On January 17th, the BPL Trustees held their first meeting of the year.  After the call to order, roll call, a reading of the Equity, Diversity & Inclusion statement, and minutes approval, Trustees’ Chair Priscilla Douglas asked the chairs of the Community Engagement Committee, the McKim Building Capital Project Committee, and the Strategic Planning Committee to say a few words about their work. 

Linda Dorcina Ferry acknowledged Jose Masso as her co-chair of the Community Engagement Committee and spoke about the draft charter for the Committee, which aims to elevate and amplify the work of BPL staff and the library branches.

Navjeet Bal, chair of the McKim Building Capital Project Committee, discussed enabling transformation of the existing designs/plans into reality by fundraising from the City, the State and private donors.  The Committee’s first meeting will be held in early February.

Chair of the Strategic Planning Committee, Christian Westra, explained that the key question for the Committee will be, “What does it mean to be an urban library in the 21st century?”  This will be the focus as the Committee  works with the Trustees, BPL staff, and community members to develop the BPL’s next strategic plan.  Their initial meeting will be in February.

President’s Report

To facilitate thinking about the next strategic plan, President David Leonard introduced invited guest, John Szabo, City Librarian for Los Angeles, which has 72 branches, to address the Trustees.  Szabo has over 30 years’ experience in public libraries.  

Mr. Szabo began by acknowledging the Boston Public Library as an American treasure.  He then made the following remarks, before taking questions: 

I believe it’s possible that public libraries are more relevant today than ever.  They are more dynamic and able to influence people’s lives.  People seem to have a greater sense of the importance of the library and democracy.  Libraries are still trusted institutions and good stewards of public and philanthropic money.  They are throughout our communities, they serve all of us, whether poor or wealthy, housed or unhoused, youngest to oldest.  They are important to leverage to do good; to have an impact on our cities’ issues.  Libraries provide lifelong learning empowering people, and we have to communicate that.  We are essential to education and all corners of our communities.

Communications, marketing, and public relations are critical.  We have to be savvy, culturally competent, multi-lingual, have robust social media to drive traffic into our digital offerings.  We must consider how we are putting our brand out there digitally, through a diversity, inclusion, equity lens that involves staff, collections, policies, and procurement.

Los Angeles Public Library is doing all the warm, fuzzy elements as well as all the other work, with “electeds” as cheerleaders.  Serving immigrants is key, ensuring all immigrants know the library is for them.  The library must be approachable in every neighborhood.

STEM/STEAM is highlighted in all programs and preserving collections.  Children’s research and scholars’ research are equally important and exciting.  Our librarians must be able to speak about the innovative work of the library with enthusiasm.

Public libraries are extremely adaptive to change; this is particularly visible in how we have made tech available quickly to all.  We have high impact, serve everyone in our area, and deliver effective communications to all in our cities and neighborhoods.

Mr. Szabo then took questions from the Trustees (responses are paraphrased):

Q:  What about libraries as gathering locations?  What is the value of community space?

A:  We need more space for gathering in civic engagement; programming that celebrates neighborhoods and people’s backgrounds is more important than ever.  We experience a shift from traditional services to more social services and continue to navigate that tension. Currently we are engaging with twelve social service organizations for mental health.  Nonprofits are lined up at our doors.  We need to tie this to our mission of lifelong learning, areas we can ensure effectiveness, and alignment with our values. 

Q:  How have you developed your mission?  Is there anything you say no to?

A:  When we engage in a strategic planning process, we involve the public and all corners of the organization.  Empowering people is key to our mission.  Sometimes we have a capacity issue even though something might be within our mission.  Maybe we don’t have the money or bandwidth.  When we consider a new area, we are concerned that we do it well.  We like to hear “I can’t believe the library is doing that.”

Q:  We are all concerned about housing.  What ideas regarding the housing crisis and the library are front of mind?

