Ep. 210 Weeding Together: The Collection Crew Approach with Len Bryan

Sunshine and Stories Episode 210: Weeding Together: The Collection Crew Approach with Len Bryan 

Episode Summary: 

Join Suzi Tonini as she talks with Len Bryan, Partner of Library Services at Cherry Creek Schools, about transforming weeding from a dreaded solo task into an empowering collaborative experience. Len shares his innovative "collection crew" model, the "ugly weed" method for visual weeding, and why building relationships should come before touching a single book in a new library.   

Outline: 

00:56 - Why weeding creates "The Great Library Divide" 

06:23 - The collection crew concept: collaborative weeding  

10:01 - The "ugly weed" method: visual scanning techniques  

14:20 - Logistics that matter 

21:03 - Communication strategies 

25:20 - Why new librarians should focus on relationships first  

28:18 - Weeding wins 

Resources:
Collection Crew Invitation for Principals (Cherry Creek Schools Library Services) 

Collection Crew Process (Cherry Creek Schools Library Services) 

Curate Shared Foundations Book (book available from ALA) 

FAQs for Weeding Libraries (Cherry Creek Schools Library Services) 

Weeding: Essential Library Collection Maintenance (slide deck presentation) 

Weeding: Essential Library Best Practices (Cherry Creek Schools slide deck presentation)  

"Weeding: The Great Library Divide, Embracing Collection Maintenance with Enthusiasm"  (Knowledge Quest blog post) 

The Weeding Handbook: A Shelf-by-Shelf Guide, Second Edition (book available from ALA) 

Contact Len Bryan: librarianlen@gmail.com 

Follow Len on Bluesky 

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CSL projects like this one are funded in part by the Grants to States program administered by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the Colorado State Library, Institute of Museum and Library Services, or the U.S. Government. 

Transcript

00:00:06 Kate Brunner

Welcome to Sunshine and Stories, 

00:00:08 Kate Compton

the podcast that shines a light on big ideas and bright moments in Colorado's public and school libraries.

00:00:14 Kate Brunner

Brought to you by the Library Development Team at the Colorado State Library.

00:00:21 Suzi Tonini

Hi everyone and welcome to Sunshine and Stories, the show where we explore what's working in libraries across Colorado.

00:00:28 Suzi Tonini

I'm Suzi Tonini, school library consultant for the Colorado State Library.

00:00:33 Suzi Tonini

And today we're diving into a topic that sparks a surprising amount of passion, weeding.

00:00:38 Suzi Tonini

Joining me is Len Bryan, Partner of Library Services and Cherry Creek Schools, a school librarian for almost two decades, and the author of the Knowledge Quest blog post, “Weeding: The Great Library Divide, Embracing Collection Maintenance with Enthusiasm.”

00:00:51 Suzi Tonini

Len, welcome to the show.

00:00:53 Len Bryan

Thank you, Suzi

I'm excited to be here.

00:00:56 Suzi Tonini

Let's dive in.

I want to start with the title of your blog post, The Great Library Divide.

Why do you think weeding creates such a divide with some librarians who are super enthusiastic weeders and others who avoid weeding altogether?

00:01:11 Len Bryan

Well, first, you know, it's the way you introduced this is perfect because it can be a very emotionally fraught process that we kind of go through when we are when we're setting ourselves up to weed our libraries or in some cases not weed our libraries.

And I think that one of the things that creates that divide is the mindset that we choose to embrace.

If we have a growth mindset, you know, we are more likely to embrace challenges and we're more likely to feel like that is something we need to do. We need to change the space.

If we have more if we embrace more of a fixed mindset, we may all we may have a fear of getting rid of something somebody might need one day. We may have a fear of not having enough books. We may have a fear of changing the look and feel of the space. And what are we going to do with these empty shelves?

00:01:59 Len Bryan

And I think people oftentimes overestimate the visual impact that weeding will have.

And they oftentimes wonder or worry about administrator pushback or community pushback or what if people start to ask me uncomfortable questions about what we're doing.

There's so many different reasons that people can be like me and be enthusiastic about updating and refreshing the space, and others might be hesitant or even actively resistant to weeding their library collection.

A scarcity mindset is something I mentioned in the blog post, and I think it's important to know that that's real.

We know that funding for libraries is limited, and the money for books is not going to be there in some cases in the way it has been in the past.

