I hope to have quick reference information for librarians, trustees and everyone else.  Hopefully it will be helpful with marketing, fundraising and grant seeking.  If nothing else it’s nice to have numbers behind what we already know – that Kansas’ libraries are second to none and our patrons know it.

It is a work in progress, as I only have public library stats up so far.  I will be putting information on academic libraries soon.  If anyone knows of a good source for school libraries, or if you have any other suggestions, I woud appreciate it.

Thanks,

Peter Haxton, State Data Center Coordinator

Shannon Roy led the State Library’s Public Administration Workshop this past weekend (June 6 & 7) at the Holiday Inn in Salina. I was lucky enough to sit in on Friday’s session and what a treat it was.

The workshop kicked off with a keynote session by Kate Marek who got her doctorate from SLIM and is now on the faculty of the library school at Dominican University. Kate’s presentation, “Influences on Public Libraries: Finding Trends in the Literature and in Society”. led us on a tour de force of literature outside the library profession that can inform us about trends in society and give us ideas for new library services and products. Kate’s reading list inludes titles that cover findability, generational issues, organizational schemes and more.

After her session, I caught up with Kate and got her video recommendation for Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizatons”. Click here to see Kate talking about the book. (This is an mpg file. The video clip runs just over 2 minutes.)

A crack training team from Wichita Public Library took over for the rest of the workshop. Trainers Cynthia Berner-Harris, Jean Hatfield and Jaime Prothro expertly led us through topics such as: effective meetings, planning and mission statements, tools for decision making, policy development, budgeting, and customer service. Lots of power packed into a day and a half!

If you didn’t make it to the workshop, watch WebJunction Kansas for the training manual (an excellent resource in itself). In the meantime, check out our Flickr photos from the workshop.