I’m lucky enough to have been in Darwin this week giving the opening keynote for the 6th ALIA Top End Symposium: exploring library spaces for learning and e-learning. I flew up a day early and explored Darwin on bicycle. Just beautiful.

I was excited to be asked and would have loved to have stayed for both Friday and Saturday. Diana Richards from the NT Library and her team were great hosts,  but I needed to fly back to Perth for Library Camp on Saturday. I consoled myself with a 20 minute meet up with my friend Sally who lives in Broome during a stopover on the way back. The papers looked very good – and the two that I heard were great.

Two librarians from Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Education spoke about the way they “non-project managed” the transformation of a totally cramped and crowded tiny space into a flexible learning space that allowed culturally sensitive learning for some of their students who had never been exposed to books before, let alone a library. It was a great example of not over thinking a project. When they came to write the paper, they realised that they had very sound professional goals and a framework that they followed – but without the need for anal Gantt charts. Their tag cloud of the skills they brought to the project is a very nice illustration of this:

I have been working on creating a slidecast (audio track with co-ordinated slides) of my talk for the last couple of days, but with patchy wireless I have not finished it. I will publish it here as soon as I do. It was called “Disco balls, waterless urinals and augmented reality: equipping ourselves to create innovative library learning spaces”.

Just before my talk the convenor, Anne Ritchie, asked whether I was OK with putting my mobile number onto a whiteboard at the front and taking questions via text during my presentation. Yep. Good fun. Unfortunately there was a bit of technical trouble with the PC, so I didn’t get to answer the txt question I received, but I said I’d publish the question and answer here. I mentioned Second Life for less than a minute – in the context of libraries helping their communities understand produsage – but that is what the question is about…

What do you do if you are a university library director who steps out of the library on a Friday afternoon to find the pavement riddled with chalked signs saying ” The library closes too early on Fridays”?

An older breed of library director would roll their eyes, feel annoyed, maybe get the paths cleaned….then in the next week a small notice might appear on the website about why the opening hours are as they are….or more typically, in the library newsletter that comes out two months later. Really engaged directors might post something on the library blog.

Jenica Rogers, Director of Libraries, State University of New York at Potsdam got down on her hands and knees with pink chalk and wrote answers, Chalk Notes as a Valid Communication Format . I love it that instead of writing “it’s the budget, stupid!”, she created a cliffhanger for the students and gave herself time to think about it over the weekend.

Jenica is a great role model for a current generation of leaders who are reluctant to move up in to managment. If  you want to read her take on this – and why library management can offer something to the un-greyed part of our profession – check out her earlier post, An attitude problem, where she challenges many of the myths about being a library manager.

Here is the poster that appeared on Tuesday in the library lobby – transparent and inviting collaboration.

Open Source software has many elements – code, design, documentation, licensing …. and something quite different to other software – community governance. This governance is often ad hoc, created by goodwill and what used to quaintly be called a “gentleman’s agreement”. This is fine when it works and everyone is playing nicely in the sandbox.

The Koha Fork

On September 11, Open Source Library Software support company, Liblime, took their bat and ball and went home from the Koha playground. With them they took tens of thousands of dollars worth of development for one client that they will now only allow others to access if they agree to use a hosted version of Liblime Enterprise Koha . Yes, they intend to “eventually” release the code back to the community, but what are other developers meant to do in the meantime? Stop working on bits of Koha that they *suspect* might be in the Liblime version? Keep working as though the extra features – which are desired by many other libraries – still need to be developed?

Liblime are entitled to do this under the GNU GPL license, as hosting does not constitute “distribution” which has certain rights and responsibilities under the license.  There is an Open Source license – an Affero General Public License – that closes this loophole. Unfortunately for Koha the license wasn’t written until 2002 – two years after Koha was gifted to the community by the Horowhenua Library Trust .

Forking is not unprecedented in library Open Source Software. VuFind has several forks and this seems to be the community choice. See Going With and Forking VuFind for more details .This is *not* the first fork of Koha – there is already Koha Plus at Sourceforge, and Australian Company Proscentient Systems has been offering a hosted fork of Koha – Intersearch ILS for over a year.

Liblime however,  own and administer the domain koha.org and have trademarked the name “Koha” in the United States, so they have played a key role in the Koha community up until now. Liblime deny that they are withdrawing from the Koha community, but this is not how the community is viewing it. Jo Ransom, who was instumental in creating Koha in New Zealand in 1999, claims that Liblime Forks Koha . This t-shirt by another prominent Koha community member says a lot:

Marshall Breeding has suggested that a more librarian-focused and formal governance structure modelled on the Kuali Foundation may be a better solution in his Open Letter to the Koha Community. Thomas Brevik has suggested that there may be a role for an organisation like IFLA,  Where goes Koha? Roy Tennant has compared the commercial forking of Koha to that of Redhat Linux, Liblime to the Koha Community: Fork You.  Karen Schneider makes the point that this development highlights the role that Open Source software must play in the future of librarianship, It Takes a Village: Koha and open source leadership .