So all those things, I think, put people in one of those two sides of that divide is either I'm going to come in and weed the heck out of this thing, or I really don't feel comfortable discarding these books.

00:02:58 Suzi Tonini

Well, I loved your article because I think it helps create, kind of bridge that gap.

I think part of it too is if you haven't had modeling and training on how to weed well, it can be a really difficult task to take on your own, especially if you're feeling new to the task.

And that collection crew model, which we'll dive into in just a second, that really provides that modeling.

But first I want to ask, have you always been in the enthusiastic camp or was that a mind shift that's shifted over time for you?

00:03:27 Len Bryan

I was really lucky job, I actually got that job when I was still in library school.

I hadn't quite finished my degree yet, and my mentor librarian left the middle school where I was teaching to open a new library.

So I inherited her library, which, while extremely well-managed, you know, she was consummate professional, needed weeding almost immediately.

I was fortunate in that I had been teaching in that school for five years.

I knew the library, I knew the collection, I knew the students, I knew the community.

So I didn't have to follow my own advice that I give in the article, which is wait a year and get to know everybody, build relationships before you weed, I was able to see that library from the perspective of a new person coming in.

I knew that I had stable funding.

I knew that I was going to be able to update and refresh titles.

And I knew that I had some different things I wanted to do with the space.

So from the very beginning, I've always been an enthusiastic weeder.

And I have to give a caveat here.

I'm not sentimental.

I don't keep stuff.

I don't keep things that have this special emotional meaning.

Maybe I'm cold, maybe I'm robotic, maybe I'm too data-driven, but I really don't feel that just because I bought a book or just because it's a book I loved when I was younger, there's a reason to keep it.

If our kids are not embracing it, if they're not reading it, if they're not entranced by a book the way that I was when I was a kid, that's okay.

You know, they're from many, many, many generations, they're way younger than me and they have a different life perspective. And a favorite that I had growing up may not be a favorite of the students that I have now.

So I've always been pretty enthusiastic about weeding.

And it's one of those things that I think one of the personality traits that makes people great librarians also makes us bad weeders is that we are perfectionists and we want to do the job perfectly.

And weeding is one of those jobs that can never be done perfectly.

We have to kind of embrace the fact that we're going to have to challenge ourselves and it's going to be a painful process.

And I like to do a light touch when I am the librarian in a school and just weed things that are obviously not great for our kids on a first pass and do that subsequent weeding a little bit more deeply each time.

And that makes it a little bit easier.

00:05:40 Len Bryan

But yeah, you mentioned the collection crew.

One of the things that our crew members mentioned after we had finished one of the schools this summer, she's been a librarian for over 20 years.

She has tons of experience, and she's never been comfortable weeding because she's so low, because she's by herself. She's having to make these calls.

And there's a lot of, you know, we all have it. We all have self-doubt.

You know, we're all like, oh, maybe I should hang on to this.

But it's so much more empowering when you can look across the library and hold up a book and go, hey, Do you guys circulate this? Whether you kids like this book or not?

And people go, no, get rid of that thing. Nobody's touched that in years. It's empowering, right?

00:06:16 Len Bryan

So it gives you that, it gives you that permission that I think a lot of us need to go ahead and let that book go and move on.

00:06:23 Suzi Tonini

Absolutely.

And Len, when I read your blog post, I thought, oh, this is brilliant. I think so many librarians would appreciate that opportunity to have a time to come together with colleagues to weed together.

If you wouldn't mind just talking a little bit about what the collection crew was and what were some of the benefits of bringing folks together for this kind of collaborative project?

00:06:45 Len Bryan

Absolutely.

So this is an idea that actually came from my experience in Houston ISD.

So I'm the previous library director in Houston ISD, which is the 7th largest school district in the country.

I was really fortunate. We had a visionary superintendent who put libraries in the strategic plan, and I had a staff of seven experienced library coordinators who worked with me at the central office, and each one was responsible for a section of our district.

We had almost 300 schools in our district, so it was humongous. So each one of them was basically a baby library director, and I was just kind of their person who did the advocacy stuff for him at the district level.

So we had this, we started this tradition where when you went into a library, that was a wreck.

And some of these schools had not, the library doors had not been opened in 20 years, much less staff or anything like that.

So if you go into a library that's a wreck, and you're just like, oh my gosh, this is way more than a person can handle, we called it the bat signal.

