December 4, 2008 - back up to move forward

Back in my early twenties, I had an unusually vivid dream. I was driving a car, when suddenly, a big concrete wall loomed up in front of me. Crash!

For a moment, I was stunned, stopped, horrified. Then, I gradually realized that I wasn't bleeding. Nothing was broken. I put the car in reverse, and slowly backed up. Everything seemed to be working. I pulled forward around the blockade. And woke up.

The meaning was clear enough. Back then, I had a gift for making spectacularly bad romantic choices. The dream was about another breakup ... that I survived.

I find the image apt for the 2008 library election. Crash! - 52.6% of the county voted down a mill levy increase.

Castle Pines North voted for the mill levy increase at 62%. Parker approved it at 51%. Highlands Ranch and Lone Tree came in at 48%; Castle Rock at 43%, and Roxborough at 38%. But despite regional differences, the total is what matters.

The library was on the road to keeping pace with growth and demand. And after two attempts to make that case to the voters, I think we have to assume that the community has spoken. That road is blocked.

But as in my dream, I find that the library is still whole. In the entire history of the library district (formed in 1990) we have never taken on any debt. We have an extraordinary staff, whose dedication and skills are intact. On the basis of public use, of staff productivity, of community connection and impact, we are among the most successful public libraries in the nation.

That's not a bad place to be.

Of course, there are still some significant discrepancies in library services around the county. Our Parker Library is woefully inadequate. Castle Pines has no library at all. That's a service problem.

As we sat down to finalize our 2009 budget, we made another couple of discoveries. For the first time, our expenditures are exactly equal to our anticipated revenues. There's no wiggle room, and thus no contribution to our savings. Recent projections suggest that all of Douglas County may see a drop in assessed valuation next year. That means a drop in library revenue.

So not only will we not be growing, it's time to trim our sails. The alternative is to do nothing, and have to meet a crisis the following year, when only the most drastic action is possible. That puts too many library workers at risk.

Responsible leadership means that we have to make some thoughtful reductions in service in 2009.

We are not alone. I am well aware that this exactly parallels what's going on in many households across America. When times are tight, you can't do all the things you could do before.

In January, 2009, our Library Board and staff will begin to consider some changes in our service offerings. I anticipate that some of those changes might begin to be seen in June of next year.

Meanwhile, I'm taking a month off from writing newspaper columns. I've got some thinking to do.

Sometimes, you have to back up a little before you can move forward.

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LaRue's Views are his own.

November 27, 2008 - What (and who) is next?

Many months ago now, I attended a couple of meetings with the deans of two library schools.

We library directors had some ideas about the desirable skill sets of new graduates. The deans were eager to hear from us what public libraries were looking for these days.

After a while, I started to feel a little sorry for the deans. It turns out that all we wanted them to do was give us smart, emotionally intelligent, and experienced project managers who not only had a good handle on their own high ethics and professional standards, but also inspired others to be as good as they were.

To put it another way, what we wanted couldn't be simpler. We just wanted them to guarantee that we would never make a hiring mistake again.

The problem, of course, is that such an expectation is utterly unreasonable. No matter how good any new professional may be, the hiring organization still bears a lot of responsibility.

Professional programs impart a body of theory. They provide an introduction to a career.

The library provides something else: the real career.

The first test of theory against practice. The first big thrill. The first big disappointment. The first day when you think you actually get what's going on.

That magic moment when you see something new, something not only good, but something better than anything any of your professors talked about. You see a path to making a difference.

The day when you are tested, and you choose.

It's not all good. No matter how fine the library might be, it will still allow dysfunctional and even destructive behavior. Sometimes, that's because those in charge of the library really don't know such behavior is going on. Sometimes, that's because library administrators (and staff!) lack the courage to confront it.

Sometimes, libraries are guided by a compelling vision. Sometimes, there's nothing but expediency and crass opportunism.

Yet I believe that most librarians are in it for love. We live to serve, with intelligence, tenacity, great dollops of humor, and a genuine love of learning. We want the people whose lives we touch to be a little richer, a little better for it.

We want everyone -- the infant, the toddler, the preschooler, the elementary student, the secondary student, the college student or tradesman, the business person or social sector worker, the parent, the teacher, the consumer, the senior -- to know that the library is his or her birthright, sanctuary, workshop, and playground. We offer the accumulated knowledge of the human race.

I've been giving a lot of thought lately to what's next in my life. I've decided that maybe I should be giving more attention to those just entering the profession that has given so much to me.

