on down there? What’s happening that will affect our lives in the library?

Aging of population

Asian influence

• Increased influence of the East, Asia

Breakdown of what is proper

• Social mores
• Googling prospective employees
• Wired article myspace murder investigations

MySpace

FaceBook

Challenging of all beliefs

• Everything under the microscope
• Steve Berry, The Alexandria Link
• Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code
• Al Gore & global warming

Customer focus

• Self focus on customer, throughout society
• self-oriented / needs
  

Diversity

• Changing customers and staff, faces, language, technological abilites
• Literacy (Information vs. Technology vs. Basic Literacy)
• Library expectation that everyone has the same knowledge of 5 years ago
  Thumb generation: Gen Nxt example: use an iPod but not a keyboard
• Different populations are literate different ways
• Different staff are literate in different ways
• Incoming staff much more technologically advanced

Education: Commercialization & Globalization

• Change in use of library: commercial education product
• E.g. online univeristy receives revenue, students use other library’s resources
• Globalization of education
• Libraries assist in education resource platform and they don’t know it (expectations)
• WebCT / Blackboard
  

Expectations

• Expectation that any information will be available in any library anywhere
• Competition/expectations changing/growing
• Universal stress to do more
• Anger/frustration at expectations unfilled
• Expectations divergence:
  Patron = good enough
  Librarian = perfect
• Lack of patience
• Multitasking customers
• Not the normal services taught in library school
• Fact vs. Fiction: TV – computers have all easy answers
  E.g. 24, Smallville: Chloe.
  

Funding

• Money/funding going in different directions
• Collection building affected by options fee for service
• “Golden years” of public libraries
• Fact vs. fiction in what voters say/do
• Technology gets funding while staffing not
• Report from the Gates' funded study
• Gates Study: Did not result in gov't support; Government buy-in missing
• Specialization libraries representing highly paid occupations – libraries highly funded
  

Gates Study

Global Libraries Fact Sheet

"Making sure all Americans benefit from computers and the internet"

Global shrinking

• The globe is smaller
• We know all about everything happening everywhere
• “Connected”
• “So much knowledge but how to evaluate?”
• Instant reaction without knowing what it means
• Communications are limitless (for the haves)
• Fact vs. fiction in perception of world (crime stats)
  

Global stock market

• Worldwide development affects resources (Tsunami; dam in China)
• Commodities, Disaster Effect on Library Budgets
• Global economy
• Global warming
  

Government services

• Expanded demands from other government services
• E-government report
• Federal, State, local government pushing things down to public libraries

Haves vs. Have nots

• Division growing
• Automation: dichotomy; division growing – more significant split
• Access issue and disparities
• Libraries see have nots for everything; Haves for pleasure or desperation
• Downloadables
  The person who can’t afford that
  Download service also available to people outside who can afford it
  

Intolerance

Lack of trust

• Others
• Politicians
• World terrified of U.S.: Clifford to Cujo
• Fear of others: Inside Edition: Library Violence
• Not trusting the medium now is healthy
• Images: what’s real and what’s Photoshop-ed?
  

Patron control of information

• Anyone with access can change info
• Ephemeral knowledge on the web
• Info is what we agree it is
• Stephen Colbert’s wiki-ality
• Mass scale dissemination of my point of view

Population migration

• Shifting of where people are and population densities on the globe as well as within the micro-groups within those densities
• Color coded areas of the globe where people live
• Areas changing from place to place

Privacy

• Intentional & unintended
• Identity theft
• Legislative inhibiting genealogy research

Simplicity

• Success depends on similarity to Google
• Not all patrons have technology that libs provide, too complicated – too many hoops
• Catalogs getting simpler? ENDECA, Phoenix public library, NC State University Library
• Automation systems vendors don’t have the resources to create the best kind of product
• We have to teach patrons to go to worthy sources
  

Suppression of free speech

• perception of free speech
• security issues

Violence - War

Do we need to redefine the library and what would be the repercussions?

Will the library only look the same on the outside?

• Fl educ is failing
• New generation of super readers
• Games may contribute to learning and provide opportunities for children who wouldn’t succeed
• Rise of home schooling
• FCAT

"Potter's magic spell turns boys into bookworms"

"Harry Potter and the Positive Impact"

• Shrinking funding
• Political environment – need for strategic alliances
• Large conservative trend
• Growth of libraries
• How to pay for operating costs in no tax climate
• Increase in demand for library space / meeting rooms
  

New SouthShore Branch, Hillsborough County

• Degradation of concept of customer service
• Lack of civility in customers
  

• Profession marginalized- toward informatics
• Public viewpoint, people don’t value librarians as a profession
• SACS accreditation language more vague as relates to professional requirements
  

• Safe environment for children online - legislation
• Latch key kids
• Library - babysitting service. OST
  

• E-government
• DCF, e.g. no say in these
• Training necessary to meet demands
• Early voting
  

• Staff shortages, lack of job pool
• Hurricanes/disasters: no one moving to FL
• Library schools haven’t caught up with library needs in the real world
• Tech savy librarians have new freedom to publish, contribute, & change library organizations
• The best of the best are not becoming librarians
  No cache, not sexy, no money in it
  Hard to justify the MLS requirement
• Moving things forward fast but do they go into libraries?
• And if they do, do we know how to deal with them?
• Recruitment a challenge for all staff positions including pages & L.A.s
  

• Property tax
• Insurance premiums
• Growth management, positives & negegatives: not ready for growth
• State mandate for infrastructure concurrency
• Doesn’t include libs, now county by county
• Development occurring where no infrastructure
  

Legacy Program

• Has legacy program been superseded by lib 2.0?
• Should it adapt to 2.0 subsequent retraining shift in attitude?

Harvesting

Florida on Florida

Networking

• Conversations about issues
• Collaborative problem solving
• More talk about what we do with each othe

Patrons Concerns

• Accumulate data
• SWAT analysis

Synergy funding for E-government needs

• Providing e-government services
• Strategic Partnerships with government entities