You would throw up the bat signal, you would e-mail all of us, and we would drop what we're doing, we would come to your library and work with you for two or three days to at least make in the mess that you had to fix or clean up or whatever it was that needed to be done in the space.

And that idea of being able to throw up the bat signal and tell your colleagues, hey, I'm in over my head, I need some help, really resonated with me.

00:07:59 Len Bryan

And we formed such strong bonds.

We text each other almost every day still, even though that group is no longer together and that district kind of dissolved all of our positions. We still text each other every day. We're very close. It's the closest working relationships I've ever had is with the people that I was with in Houston for just a couple of years. We weren't together that long. But the advantages of having this collection crew is kind of like what I've already talked about.

It's the camaraderie.

It's having other professionals in the room with you as you're making those decisions.

It is having multiple perspectives on not only the books.

00:08:32 Len Bryan

One of the schools that we did really had a non-functioning layout.

So after we got done weeding, we talked about putting sections together and moving shelves around and making the space flow and work a little bit better.

And I know this is something that you guys did when you were in DPS, you had the same thing.

You were able to come in and really rejuvenate and reinvigorate a space, not only through weeding and inventory, which is what we were really focused on this summer, but also in recommending signage.

00:08:58 Len Bryan

You know, here's a couple of different ways you can label these shelves and make directional signage better.

And here's some poster ideas that we found online, maybe print these out and use them.

But the thing that I got most out of that was just being able to sit back and watch these librarians formed super strong bonds.

And I'll tell you a quick story.

After we got done, we did four schools this summer.

And after we got done with our schools, some of these librarians went back to their home campuses and not only felt empowered to weed, but also texted each other and go, hey, you want to come help me?

00:09:27 Len Bryan

And two or three of them would go together to a school and do some of the same work that we had done at some of these really high needs campuses that had really outdated, I mean, we really focused on our oldest collections and the buildings that had the most books and were the vastly overstuffed shelves and that sort of thing.

So those benefits are huge.

00:09:45 Len Bryan

Obviously, we discarded thousands of books, we reduced the collection age, we made the shelves more navigable, you're able to do more face-out displays.

All those things are true for the schools that we touched, but that has a ripple effect for the individuals who participated.

00:10:01 Suzi Tonini

And I love that you called your approach the ugly method.

Can you tell us more sbout that and why use that approach for these types of projects where you're coming into a space that has been neglected for a while?

00:10:16 Len Bryan

Right.

And part of the thing that I discovered is a lot of our libraries have not been inventoried in a long time.

So typically I would run a report of anything that was X number of years old or had not been checked out in X number of years.

And I would weed based off that report, right?

Because that way you're data-driven and you're able to justify every book that you weed that it's older than our kids and hasn't been checked out in a decade, we can comfortably say these books are probably not relevant.

The Ugly Weed works really well when that report is not helpful.

And in the case of some of our buildings, the inventory hasn't been done in seven, 8, nine years.

So the list of books that you get from those reports, those books may not be on the shelf anymore.

00:10:59 Len Bryan

And you're gonna be spending your time, I call it the bug hunt, you're looking for this individual title in these badly shelved libraries where things aren't shelved in order, you've got stuff sitting in back rooms, there's just, it's a mess.

So I like the ugly weed, which is just a visual process where you're scanning the shelves and you're looking for, I have a couple tips for that.

Let's say you're in the chapter book section where you have a nice thick book.

If you're looking at the top of the book and those pages are brown, the likelihood of them being less than 20 years old is almost nothing.

We also have a couple tricks that we used.

You can look, once you've done this a few times and you've been around books for a couple decades like we have,

You can look at the type set, you can look at the font of the spine or the cover, the cover art, and you can guess probably within two or three years when that book was published.

I also look for condition.

I look for books that are falling apart.

I look for books that have taped up spines.

I look for books that are still bound in that buckram, that canvas cover.

Anything like that, those are candidates for weeding.

I don't automatically weed those, but I put those in my stack to open to the title page and figure out what's the publication year, and let's look at that.

Another trick I have is dust.

I'm looking for a fine layer of dust.

If a book has a fine layer of dust on the top, that means it has not come off that shelf or been in a child's backpack probably in the last year or maybe even longer than that.

So that's another visual cue that you can use without running those reports.

You know, if you look at the Texas State Library's CREW manual, you'll know anything that is out of date, you preceded, you know, misleading.

