2019 Pacific Northwest Library Association Conference

LEADERSHIP TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE A 3 hour morning workshop lead by experts from the University of Idaho Extension to help build leadership skills that will positively impact libraries and their communities.
This workshop is designed to assist people in developing a greater understanding of self, others and community. Working with Others is one segment the Leadership to Make a Difference Institute, focused on the development of basic leadership skills necessary for planning, leading and supporting positive intentional community change.

Do you want to create a better team environment at your library, where your staff treats each other and customers with respect and goodwill? Jenny Berg, Adam Carlson, Kimbre Chapman and Alice Darnton, supervisors from McMinnville Public Library, will share how their mid-sized public library transformed its culture to be more positive and inclusive, thereby improving customer satisfaction. During a time of anxiety caused by high turnover and leadership changes, we led our 20-person staff in brainstorming the ways they want to treat each other. The resultant list became the library’s Staff Ground Rules. The library work teams have revisited the Staff Ground Rules regularly in meetings for the past three years. We have discovered that customer service has been significantly improved as a result. Great customer service starts within ourselves and our work teams– if we thrive as a team, we thrive as an organization, and the library will thrive within the larger community. We have since used the Staff Ground Rules, and the process from which we arrived at them, as part of a new Strategic Plan. Presentation attendees will leave this session with tools they can implement to create a better team environment at their libraries.  

Presentation attendees will leave this session with tools they can implement to create a better team environment at their libraries, including positive relationship building, holding people accountable and having critical conversations, fun ways to keep the positive team dynamic front and center, and getting staff buy in for various library initiatives.  
 

Hands-on food programs in the library sound too risky? ImagineIF Libraries has incorporated making and eating food into programs for adults and reaped the rewards of increased engagement and greater community connection. Participate in a food program at the session, and leave ready to try food programming in your library.
1. Understand what goes into planning a fun and safe food program
2. Identify outcomes possible from diverse styles of food programs
3. Feel empowered to try a food program in your library

The Latino population of many states in the Pacific Northwest is over 20% and growing. How can the public library best engage and serve this community? Library Director Jenny Berg will tell the story of five years of increasing involvement with Latinos in McMinnville, Oregon, a town of 34,000. Utilizing available resources, making a case for engagement, and working with partners, funders, and staff the McMinnville Public Library is a city department leading the way in building strong relationships with Latinos. This will be a fun and interactive program where attendees can exchange ideas about how they might better form cross cultural connections. 
>Make the case for engagement outside of the library walls
>Utilize existing resources to engage Latinos in your community
>Create partnerships to grow cross cultural connections
 

You don’t have to be the boss to impact your organization. The truth is our actions as followers can have a significant effect on our careers, colleagues, organizations, and definitely our leaders. This is often a surprise to many since our culture celebrates and promotes leadership as the primary component for positive change. When we do consider those who are following our leaders, our focus is usually on teams and group dynamics, not on the experience of the individual. This workshop will explore the concept of followership and how it can benefit our libraries. We’ll discuss why we should care about the individual follower, how a single person with limited authority can have a truly positive and organization-wide impact, whether or not it is possible to develop specific traits and skills to maximize our contributions as followers, and how can we support our leaders while remaining true to our personal values. Finally, we’ll evaluate our own performance as followers and strategize ways to improve our abilities in this area. 

Participants in this workshop will:
- Become familiar with the concept of followership and the connection it has to organizational health.
- Recognize the ethical challenges followers face
- Identify followership skills and strategies for developing these abilities
 

The Archive of our Own (A03) fanfiction database has been operation in the last 10 years and has over 1.6 million members creating and reading works of fanfiction.  In A03, anyone can be an author, editor, book marketer, publisher or content creator.  With the myriad of digital social media platforms writers and readers of fanfiction can interact directly and immediately.  The digital content being produced is dynamic and readily available for free to anyone with a smartphone or computer.  In this session, we will explore the global and digital ecology behind fanfiction.  This includes the creative autonomy of fanfiction writers, the ways in which they can produce a story rich in multimodal content and how their interactions with their readers can engage readers in curating and creating digital content as well.  We will also discuss some ideas and engagement strategies for libraries might think about when engaging with fanfiction readers and writers in their communities.
 