A:  Our new mayor, Karen Bass, has made it her #1 priority.  Our first approach to unhoused people is to treat them with dignity and respect; they are our patrons.  Issues related to the homeless affect all our locations.  They use our spaces to be warmer or cooler and our information services are important to them.  We bring together at our staff trainings multiple social service agencies such as DMV for free ID badges, transitional housing services, Veterans Administration, and the Los Angeles Coordinated Entry System (the network that aligns homeless services to ensure that resources are efficiently and equitably distributed.)  One size doesn’t fit all so we need various tools in our toolbox and more often than not, this is not law enforcement.  We are hiring social workers and training staff as ambassadors who can help in de-escalating and providing information on housing services.  Some of our staff are trained in Narcan administration.  We make referrals to transitional housing and other assistance organizations.

Q:  What about traditional library use such as books and reading?  What is the impact of the digital revolution?

A:  We see a decline in print circulation; however, we are still investing in it.  Given the e-resource space it is challenging to balance major elements of the collection such as film, e-books, and audiobooks and make them available equitably.  We have WIFI and computers in our libraries and provide WIFI hot spots and loaner computers.  We have traditional literacy programs which are still very important and are aligned with school programs.  All school kids have library cards through our partnership with schools.  We offer a program called Read Baby Read which supplies a book and a sippy cup for early reading engagement.

Q:  How important are exhibitions for driving involvement?   We have been approached by the Negro Baseball Exhibition and are wondering about offering it. 

A:  Exhibitions are extremely important to us, and we are making more of them available throughout our system.  Exhibitions must reflect the neighborhoods we serve.  The Negro Baseball Exhibition is a traveling exhibit and we are delighted to have it in our Central Library right now.  We have a large photo collection. It is an artifact-based exhibit, and we are getting media coverage as well.

Q:  As President of Simmons University, I am interested in what we need to teach and how to attract students to library science.

A:  The professional ranks of our staff are not representative of all our communities, and we need to bring in more people who are reflective of our patrons/communities.  Students going into the field who at some point will become librarians will need to lead others, understand the impact of libraries, and speak with passion about their library’s mission.

Q:  How do you decide what to highlight in your marketing communications to your communities?  

A:  We have professional library staff in our PR/Marketing group.  They can pitch to and get earned media coverage.  We used to be central library focused but we hired three communications staff to cover the wider community to be more effective with ethnically diverse media and other larger channels.  We have over 1000 programs monthly (and sometimes I learn about them after the fact).  We look at programs we haven’t promoted previously and try to see what will appeal to other channels in which we don’t usually have a presence.

The Trustees expressed their gratitude to Szabo and he signed off.

Leonard mentioned that the March meeting will feature a guest speaker from the Austin Public Library.

Leonard continued with his President’s update, referencing a written, end-of-year wrap up, the challenge of building back staff to capacity (still a ways to go), participating in the unveiling of “The Embrace” on January 13th, and BPL’s continuing partnership with King Boston.  He also mentioned that the BPL was highlighted on CBS Sunday Morning for its research holdings, in particular the anti-slavery collection.

Finance & Audit Report

Finance Committee Chair Evelyn Arana-Ortiz stated that the Committee would be reporting on the FY24 Maintenance Budget Submission and on a request to increase thresholds for approvals.

Ellen Donaghey, CFO, stated that the Committee had a good initial meeting with the City’s Office of Budget Management and the Mayor’s staff to ensure the draft budget aligned with the Mayor’s priorities before making the formal budget request.  Donaghey noted that union settlements are under way and that collections will be affected by price increases.  More specifics will be provided at the March meeting, which the City CFO is expected to attend. BPL will present to the City Council in May.

Donaghey then presented the request for increasing approval thresholds as follows:  $0-$50K – no trustees votes required; $51K-$200K – Finance & Audit Committee votes required; $201K+ -- Finance & Audit reviews and recommends a vote to the full board.  The board approved this request subject to the approval of the BPL outside audit firm.

New Business

·       The next meeting of the trustees will be on March 21st at 8:30am.

·       It was noted that WBUR has a very good podcast about the unhoused population.

·       The new Leventhal exhibit is great.  BPL guided tours occur at 5:30pm on Wed or Fri and 11:30am on Sat.

There being no public comment, the meeting was adjourned.