I've really, I'm brutal when it comes to weeding the 500 section.

00:12:36 Len Bryan

Anything on space or science and technology that is not five years or younger is probably way out of date.

We pulled books out that said the space shuttle was cutting edge technology.

That thing has been retired now for 10 years.

We  found things that were, that would say things like, one day we'll go to Mars, like we've been there, we've had probes there for years, still calling Pluto planet, all that kind of stuff.

So those are things I look for the subject areas to, I take a very heavy hand with anything in the 900s that discusses a culture that might be worth looking at to see if it's a respectful representation.

So there's, I mean, there's the visual condition of the book and age of the book, but there's also the contents kind of go into the ugly weed method.

00:13:19 Suzi Tonini

When you're talking about technology, I was thinking about iPhones.

If you do the iPhone test, like if you wouldn't buy a five-year-old iPhone, that's probably your clue.

00:13:26 Len Bryan

I love that. I love that. Oh, I'm going to incorporate that into some of my materials. I love that.

Yeah, the iPhone test is a great one for technology.

And you know, going back to the hesitancy and the scarcity mindset that people have, it's like, well, I want them to have information.

It's like, I want them to have information too, but I would rather they not get a book than get one that's factually inaccurate.

I would rather not have a book on that subject than handing a child a book that is no longer true or contains stereotypes or is harmful in lots of different ways.

Like some of the older fiction and Everybody books that we have, not that old is bad, but many of them are pretty racist. They're pretty terrible. 

So you think of Five Chinese Brothers, you think of books like that, you know, just have these depictions that we now know are harmful and should not be in kids' hands.

00:14:13 Len Bryan

I'd rather not have that book than have a book that is going to cause a child harm.

00:14:20 Suzi Tonini

I know from experience that there is quite a logistical side to successfully pulling off this kind of project.

You've got entry into the building.

You've got to make sure the alarms are turned off before you enter the building.

AC on.

So can you walk us through what advice would you give to someone hoping to start something similar like this in their district and kind of what do they need to keep in mind logistics wise?

00:14:41 Len Bryan

Absolutely.

And this is something that I've really thought through.

I learned a lot of lessons in Houston about having the air conditioning on during the summer is kind of a big deal.

Part of my communication, and I'll send you the files that I have a principal communication where I want them to invite us into their building.

I'm a vampire. I'll come to your house, but you got to invite me first.

And part of my request is I need the facility manager's phone number so we can text or call in case of emergency.

I need to have the air conditioner turned on for these days.

We're pretty lucky. I have a, my district, I call it the dork badge.

My district badge is all access every door in the district 24-7.

I can get in on the weekends.

I know all the alarm codes and I'm able to manage that kind of stuff myself.

But I think planning for that is huge.

00:15:25 Len Bryan

Another logistical challenge is how are we going to pay people to come in during the summer?

Because I'm not going to request our staff volunteer their time.

Luckily, my library services department is a part of human resources and our chief human resources officer gave me the green light to pay people whenever and however we need to do.

We have curriculum pay that we give people over the summer and anytime they go above and beyond.

So we're able to pay everyone who came in for a collection crew. And that's super important. 

I think it's super important for staff morale.

It's super important to get people to come and it's also it's also shows that we value your time and we value your expertise. And we don't want you to just donate that out, even though many of us would.

I mean, I would in a heartbeat just because I love the process and I love the physicality of it and all that kind of stuff as well.

00:16:12 Suzi Tonini

And it's showing care for the investment and the resources.

School libraries are huge investments and worthwhile investments.

00:16:20 Len Bryan

Absolutely.

00:16:21 Suzi Tonini

And investing and maintaining them absolutely makes sense.

00:16:25 Len Bryan

Yeah, the logistical piece is a challenge.

00:16:28 Len Bryan

So I sent out an e-mail toward the end of the school year in May, and I only copied our certified teacher librarians.

00:16:34 Len Bryan

And we also have another job category called media teachers.

Some of these folks have an endorsement.

Some are certified teachers who are in the library.

So I included them, all of them on the e-mail to go, hey, we're going to do this this summer.

Here are the dates.

Here are the schools.

Sign up on days that you can.

If you could work a full day or half day, that's fine.

So I sent out a spreadsheet.

Because me, I love my spreadsheets.

And I just let everybody put, their, just put your last name on there and how, if you could be there full day or half day.

