Marcellus Turner, Seattle Public Library
Idaho Libraries Futures Camp

His Goals for today: #

  • Not Bore You
  • Not Mispronounce Words
  • Not Leave a Thought Unfinished
  • Learn something to take back to Seattle

If you were to build a library today, with no conception of libraries already in place: #

  • What would you build?
  • Who would we serve?
  • How would we deliver these servers?
  • Who would work for you?
  • What would be your mission?

What today’s presentation / conversation will be about and will not be about #

This space is NOT:

  • About leadership (directly anyway)
  • Size; it’s all relative and transferable

This space is:

  • Space of appreciation, honor, expectation, and opportunity
  • safe space
  • learning / engagement space
  • space of good intentions
  • space of opportunity
  • and a space of celebration

He’s:

  1. the Official Bear Poker, he really relishing in “poking the bear”, the one who’ll ask questions like “what are we going to do next?” “what will that look at?”
  2. a librarian through and through, may different positions at different places
  3. been in public, academic, etc (just not schools, but visits students)
  4. he’s a life-long librarian
  5. he’s from Mississippi… he says “who back then could imagine that a young black boy from Mississippi could grow up to be the head librarian of the Seattle Public Library?”

they’ve had 3 PR nightmares during his 8 years there:

  • Drag Queen story time (unexpected pushback)
  • branding went very bad
  • restroom issues with trans population

Strategic direction broken down into three circles:

  • program of service; what promise individual patron / user
  • areas of impact; what promised the city / government the library would do
  • business model; what Seattle Public Library will do internally to prepare for what need to do in 10 years

“You can live through anything as long as you know how long it’ll be” - a refrain he’s returning to throughout

They do their review every three years; the structure of three bubbles doesn’t change every three years, but what’s in the three bubbles can change every three years

That one-page, three circle diagram IS their plan; there’s no 80 page version, not other version. So it’s easy for everyone to know what SPL will do, internally and externally

Libraries & librarianship affect:

  • the profession
  • the association
  • the industry

Our history:

  • our sole job in libraries is to help someone else; we’re the only profession / institutions that do that
  • The Rule of 1965 (or 1969): librarians answer questions, check out things, and (??)
  • Three Bs: books, bodies, or buildings
  • We can do whatever we want to do, we just can’t do everything

Knowing the Challenges in order to meet the future:

  • funding
  • technology
  • convenience
  • social issues, one of the biggest challenges to libraries anywhere
  • emotional
  • image: librarians, profession, association, industry
  • cars and others controlling our destiny: example of automobile industry getting rid of cd players when that’s what he wanted
  • hard time with change
  • staffing the building / straddling the river; need to figure out how to get librarians outside of our doors… perhaps we don’t need a librarian on the reference desk all the time
  • “I have an iPhone, therefore I am”
  • close enough: our public often doesn’t want the exact answer, but instead just want to know close enough

Admits that first reference question when moved from academic libraries to public was “do you have the Harry Potter books?” and since he had no idea who Harry Potter was, he did an author search

Solutions for a viable future:

  • image, libration, and divestment
  • engagement vs outreach (community listening); when staff goes out, shut up. let community tell you what they want / need, not what you’re doing
  • becoming a socially-conscious library; you have got to do this. SPL doesn’t call homeless people “homeless,” calls them “daily readers” so that the staff reinforces people’s dignity.
  • creativity vs innovation; new solutions is creativity, he wants that as much as possible. librarians are not making a new way to read, but can make new ways to get innovations to patrons.
  • values; staff want to see same values in organization that they individually have
  • partnerships and relationships; needs to be two-ways
  • nimbleness and flexibility;
  • whatever you’re teaching, I’m not hiring; if library schools aren’t thinking about social issues, he’s not hiring… (I think he means librarians needs values & orientations, not skills)
  • using data and metrics for decision-making
  • great customer service / public safety / incidents; we’ve got to get better, since community will compare us against all sorts of things
  • date to be different; don’t think every location needs to look the same when they serve slightly different needs & populations
  • librarianship becoming professionally appealing; image of our work isn’t what it needs to be, like informatics vs libraries
  • experiences vs transactions; customer service, safety
  • intersection of influencers; SPL is going to start looking at what library work will be in 10 years; how will people searh for things?, what will finance look like?, we need to know these things in order to plan for future library needs & services
  • funding: private dollars, grants, gifts; when a voter has to decide between libraries, police, and fire stations, we’re going to lose
  • staffing (we’re the most painfully polite profession, need to figure out how to get other professions into the building {teachers who can write lesson plans; reporters who can dig up information; social worker on staff}, diversity)
  • equity vs equality; we need to focus on equity, not everyone can be supported in the same way, since there are different needs
  • expanding our industry network; spoke not to other librarians, but to other people in other industries who also deal with our issues, like transportation of people
  • external vs internal focus (outcomes and impacts);
  • digging the ditch you’re gonna die in; if you feel strongly about the issue you want to tackle
  • mission; none of this is asking library workers to change mission

That dreaded box (and thinking outside it):

  • long haul, not a sprint
  • change takes time
  • directions / fads / trends
  • creative solutions

{photo of his old horoscope}

looks back at his goals

  • our passion and energy is something he’ll take back to Seattle

again, if you were to build the library of the future, would it look like what your library looks like now?

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