I do not know how much of the fork was driven by the client who contracted Liblime to create the changes. I think it would be extremely short-sighted to see any economic value in taking a base product created by millions of dollars worth of coding and design expertise, then paying tens of thousands of dollars for extra features but also cutting oneself off from working openly and collaboratively with other coders in future developments.

Being the change you want to see

Liblime’s behaviour has been correct to the letter -but not the spirit -of their Open Source license;  and ultimately likely to do them a lot of economic damage.

The big, bold silver lining to the cloud, however, has been the behaviour of other Open Source Library software support companies in the last week.

Two other major Koha support companies, BibLibre from France and ByWater Solutions have hired Nicole Engard to continue on as documentation manager (“until she drops” according to her announcement, Moving Up and Remaining Open ). Nicole was working as Open Source Evangelist at Liblime until September 11, the same day as the forking announcement.

Instead of pointing out Liblime’s bad behaviour, Equinox–  the main support company for the Evergreen Open Source Library Management System –  released a statement outlining their commitment to their community. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and through my geeky “I find Open Source Library Software fascinating” eyes, this is a beautiful statement about  the spirit of Open Source library software.

The Equinox Promise: An Open Letter to the Evergreen Community

We at Equinox Software feel it is timely to share an evolving document we call the Equinox Promise.

We invite engagement and feedback from everyone, and encourage other vendors to come up with similar statements, or join in on ours.

The Equinox Promise

In 2007, Equinox Software was founded by a group of dedicated people who believe that open source software offers libraries unheralded opportunities to engage in the process of designing the tools they use.

A software company can never speak for the open source communities it serves. But we at Equinox believe we owe our communities a clear statement of our commitments to everyone associated with the Evergreen open source project—whether you are customers of Equinox, Evergreen community members, affiliated vendors, or those who support and champion open source development.

We believe in a transparent, open software development process, and we promise to do everything we can to maintain and improve transparency in every part of that process.

We believe Evergreen code belongs to the Evergreen community, and we promise to continue to expeditiously release all code to publicly-available repositories.

We believe in one single set of code that in the spirit and letter of open source software is free for everyone to download, use, and modify, and we promise that in concert with the community and other development partners, we will work hard to maintain that single code set.

We believe we have a responsibility to the Evergreen community to help keep Evergreen open in every way, and we promise we will never agree to hide code we can share.

We believe that Evergreen deserves community-based stewardship through foundations, user groups, interest groups, conferences, and similar activities, and we promise to encourage that stewardship in every way we can.

We believe that the community is the true voice of Evergreen, and we promise to listen and to share, and to help build and maintain the tools that enable this communication.

I just found a way to use Zotero to save me heaps and heaps of time.

I use a lot of Creative Commons images from Flickr in my presentations.

I usually upload them to slideshare.net, which means I am stringent about attributing the image with a “Media Credits” slide at the end. I have been cutting and pasting the details from Flickr. With the URL, the author/date and the image title all being in different spots, this was three separate transactions that took a couple of minutes per image.

Now Zotero – the Firefox extension that organises citations, saves the day. It recognises when I am browsing a Flickr image and knows how to harvest the data I need. One click adds the citation to my Zotero library,  then I can just drag and drop the title on to my “Media Credits” slide and the entire citation is dropped there, in whichever format I specify.

Here’ s a little video clip I made to show how it works, Using Zotero with Flickr and PowerPoint .

UPDATE: Zotero also can save, store and organise your academic citations on the web. This short clip is worth every one of the three minutes it takes to watch it, Zotero 1.5 Screencast .

This video is not by the original  “Did you know? ” team , which outlined worldwide changes that will affect education –  but is done in the same style. It is all about the convergence of media – Did You Know 4.0 ? It has a US focus, but most of it applies to Australia.

Media has changed, attention has changed, how we communicate has changed – not in a tiny increment but massively and disruptively. I’m concerned that changes I thought would take another 5 years to trickle down will be there in two years. Are our libraries ready?

I’ve been sitting on a secret for almost a year….