People provided their own lunch, but I provided snacks.

I provide all the materials, like the big fat Sharpies for scratching out barcodes.

I provided dusters.

I provided a Bluetooth speaker and music, because music is important.

Having fun while you're doing that work is important.

I provided laptops and scanners, everything that a person would need to come in and do that work.

And I started planning this probably in February, January, February for the summertime.

I got such a great response from the teacher librarians who participated that I'm contemplating doing some collection crews on Saturdays during the fall and spring.

Just the mornings, just like 4 hours, and they were very receptive to the idea.

The nice thing is, these folks are so good at this, all I have to do is go and let them in the building, and then I can leave.

00:17:50 Len Bryan

They can work for four hours completely without me.

They had a few questions on the first school that we did, but after that fourth school,

These folks are now, they're almost as passionate about weeding as I am.

So they're just, they go in and they're gung-ho. It's great.

Another logistical piece I had was coordinating with our warehouse department.

So our warehouse has these four-by-four cardboard containers.

They call them gaylords.

They're not really gaylords.

They're big watermelon bins that you see at the grocery store, but they're on pallets.

So I had to coordinate with them and reassure them that I would be in charge of making sure that they could take the strips out of doors so a pallet jack can roll pallets in and out, that nobody would take one and put it where it was inaccessible by pallet jack, because they've had that happen in the past where people have cleaned out book rooms or libraries or whatever, and they stick the Gaylord in a place where the warehouse workers can't get to it to get it back out of the truck.

And once those things are loaded, they're about a ton. They're about 2,000 pounds.

So they didn't want to unload and reload. So I worked with them.

We scheduled them to deliver those gaylords a day or two ahead of us going into a building.

I asked them to, I asked them initially to pick up the Gaylord the day after we finished, but they didn't want to do that.

They wanted to do them all at once with one truck.

So the boxes had to sit in the schools full of books.

And this brings up a communication thing, which I know we'll talk about in a minute.

I printed up a sign that said, Why are you weeding perfectly good books? What are you doing here? What's going to happen to these books?

And I put my contact information on there.

00:19:18 Len Bryan

So when we finished, I taped the box closed and put that sign on there.

So if we had any looky-loos or anybody that was curious about what was going on, they could first hopefully feel reassured that, hey, we're intentional about this.

We're not just throwing everything away.

And if you have questions, please ask.

I want you to know that here's my phone number, here's my e-mail address. Please call me or e-mail me if you have questions about this.

We had already briefed principals on what it was going to look like and how we were going to do it, but you never know.

We have randos coming into our buildings all the time, and having that communication ahead of time is really helpful.

So I think those were like the big moving pieces for logistics.

The last thing I'll mention is we ended up filling up 11 4 x 4 by 4 gaylords.

I hate to, I hate to say this on a podcast, but we did, because of the volume of the books, we couldn't recycle them. We did have to pitch them into a dumpster.

So I had to rent a dumpster and I pitched 11 gaylords of books myself.

When we do a sustainable, slow weed, we have more opportunity to recycle and repurpose books.

I have a document that I'll send you to that has ideas for that, like creative things you can do with books.

They can be recycled, but you have to strip the pages out and all that.

So on a smaller scale, you can do that.

But we did 11,000 books this summer, and there's no way I'm stripping 11,000 books.

And we're paying people to do that.

That's just not, it's not sustainable.

00:20:38 Suzi Tonini

We're not running museums, though.

And I know a lot of people have DreamBooks or have other partners that they.

00:20:42 Len Bryan

Yeah, and we do that.

Yeah, we do that as well from when we do, you know, just daily weeds.

And, you know, when you have a half dozen boxes or 12 boxes, DreamBooks can help with that.

You know, and we do partner with them, and we do that as well.

But for these big, massive projects– DreamBooks can't handle that kind of volume. I asked. They can't handle it.

00:21:03 Suzi Tonini

Well, I, you know, I've certainly experienced this myself.

What advice do you have around messaging to help stakeholders like teachers and students and administrators understand that weeding's a positive, necessary part of maintaining a strong collection and not a loss to mourn?

00:21:21 Len Bryan

Yeah, and it's hard, right?

Because people do get in their feelings about books and about weeding and about change in general.

So I have a fundamental belief that every single thing that we do is advocacy for the library.

And the weeding communication is another piece to that puzzle.

