Category Archives: Trustee Tuesday

Creating the environment within your library, and within your library culture, that makes every single community member feel as though the library is their place, best suited to serve their community. When we library people work to translate abstract values into action, we sometimes lose our way. At this summer’s STLS Trustee Retreat, internationally recognized speaker,

The New York State fiscal year 2018-2019 has passed with a bonded allocation of $34 million to fund public library construction across the state. For our membership, this means a nearly 45% increase in our local funding allocation, allowing us to provide more than $880,000 in assistance to member library projects. Have a project you’d

By show of hands, how many of you have made a joke about the public comment period of your board meetings? In the past month, I’ve personally heard at least two. It’s the easy joke we tell because we all know it is uncomfortable to be either caught unawares by the uncontrollable will of the

Evaluating the performance of your director can be either disastrous or positively impactful for the library. We’ll cover some practices that can help make the process meaningful and helpful to the sustainability of the library program. To start, your library would ideally have either or both a long range plan and a strategic plan in

You have found the new leader of the library. The Chief Executive Officer who will implement the mission and vision of the library organization through their operational practices. Or at least, we all hope they will. The most impactful thing you can do as the collective supervisory body over this new leader, is to support

You call a candidate and invite them to an interview. Every contact you make with that candidate, is an opportunity for both of you to gauge if this relationship is going to work. Every candidate is interviewing your library as well, and how you do will lay the foundation for long term retention, or sudden

All libraries face issues of recruitment, retention, and evaluation. This Trustee Tuesday mini-series will deal with the major barriers to library trustees fulfilling their role as supervisor of a qualified director.   Your director is leaving? Your director has left? Disruption is not easy for any organization, and unexpected disruption in leadership can set a

Innovation in libraries is often seen as something new, difficult, technological, and expensive. We hear innovation within the story Silicon Valley has written for us – an iPhone X that many of us will never be able to afford, a driverless car that many of us would never consent to. For the purposes of this

This week each of your libraries will receive Paid Family Leave printed guidance (.pdf) on Paid Family Leave and Disability Benefits Law. While only association libraries and reading centers (who employ at least one person, including the manager) are required to comply with these laws, it is my hope that all library people will take

It has been a year. Some of the work that we thought would be given to a new hire last year is still mine (member event calendar, member website training & assistance, annual reporting). We’ve happily made that hire and she’ll begin in September. I’m glad we waited – the team we will have at