Oh, and for those of you over the age of 50 who do not happen to have the great joy of being librarians, maybe you want to think about how you will offer a hand up to the gifted generation behind you in your own profession.

Do you see them?

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LaRue's Views are his own.

November 20, 2008 - Veterans Services at the Library

By Rochelle Logan, Associate Director of Research & Collections

Of all the phases in my life, the time I am most proud of was spent as an Air Force spouse. My husband was a pilot, now retired. We moved eight times all over the US and overseas until we landed in Colorado in 1992. It was a wonderful life, but also a hard one. We never knew where the military would send us next. Will it be in a part of the country or world we’d rather not live? How will the children take another move?

There were plenty of times I was anxious and lonely and those were during times of peace for our country. Now I have friends whose sons and daughters are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military and their families deserve our thanks and support from our government. The GI Bill is one way the United States helps veterans.

Douglas County Libraries is participating in a pilot project with the American Library Association to provide information to veterans about the new GI Bill. The American Legion and Congress overhauled veterans’ education benefits and created the Post 9/11 GI Bill, which is scheduled for implementation on August 1, 2009. People eligible under this new Bill served after September 10, 2001.

In addition to the Post 9/11 GI Bill, we still have the Montgomery GI Bill, the Montgomery GI Bill-Selected Reserve and the Reserve Education Assistance Program. Confused yet?

If you think you are eligible for any of the four GI Bills, come to one of the Douglas County Libraries to get help from a librarian and pick up information. You can also visit http://www.wo.ala.org/veteransinfo. Some of the costs you might have covered include tuition, fees, and housing allowances. With the cost of a four-year education skyrocketing, these benefits are especially valuable.

We want to get the word out to all veterans to check on their GI Bill eligibility. Thirty percent of active-duty service members never use their veterans’ education benefits after leaving the military. And only seven percent between 1997 and 2006 used up all their benefits. Let’s improve those numbers.

Another venture I want to mention is the “Speaking to the Future: Voices from the Past” project in the library’s Douglas County History Research Center (DCHRC). The DCHRC is looking for veterans and civilians with wartime service who want to be interviewed and have their oral history become a part of the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project. The importance of collecting and preserving stories of military service cannot be underestimated.

Does your grandfather or aunt tell you stories about their wartime experience that would someday be lost? My father-in-law stepped on a land mine in France during WWII. His telling of that day and being saved by a French farmer is absolutely riveting. Dad was interviewed in San Diego for the Library of Congress project. I encourage you or your family members to do the same.

If you would like more information about sharing your story, call the DCHRC at 303-688-7730.

This month we honor our veterans and their families. I encourage you take the time to thank your friends who are or were in the armed forces.

November 13, 2008 - test your civic engagement

A year ago, after the 2007 election, I did something I hadn't done before: took a vacation, all by myself, to a place where I knew no one.

Last year, it was Milwaukee. I rented a cheap hotel room close to Lake Michigan. And I spent several days walking the shore, walking the city, walking and walking and walking.

When I got back, my wife asked me, "So who did you talk to?" Usually when I travel, I return with lots of stories. And that's when I realized that at least during the Milwaukee part of my travels, I really hadn't talked to anybody, other than to check into the hotel, or to order a meal. I had no stories.

I returned, I think, better than when I'd left. I had found my center. Sometimes you just need absolute quiet and physical release. You need solitude.

And if that's one side of the equation, here's another: civic engagement. I know that after the recent, interminable election process, no one wants to think about this.

But I ran across a fascinating chart on the Wikipedia entry for "civic engagement." (I'll take up some other time the debate about whether or not Wikipedia, open to all for revision, can be considered a reliable source of information. Briefly, yes. Not infallible -- but neither is an encyclopedia.)

The article, as of November 1, 2008 anyhow, spells out 19 objective measures. So here's a family exercise. Lay this out after dinner and give yourself a score -- how many of the following did you participate in over the past 12 months?

The 19 measures fall into three categories (with a few clarifying notions of my own in parentheses).

Civic

* community problem solving (trash pickup, recycling, latchkey kids)
* regular volunteering for a non-electoral organization
* active membership in a group or association
* participation in fund-raising run/walk/ride
* other fundraising for charity

Electoral

* regular voting
* persuading others to vote
* displaying buttons, signs, stickers
* campaign contributions
* volunteering for candidate or political organizations

Political Voice

* contacting officials
* contacting the print media
* contacting the broadcast media
* protesting
* email petitions
* written petitions
* boycotting (avoiding products because of their political affiliations)
* buycotting (selecting products because of their political affiliations)
* canvassing (direct contact with people, handing out flyers, etc.)