So one of the things that I'm trying to stress here in our district, and I hope that all library staff will stress, is our job, this is not a hobby. This is a profession. We have professional standards. We have professional practices. And weeding is one of those collection development practices that must be done.

It is mandatory.

It's not optional.

00:21:58 Len Bryan

It's not the kind of thing that, oh, I'll just, I'll do it when I get around to it.

No, you have to do it all the time.

Fortunately, our board policy specifically addresses deselecting library materials.

So we have that. We have policy backing for that.

It's in all the practical guidelines and stuff that I send out to our folks.

So we try to make the case that this is just part of what we do.

The communication has to be positive.

You know, we're making room for new materials.

We are making the shelves easier to navigate.

We are helping students find books that they love by removing books that have not been touched in, some cases, decades.

We are refreshing our library space.

So we try to use language like that.

And again, I'll have the specific messaging I use for principals, the signs that I post on the gaylords. I'll send those to you so you can put them in the show notes.

But all of those things are a positive thing.

00:22:50 Len Bryan

One of the things that I told our parents who were helping us in some of our schools is your students and your teachers are going to come back and see the library and go, where'd all these new books come from?

We haven't added a single new book.

We just uncovered those by getting the clutter out of the way.

There's so much positive messaging that we can use, but in order to be effective in communicating that, we have to feel that.

And again, that gets back to our attitudes, whether you're a new librarian or an experienced librarian, we all feel a certain kind of way about weeding.

00:23:20 Len Bryan

And it's really time for us to kind of embrace it and let go of the scarcity mindset, the mourning mindset, the sadness that is part of that.

We really need to put that aside in the best interest of our kids.

So again, the way we feel about weeding is going to impact how we communicate about it.

And one thing I'll caution anybody to do is don't do this in the darkness.

You know, you need to be transparent.

You need, it's tempting, and I've done it myself, you know, where I'll weed a box of books and I'll take it home with me on Friday and put it in my own personal trash because I don't, you know, I don't want to have those difficult conversations.

But, you know, you can do that on a small scale, but if you ever do a big project like this, you need to be upfront about it. and let people know that this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it, and most importantly, this is how it's going to benefit our kids.

Our district has a goal of all students reading on grade level by 2030, but if they can't find a book that's relevant to them, that interests them, and practice on their own outside of classroom instruction, they're never going to reach that goal.

So I think it's really important that we tie that to our policy, our vision for our district, what we're trying to do for our kids, and make it, again, a very positive thing.

00:24:31 Suzi Tonini

And every reason you listed, it relates back to serving kids best.

And so even if you are of that sentimental nature, I think that's where we as professionals, that's what we can center on to get over that hump of discomfort.

00:24:45 Len Bryan

Absolutely, yeah.

And again, being a data guy, I can tell you that the average publication date for books in my district is 2006.

That is rough. That's hard.

It's hard to justify keeping a collection that is 20 years old.

it's older than all of our students and starting to be older than some of our teachers.

00:25:03 Len Bryan

It's just like, we need to, we need to, we need to let some of this stuff go.

And it's, you said it best, we're not an archive, we're not a museum, we're not keeping every book ever published.

You know, the Library of Congress doesn't even do that.

You know, they have a lot, but they don't have every book ever published.

00:25:20 Suzi Tonini

So for librarians who are new to a school, weeding can feel like a high stakes move, especially early on.

So based on your experience, what advice would you give them about timing and communication?

You talked a little bit about this when you inherited your library and especially relationship building.

What advice do you have for them before they dive into leading?

00:25:42 Len Bryan

Yeah, so if a librarian is new to a school or new to a community or new to a district, don't weed your first year.

That it is so tempting because we go into a space and we see so much opportunity to reorganize and relabel and genrify and weed and work in the collection.

And I would caution anybody that's new to a building or district, don't touch the collection year one because you have bigger fish to fry.

The very first priority when you come to a new place is relationships.

Guess what the second priority is?

Relationships.

And the third priority?

Relationships.

You've got to get to know the people that you serve, and importantly, they need to get to know you.

00:26:25 Len Bryan

That you are a professional, that you are here for the students, and you're here to support the school's goals, and you're here to support the curriculum, and you're here to do the very best things that you can for kids.

You need to establish that before you start making changes.

Change is hard.

Even a simple reorganization of a collection will get people feeling a certain kind of way.

You know, this book that I use in my third grade class in April is always right here on the shelf. Why did you move it?

