Leadership Team Minutes - May 12, 2021

News

• Ralph Ellison is planning a Centennial Celebration. The Dunbar branch opened in 1921 to serve the citizens in NE OKC. The original cornerstone from the Dunbar branch is in the wall at Ralph Ellison.
• A limited number of Blu-Rays will be purchased for the system. Our standard format has been DVDs as not everyone can play a Blu-Ray, but a Blu-Ray player can play a DVD. There are some titles that are now only being put out through streaming or Blu-Ray. We will purchase titles in Blu-Ray if we are unable to get them in DVD format, one example is Nomadland. They will be processed in the same cases as the DVDs, but they will have a Blu-Ray sticker on the spine. Pauline, Kim and Morgan have worked on an email that we will be sending out to people who placed reserves on Nomadland prior to us being aware that we could not get the title in a DVD format so that customers are aware that it will be a Blu-Ray version. Pauline will also be working on an email for all staff about the change and provide some talking points to help with future conversations with customers. Pauline is also attending the Public Service Managers and the Access Managers meetings to discuss this change.
• The recycling and removal project dealing with the withdrawn bound magazines in Special Collections is not going as planned. The vendor is not committing to regular pick-ups or drop offs and there are some concerns about space in the basement and being able to have space for regular tasks to occur. They are working through this. The Friends are also having a conversation about whether to require volunteers at the sort site to be vaccinated, this has not been decided at this point.
• Exploring the possibility of having a social worker from a local agency officing out of a MLS building is moving forward. There are meetings set with NorthCare, Diversion Hub and the Homeless Alliance to talk about possibilities.
• The public art that was supposed to be installed at ED last year will be installed on May 31^st.
• We received a gift of 4,000 bottles of water from Niagara Bottling Company. This water will be used to help customers keep cool at outdoor programming at our locations this summer.
• SMG will be meeting Tuesday for a final budget review before it goes to the Commission.
• We’ve been in Sit and Stay for several weeks and we briefly talked about the feedback that the RDs have received from the locations. Overall, it has been going well. There is some relief in staff as they do not have to continually have conversations with customers about wearing a mask, some staff are concerned about the number of customers not wearing a mask in the building. The numbers are trending down if that continues, we will be returning to normal operations on August 1^st. Staff will be wearing masks until the CDC says that it is safe to not do so. We will also still have staff stay socially distant if that is what the CDC is recommending. There are some concerns about moving to be fully open if we are still socially distancing and wearing masks. We will be working towards giving as much space back to public use as possible. At some locations it may not be possible to socially distance staff without the use of a meeting room so that will be a case by case discussion.

Discussion

• Safe Place- Mark presented a proposal for the libraries to be part of the Safe Place program again. Safe Place is a national program that assists youths (focusing on teens) who are in immediate need of help and safety. The library would be a place that a teen could come in and say they need a Safe Place, staff would then contact Pivot who would send a staff member to assist the teen. We discussed that the Service Center would not be a building that would be included in this program, if we had any concerns about staff safety in being involved in this program and what signed agreement we would need between Pivot and the system.
• Priorities for LT in the coming year- Larry asked the group for feedback about what the priorities for Leadership Team should have for the coming year. A question was asked about where we were at with a Strategic Plan, Larry let us know that the Strategic Focus group is working on it and should have a draft of a plan by mid-June and we hope to implement it by mid-July. Items that came up in discussion: continuing conversations about the Core Values and how to implement/live them, working on communication, working on LT members being out in the locations more, changing how we write the meeting minutes, ensuring that we are conveying the ‘why’ behind the decision, talking more about the collection and how that fits in with everything else, working together with staff to combat burnout, focus more outwardly, more teambuilding exercises, pick a focus as we cannot change everything at once
• Leadership Team ended the meeting sharing micro successes each person had experienced recently.
• Charisse asked us to make sure and review the budget one final time before next week.