The way that digital platforms for fanfiction are growing, and the incredible content that’s free and readily available to anyone with digital access, it is in the best interest of libraries to be an active participant in the rich digital ecology of fanfiction.  In attending this session, we hope to:
1) Raise awareness about fanfiction and how it impacts traditional print readership
2) Inspire folks to reimagine programming for their libraries that is focused on digital content and its possibilities
3) share information about new ways digital fiction content is being produced and disseminated
View and reflect on the presentation at: bit.ly/beyondfandoms.  Thank you all for your feedback!

Most of us dread having to attend meetings just for the sake of meeting.  There’s nothing worse than sitting around a table (or webcam) with folks consulting a vague agenda, where outcomes are not clear, decisions are not followed through on, and nothing gets communicated back to stakeholders.  This combination can be toxic to overall morale.  In this session University of Alaska Southeast’s Library Dean Elise Tomlinson will share some free online tools and practical steps she has developed to significantly improve the outcomes of departmental meetings.  This includes how to collaborate on agendas, remove the need for someone to take “minutes”, provide a way to increase accountability and close the loop on action items, and still get minutes out to stakeholders by the end of the meeting.  Dean Tomlinson uses humor and lessons learned from 10 years of running meetings (the good, bad, and the ugly), to show how anyone can improve their process with a few quick and easy changes. 

Attendees will learn how to:
1. Set up collaborative agendas where everyone gets a chance to be heard while eliminating the need for a designated note taker.
2. Increase the accountability of team members and prevent action items from falling through the cracks.
3. Improve timely communication to stakeholders including marketing the hard work of library staff and faculty.

When challenged to create an organizational chart for your library that was patron-focused, it is unlikely we would come up with the cumbersome, siloed
org charts we now have. The Hillsboro (OR) Public Library did away with traditional departments, replacing Circulation, Reference, and Technical Services
with four quadrants that speak to the experiences we want patrons to have. How did we do it? By learning from the self-management, or holacracy,
movement, and implementing a new structure that prioritized supporting staff expertise, allowed for significant cross-training, and empowered staff to
manage their own time and participate more fully in organizational projects.

1. Upon completion, participants will understand the principles behind holacracy and self-management.
2. Upon completion, participants will have developed a clear action plan for implementing potential organizational changes in their own libraries.
3. Upon completion, participants will have obtained a set of resources from outside of the library world to assist in structural organizational change.

How to build healthy and positive images of females in middle and high school collections. 

Consideration and discussion of current titles with healthy characters.   Encouraging kids to balance their book diet. Teaching students to recognize healthy relationship patterns.  Sharing microreviews with the audience.  

The Latino population of many states in the Pacific Northwest is over 20% and growing. How can the public library best engage and serve this community? Library Director Jenny Berg will tell the story of five years of increasing involvement with Latinos in McMinnville, Oregon, a town of 34,000. Utilizing available resources, making a case for engagement, and working with partners, funders, and staff the McMinnville Public Library is a city department leading the way in building strong relationships with Latinos. This will be a fun and interactive program where attendees can exchange ideas about how they might better form cross cultural connections. 

• >Make the case for engagement outside of the library walls
• >Utilize existing resources to engage Latinos in your community
• >Create partnerships to grow cross cultural connections 

An introduction to flying robots! This session will get participants acquainted with drones & UAVs. You'll get up to speed on what they are, how they work, and what they can be used for. We'll learn a little about selecting good drones for libraries, with special attention given to durability and cost. You'll get an overview (pun intended) of flight basics, laws, and safety. We will then look at developing programs for all ages, including best practices, lessons learned, and ideas for community partnerships.

Participants will leave the session with an understanding of drone fundamentals, develop criteria for choosing drones for library programs, and be prepared to design drone programs at their home library.