Last October I was walking with Con in the botanic gardens in Auckland when we were both over there for the LIANZA conference . We were chatting about unconferences and the fact that Michael Stephens would be visiting Perth this October for the  Australian School Library Association XXI Biennial Conference 2009 . The group of us organising the W.A. Library Unconference had been toying with the idea of holding the next one on a Saturday to  keep it fresh and hopefully attract people who were unable to make it on a weekday….and so we wondered whether Michael would be interested in coming along the day after the ASLA conference…

I was very, very excited when Micheal accepted our invitation to be a participant at Library Camp Perth on October 3 .

Instead of announcing that Michael would be there, we wanted to wait until after the registrations had opened, so that the people who registered were there to participate with each other rather than to hear Michael. Last year the 100 places filled up within about 2 days and there was a waiting list.  This year we have 66 people registered so far – not bad at all, but there hasn’t been the takeup that there was last year. Maybe it is because we are holding it on a Saturday, or maybe it is that people are a bit unconferenced out. This year’s Perth Barcamp 3 had a lower turnout than the last two years too.

If you have not signed up yet, you can still register and then put your name down to facilitate a session or do some other job on the day. Further details are on the wiki, Library Camp Perth.

If you have already registered, it would be great if you could read the list of sessions on the wiki so far, add any more that strike your fancy, and think about facilitiating one on the day.

So far we have:

• * · iPhone apps – Kathryn
• * · Can we use Kete or Omeka in Western Australian Libraries? (eg. Kete Horowhenua) – Kathryn
• * · Setting up a new library
• * · RFID
• * · Using drupal for library web sites
• * · What are the next 23 things- technologies on the horizon
• * · Keeping up to date – what tools do you use? – Con
• * · Mandatory Internet Filtering in Australia – Amy
• * · LibJam
• * · What should we stop doing to make room for new library services?
• * · Outrageously expensive, ambitious and impractical ideas for libraries
• * · Beyond death by Powerpoint try Keynote!..and how not to use everything Rosemary
• * · Engaging non-users
• * · Open Source and libraries
• * · How do we prepare now for the library of 2019?
• * · My favourite web tools and tricks
• * · Step-by-step hands-on creating a LibX toolbar for your library
• * · Zotero vs Refworks vs Endnote Cage Match
• * · If our brand is books, then what is the future of the format and how does this affect our future ?

We are opening our house for Sustainable House day from 10am – 4pm this Sunday, 13 September.

Sponsored by the Australian Government, Sustainable House Day gives people an opportunity to talk to homeowners about what works and what they would do differently in their sustainable house. Three houses in Hilton/Hamilton Hill are opening up. Maggie’s house has some great raised garden beds in water tanks, and Amy and Adam have a huge rainwater tank  and a huge vege garden almost cut into a steep hill.

Visitors do not pay to visit, but the government provides some sponsorship that we are all donating to the Hilton Community Harvest Garden.

We built our house in 2000 using the designers, Solar Dwellings.

The temperature inside the house generally ranges between a very comfortable 19 and 22 degrees Celcius. (66 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit).

External temperatures range between 0 and 45 degrees Celcius ( 32 and 113 degrees Fahrenheit).

Internal temperatures range between 16 and 28 degrees Celcius ( 61 and 82 degrees Fahrenheit).

Features include:

• North facing orientation
• Rafter extensions on the North side with “fins” that provide shade in summer and let in the sun in winter
• Solar pergola with “fins” that provide shade in summer and let in the sun in winter
• “Thinking Cap” roof ventilation that opens up when it is hot, closes when it is cold
• Pelmets and block out curtains on North Windows
• Tiled floors for thermal mass
• “Anticon” insulation under the roof
• Cavity insulation East and West walls
• Windows positioned to catch the prevailing winds
• Windows in each room positioned to allow cross-ventilation
• Marmoleum floor coverings
• Solar hot water system
• Light sensor in the kids’ toilet to automatically switch it off and on
• A teeny-tiny garden with around 10 different fruit trees, many types of edible flowers, vege garden, compost, worm farm in a bath-tub and my favourite feature – the chicken tractor in the mandala garden.

There’s even a tele ad 🙂

The electricity just went off at my house, and won’t be on for about two hours. I had been procrastinating for days on some writing with a tight deadline and I had *finally* written one sentence when I lost power.

I am now working at my favourite coffee shop, and it occurred to me that my local public library is closer to where I parked my car. So why am I here, not in there?

Here’s my list of why I’m choosing a coffee shop for study. I’m not saying that my local library does not offer any of this . I would love our new library building to be destination of choice for people like me in the community we serve…so why am I here?

