We sent out a postcard,
announcing some of the 4th quarter Guerneville Library events
and on the other side was a meeting announcement for Sept 29th
The opening 15 minutes
and on to 10:45
winding up thru 11:30 ish
x
I've summarized the meeting in my first article for the Russian River Times
Johanna Lynch, publisher of the Russian River Times, a West County monthly Newspaper, has asked me to put together a monthly column on the Library. I have accepted this offer and will attempt to use the space provided to keep the public aware of what’s been happening and what’s coming up at the Guerneville Library.
Library News.
Guerneville.
Library News.
Guerneville.
The
library doesn’t have a lot of room to maneuver.
It’s a bureaucratic government agency: slow to act, very
constrained. The hope was that the 40-50
people attending the two-hour forum would have dozens of ideas about how to
improve the current situation. We were
overjoyed with the results.
Videos of the event are on our Blog site,
This has been a year of turmoil for the
Sonoma County Library (SCL). Our
Guerneville Regional Library (GRL) has gone through changes in hours and
staffing, but the main stress factor has been people-related. For me, this has been evidenced by the SCL
director and staff no longer returning my calls and e-mails.
I am an active patron of the GRL, also a
member of the River Friends of the Library (FOL), and a decade-long member of
the Library Advisory Board (LAB). The
LAB is the central pivot-point of a four-part compact that allows the SCL to
function. Each of the dozen SCL
libraries has a LAB. The LAB brings
together the four parts of the system: the local library facility & staff,
its service community (represented by the LAB appointees), the central library
management structure, and fourthly, the Library Commission, which has oversight
of this four-part structure.
There is a fifth, peripheral part of the
structure, – that is the FOLs, which are financial support groups individually,
to each of the local libraries. The
primary revenue support for libraries, as for Parks and Fire Departments, is
property taxes, and these are significantly down and will lag any housing
market rebound for years to come. The
FOLs may be a viable conduit for fund-raising during the next decade.
As a result of the heightened awareness of
these groups, an all-hands meeting was convened six months ago to address the
problems. Out of that meeting, your GRL,
its LAB, and its FOL took several steps: the LAB increased its meeting
frequency by 50%, the LAB adopted a policy that encourages its members to
attend the Commission meetings. The LAB
and the FOL jointly agreed to support this community forum, which turned out to
be fertile with ideas.
I am not a patron of the Guerneville Library, but I appreciate your efforts in bringing together community and library for brainstorming. From watching the videos I an tell that this has been a very productive session. Keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteG. Foster