Summit Wrap Up - Emerging Themes

After the open floor, Lou summarized what she saw as the emerging themes.

• desirability of paying more attention to nuts and bolts of how we collaborate
• deepening and increasing our involvement
• leveraging existing partnerships
• partnering that would stretch our boundaries
• variety of types of collaborative partnerships
• building upon the collaboration we have - TexShare is a brand - how can we leverage that?
• a call to be more experimental - to try things we haven't done before. raise the risk quotient.
• recognition that incentives might be helpful
• call by all of you - where's the data? you want to base this on facts/research
  
• let's do our homework on this first
• find out who they are, attend, participate
• leads to an informed decision about partnerships
• cooperative programs - teaming of librarians with teachers - curriculum development -put these folks together in a creative environment
• user focus
• enhanced user focus, intense focus on our users
• self service
• personalized services
• flexible services
• improvisational - what do we want to do today? (parking cam)
• commitment to combine quality and convenience
• using wisely and innovatively the tech we already have access to to deliver the services we want to the users
• necessity for multiple types of access
• a new attention to variations in ways we might want to offer access based on demographics of our clientel
• what would you like, how would you like it delivered, instead of this is how we offer - you fit yourself into it
• leveraging of technology
• use social software - some effort to investigate and understand and help the library community to understand the power of all this
• community and conversation
• social networking software - we're just on the edge of that and the power of that is quite phenomenal
• take a look at the music video from fulton county library in Georgia [Ellie's note - I couldn't find this - if you have the link, please leave a comment. Thanks!]
• leveraging tech to delivery services
• make what we have feature rich
• encouraging user created content
• are we doing a good enough job of leveraging technology to train our own staff
  

Big Ideas:

• one stop concept - any user, any library, and format, anytime, any place, one card, all catalogs, all databases, all users
• TexShare, next? - statewide authentication. crawlable. both leverage and supercharge the existing partners into larger collaborative endeavors
• seamless lifelong learning
• the need to address literacy and info lit
• to address demographic changes in our state
• look at what the global environment is expected and what our demographics expect
• this is something we can address
• what about our staff? what about lifelong learning for those of us trying to deliver life long learning
• shorter more focused, what you need at point of use
• outreach - we're not doing as much or as well as we should and we should address ourselves to it
• marketing and advertising. could we share the cost by libraries banding together on the creation/delivery
• interest in small in place kiosk type of access
• thread that outreach will work best if we demystify library services and what we've got
• statewide large scale message - use big Texas brand combined with books as brand
• link bigness and books piece
• in terms of marketing and advertising - clearly distinguished by bob
• convenient and easy to develop and deploy
• emphasize community and library as place
• position library as social gathering environment that exemplifies what ...
  
• call to step up quality of marketing
• use professional level personnel; to help us do that inside and outside the organization
• need to do a better job of training and retraining staff to implemeent marketing
• define expectations of staff
• transformation - transforming how we think about the users
• move from looking at users as unfortunate individuals who, bless their little hearts need our help, to seeing them as peers and partners
• move from helper to peer or partner mentality
• most organizations would pay dearly for the goodwill that users have towards libraries
• we have it but don't seem to be leveraging that
• move from transaction based activity to experiences, laboratory, improvisational activities
• are our spaces appropriate for that? how would that work?
• the need to do it more like the rest of the world does it
• mainstream our service models so they don't look weird to people
• how do we move our service model closer to the mainstream of what people expect from other organizations
• self service one step
• transformation from a focus on things to a focus on place
• look more closely and learn more deeply about our communities
• what does it mean to be a library staff member in the new mode
• so people being asked to make that transition have a clear idea in mind
• idea of triage
• rethinking radically the user experience at the front line
• how would that work, what would we do, how would we move to a more mainstream model
• base it on research based on users and real data
• we want assessment
• we don't want to go it alone
• could we collaborate on getting this data?
• desire that we do a better job integrating customer knowledge

• much more to say, but those are the key pieces
• the themes you are interested in transcend all of the topics
• there is a common wisdom of the group