You’re creating unnecessary conflict when that person doesn't know you from Adam and has no idea who you are and what you're about.

So my best advice for new librarians or old librarians like me who are new to a space or new to a school is work on those relationships.

Focus on that first.

It is mission critical to everything else that we do.

You know, I said before, everything we do is library advocacy.

And we have to advocate every day. Unfortunately, it's just a reality.

We have to advocate every day for our profession, for what we do, and the fact that we have standards and guidelines to help us make those decisions.

We need to communicate that stuff early and often before we ever consider reading a book or taking something out of the collection or reorganizing or rearranging the collection, which as a type A introvert, and many librarians are type A introverts, our first instinct is to dive into the stacks and start making it our own and kind of take control of what may be, it may be badly organized, it may be really old, it may be, it may be a lot of things, but diving into that first before reaching out and learning about the community and have them know us is a tactical mistake in my opinion.

I really feel like we need to do that.

We need to do that relationship building so that people can support us while we're doing the work and they understand the why behind some of those actions that were taken.

00:28:18 Suzi Tonini

Well, before we wrap up, do you have a personal weeding win or a story that stands out, something that really affirmed the process for you or your staff?

00:28:27 Len Bryan

The best feeling in the world has been seeing the look on teacher and students' faces when they come back after a project, whether it be weeding a project or genification project or reorganization project.

To me, that makes all the hours of moving and lifting and packing and stacking and stickering and dusting and all those things, it makes it worthwhile to see the looks on their faces.

And invariably, they'll ask, where do we get all these new books?

And I'm like, yeah, I don't have a budget for that.

These aren't new.

You just haven't seen these in a while.

That to me has always been the most beneficial part of that.

As a data guy, I love to see my collection age come down.

I love to see, I love to be able to run reports and be able to show my principal or my school board member or whoever, look at last year and here's this year, and you can see I'll run the title wise, you know, collection analysis report, which will give you your average age for the whole collection.

It'll also give you your age by Dewey range and by section.

So you can really see the impact of the work that you're doing.

That's personally gratifying to me, but not nearly as much as seeing the looks on student and teachers' faces when they come in.

And just people feel a new energy around the library when it's different, when it looks better, when it smells better, when the dust is gone, when, somebody has put some love and attention into the space and into the stacks and into the collection and into the student experience, people react differently when they sense a new energy in a library.

The kids are going to see the benefit, the teachers will too, and you're just going to reinvigorate your space.

00:30:02 Suzi Tonini

Len, I love the way you phrase things.

They always stick with me.

One of my favorite podcasts is actually NPR Life Kit, and I love how they kind of sum things up at the end.

So I'm going to use some of your words to sum things up.

You know, if you're feeling overwhelmed, start with the ugly weed.

Be a vampire.

Most importantly, find that bat signal crew.

Find your people that you can collaboratively work with.

And finally, it's all about the kids.

00:30:28 Len Bryan

It really is.

I love that.

00:30:31 Suzi Tonini

So thank you, Len Bryan, for being with us on Sunshine and Stories, and I hope to chat with you again soon.

00:30:37 Len Bryan

I had a blast.

Thank you so much for having me.

And if anybody ever needs anything or wants to bounce ideas off someone, I'm on Blue Sky and I have a Gmail address.

It's librarianlen@gmail.com.

Please feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you have questions or if you just want to have a thought partner.

I'm always happy to help support our colleagues.

00:30:55 Suzi Tonini

Perfect.

I will drop those into the show notes as well as your resources.

So thanks everyone for joining us and we'll see you next time on Sunshine and Stories.

00:31:02 Kate Brunner

That's our Sunshine and Stories for today, y'all.

00:31:05 Kieran Hixon

If you want to hear even more about what other Colorado folks are up to in their libraries, check out librarieslearn.org for all our past and future learning opportunities.

00:31:16 Suzi Tonini

This podcast is offered at no cost to listeners thanks to the time, effort, and dedication of CSL Library Development consultants, as well as our state library colleagues and all our volunteer guests from across the field.

00:31:26 Kate Brunner

CSL projects like this one are funded in part by the Grants to States program, which is administered by the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.

00:31:35 Polly Gallagher

The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the Colorado State Library, Institute of Museum and Library Services, or the U.S. government.

00:31:47 All

Thanks for joining us, and we'll catch you next time.