I find this very clever and precise: they are measures of what is also called "social capital." The idea is simple. The more people that are "connected" to their communities, the healthier both the people and the communities are liable to be. "Health" isn't just vagueness. There are fewer crimes, less disruption to life and property. People are literally healthier. They have fewer doctor visits. They live longer.

Numerous studies have found that if you want to improve the quality of your life both mentally and physically, the best strategy is greater engagement with the lives of those around you.

By your choices the community is made, or undone. These are some of the measures.

November 6, 2008 - it takes us all to make a community

Back in the day, I lived for a while as a wandering poet. The pay was terrible, but the experience was rich.

At one point, I found myself at the home of a newspaper publisher. He admitted that he did not understand poetry at all, or know how to tell if it was any good. So we got to talking. How, I asked him, did he recognize good writing in journalism?

He started rattling off some characteristics. Good newspaper writing was clear, fresh, free of cliches. It had immediacy and structure. It told a story. It was poignant but not sentimental.

And when he was done, I said "the same thing is true of good poetry." Every discipline has its quirks, of course, but by comparing samples of poetry to samples of newspaper writings, we quickly found that we had more in common than he'd thought: good writing is good writing.

Much the same thing is true in the worlds of for-profit, and not-for-profit. The end is different -- newspapers and libraries, for instance, have discrete purposes. But when you take a look at how private sector and public sector organizations operate, it again doesn't take long to identify some commonalities.

Successful organizations are clear about their purpose. They treat their customers -- and their staff -- well.

Successful organizations last. Yes, current quarter and annual performance matter. But great organizations stick around.

Successful organizations play well with others.

And that is a message that may need some underscoring after this endless election season. We need each other, all of us.

I'm writing this column before I know the results of any of the elections. But I do know this: Watching the library campaign in 2008 was a revelation to me. I met so many people whose deep and infectious passion for the power of literacy, for the value of the public library, profoundly impressed me.

They also created their own organization, that peculiar beast called a citizen's campaign committee. I'd like to publicly thank campaign CEO Justin VanLandschoot, Glen Matthes, Jim Anest, Steve Parry, Karin Piper, Warren Lynge, Sandra Kip, Bob Hanak, David Williams, Meg Truhler, Perry and Lindsay Kamel, Corbin Wagoner, Krista Simonson, and my incomparable Board of Trustees (Stevan Strain, Barbara Dash, Mark Weston, Bob McLaughlin, Demetria Heath, Amy Hunt, and David Starck). They -- and many more! -- gave literally thousands of hours to telling the library story, poking signs in the ground, raising money for mailings and postcards, showing up at rallies, or just chatting up their friends and neighbors.

They all underscored for me the simple truth that public institutions-- and their futures -- belong to the public. I am deeply grateful to them.

And you know what? I'm grateful to the other campaigns, too. Our shared community invested in a host of efforts to affect the future, to make it something closer to what we imagine it should be.

Some of those efforts will now go forwards. Others will have to regroup. But in the months to come let's remember to be kind. We are not only writing our own story, our own poems, we're writing each other's, too. Some of it is good writing.

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LaRue's Views are his own.

October 30, 2008 - early literacy means global competitiveness

About twenty years ago, I went with some other librarians to the Greeley mall. We were going to stage a "read in."

The idea was this: we put up some library signs, then stepped into a sort of reading corral. When small children would come by, we'd invite them to listen to a story. We'd taken a bunch of kid's books with us.

Shortly after I arrived, a little boy walked along who was about the same size as my daughter Maddy was back then. I suppose he was about a year old.

Utterly without thinking, I treated him just like her. I picked him up, spun him around, dropped into a cross-legged position on the ground, and opened up a book in front of him.

And two things immediately became apparent. First, I could sense from the corner of my eye the mother freezing up. "Uh oh," I thought. "I just snatched this boy right from under her. Bad idea."

But the other odd thing was that it was perfectly clear that nobody had ever read to this child before. He didn't know where to look.

You know how long it takes to learn how to follow the rhythm of reading a book? Opening the book, starting on the left, moving to the right, turning the page?

It takes two pages.

And within two pages, this little boy was acting just like Maddy: Relaxed in my lap, head turning smoothly with the pages. He was interested.

We finished the book, and I think read another one. Then I handed the boy gingerly back to the mom. He smiled happily at me, and at her. I apologized to the mother: "I didn't mean to frighten you. He's just the same size as my daughter."

And the mother said something that has stayed with me over the years: "I had no idea he was ready." She had somehow thought she would start reading aloud to him when he was older. How old, I don't know.

Early exposure to books is important. There are some significant correlations in behavior and attaining fluency.

For instance, one of the best predictors of 4th grade fluency is the ability, by about kindergarten, to recognize the letters in our alphabet. Children who have trouble learning to read in 1st grade are quite likely to have trouble in 4th. As I noted here a couple of weeks ago, reading scores in 3rd and 4th grade are reliable predictors of the prison population.

There's good news: several studies have demonstrated that one of the best predictors of academic success is a strong school library program.

But within the state, many school libraries are in crisis. The average copyright date of a book in Colorado's school libraries is 15 years. Many have no librarians.

We know exactly what to do to improve reading scores in Colorado -- but, in most schools, choose not to. It baffles me.

Then there's this even more alarming statistic from the 2008 Report of the National Commission on Adult Literacy. Alone among the first world  (democratized, free market) countries, the United States' current generation is less well educated than the previous one.

That's worth restating. In other developed nations, the current generation is better educated than their parents. In our country, the trend is in the opposite direction.

Today, 1 in 3 young adults will drop out of high school.

We know that low literacy is correlated with family poverty. It seems likely to me that it is also correlated with our ability to compete in a global economy.

Following the mall encounter, I remember being very glad to see that young mother show up with her toddler at our library. She learned something important: the time to start investing in your child's future is now.

I hope our nation is as smart.

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LaRue's Views are his own.

October 23, 2008 - personal appeal for 5A

About 70% of the currently registered voters in Douglas County requested mail ballots this year. I've already got mine. And like an estimated 70% of that group, I'll fill it out and return it in three days.

So by the time you read this, the election, at least in Douglas County, may be over. But please do not let that stop you from voting! We won't know the results until November 4, and every vote counts.

It really does. Last year, the library lost its measure by just 210 votes out of 42,000 cast. Only thirty-four percent of the voters showed up last year. A little more than half of them -- so 17% of our voters -- decided the question.

I'll be honest. Although I went into last year's election, as I go into this one, understanding that the universe persists in doing what it does, not what I want it to do, that loss was surprisingly painful. I found it personally disappointing that the election was lost in my own home town of Castle Rock.

As one of our newer facilities, reflecting the many things we've learned in recent years, the Philip S. Miller Library is a model of 21st century librarianship. It is deeply integrated into the life of our community, demonstrating its value in many ways every single day.

But I have concluded the obvious: library use does not automatically translate into library support. Our demand is at least 9 times greater than the national average. Yet we narrowly lost an election right after our period of greatest gain.

We can cite our return on investment study all day long. An independent agency demonstrated that we return $5.02 in services, goods, and value for every tax dollar. But some people simply cannot make the jump of thinking of taxes as investments -- even when the dividend is a community they can be proud of.

We can point out our astonishing services to children. We provide thousands of programs every year. We check out more children's materials than any library in the state, when we are not the largest library, or have the most children, or even the most children's books. But if you don't have children yourself, you may not appreciate the value of early literacy.

We can underscore the point that our negotiation of donated land collapses if the library loses this election. That would make any future expansion many times more expensive, in locations not nearly as well centered. But people who haven't negotiated such agreements think, "how hard can it be?"

Eighteen years ago, Douglas County's libraries were reckoned dead last among Colorado's library systems. Today, according to a recent national ranking, we are among the top five in the entire United States. That speaks volumes (hah) about the keen interest of our citizens in competent and responsive service.

But in the 12 years since our last tax increase, we've developed some capital needs that require reinvestment.

Like everyone else, I've watched with concern the recent economic thrashings on Wall Street. But I also know this: library use takes a big jump at such times, further straining an already overstressed system.

I know, too, that tomorrow's jobs will not find their beginning on Wall Street. They'll start on Castle Pine's Monarch Blvd., Castle Rock's Wilcox Street, Highlands Ranch Parkway, Lone Tree's Lincoln Ave., Parker's Mainstreet, and Roxborough's Rampart Range Road.

They'll start with someone researching a business idea at the library.

I believe that while public libraries are not the only tool communities can or should use in order to thrive, it is one of our best.

Douglas County Libraries has worked hard to earn the thoughtful support of our citizens, and has made its case in detail to anyone who would listen.

In turn, we have listened to voter concerns, and tightened our proposal accordingly. We reduced the request to a single mill. We will sunset 40% of the increase when our new buildings are paid off.

Humbly, I ask for your vote in support of the future of your library. That vote will ensure stronger libraries for our entire county, to the immediate benefit of all our communities.

Please, say YES to libraries in 2008.

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LaRue's View are his own.