• The space has personality. It does not feel like a cookie-cutter, glitzy plastic franchise.
• The furnishing makes me feel like I can relax, maybe spill my coffee and it will all be OK – red leather couches, mismatched wooden tables and chairs.
• The people behind the counter act like hosts – talking to me, taking an interest in what I am doing, telling me about what they are doing (The barista explained to me in depth how he hand-mixed and brewed my chai in a teapot filled with milk – which is *exactly* how I like it)
• There is a mix of people here – mums with small kids, a guy sitting at a table outside with his dog on a leash, someone sitting on a couch knitting, someone on a table nearby talking on a phone and working on a laptop.
• I feel like I am part of a community and have privacy too. Knitting Lady just agreed to watch my laptop while I put more money in my parking meter, even though we are complete strangers
• I can eat and drink while I work. Good, healthy food prepared with care.
• I feel like I can stay as long as I like.
• There is sunlight in the outside courtyard and the temperature is pleasant inside.
• I don’t feel like I have to dress up to be here.
• I know that other things happen here – music nights, poetry readings, ever-changing local artwork on the walls  – so I feel like I am part of an exciting venue where things are going on.
• There is easy access to electricity and I feel comfortable grabbing their powerboard and plugging in.
• I don’t mind the lack or wireless access, as I bring my own – but I appreciate that they used to provide wifi until the backpacking hostel next door kept hogging it. They understand that it is important.
• The music playing is funky, mellow jazz and it blocks out the sound of other people’s conversations and my heavy-handed keyboarding….so I don’t feel disturbed or like I am disturbing anyone.
• Distractions of home are not there, so I am more likely to work – if I ever stop writing this and procrastinating more…

The image I used above is from Para Coffee in Charlottesville, Virginia – another space that “had it” – whatever the elusive “it” is that makes me feel welcome and like I can work well. I want our new library space to have “it” too.

So many possible new projects at my new job. They need to be prioritised.

Often potential projects are solutions looking for problems. I’d like to spend some time finding the relevant problems, then measuring them against potential projects.

Here’s my ideas about how we can work out where to point my skills and energy – in no particular order. It probably works as a checklist for prioritising library work generally.

1. Team decision – It needs to be a team decision, not just mine.

2. Mission – We need to align whatever we do to the mission of  the library and our councils.

3. Giving priority means giving time –  By employing me, a different skillset has come into the library but no extra hours. For me to spend x hours of my skills on new projects, x hours of existing projects need to be freed up – either done smarter, done to a different standard or stopped. Just deciding that a new project is a priority is not enough. We need to decide what else should be done differently in response.

4. User focus – Our users are the reason we get paid. The reason we do things is not our books, what other libraries are doing or other staff. We need to to focus on our users and their needs.

5. What if we look at it as a user problem ? Do our users have problems that we can solve with any of the projects? When talking about what needs to be done, can it be phrased as a user need, not a problem that I have as a librarian? So not “we pay for subscriptions to databases and need to encourage our users to use them more”…. but instead ask “is it too difficult for our users to find the best information we can provide?” . So not “we need more people to use the self-checkouts” but  asking “do users have their books issued as quickly and privately as they would like?”.

6. Know the visions – Each user has different vision for the library. Each staff member has a different vision for the library. These can be contradictory – and only sometimes be reconciled.  A noisy, high-energy space and a quiet, still space may not be able to exist in the same building.  Compare the vision of the librarians interviewed in the CNN article, The future of libraries, with or without books or the vision of the headmaster in the Boston Globe article Welcome to the library, Say goodbye to the books with the vision of people who made comments on the articles.  Sometimes one could toss a coin and be guaranteed to offend as many people as we please whichever option we take. This is where library science becomes an art and relies on experience and a good librarian’s radar.

7. Get deeply local -We should identify what we offer that users cannot get online, in other libraries, or elsewhere – the deeply local – and use this to guide where we put our energies.

8. User demographics – If we are interested in replicating projects offered by other libraries, we should identify what is special about our users compared to other libraries’ users. For example,  it looks like 16% of the hits on our website are using Apple’s Safari browser,  whereas Safari only has 4.1% of the market share . I need to look more carefully at the source of the information, but maybe that has implications about future hardware we buy and maybe any computing classes.

9. Surpassing user expectations – Although we are paid to meet our users’ needs, I believe that we should aim to surpass expectations too. This is where research into library futures and increasing the tech skills of our staff may come in. If we know about tools that can make our users’ lives easier and if we can plan the type of library that will meet our users’ future needs,  then we will be serving them well. If asked, users probably would not have much idea of the future impact of e-books, but we do need to be thinking about these and be developing the skills to manage them.

10. Step back and fit it all together – Is it possible to step back and see disparate projects as part of the same overarching problem? For example, could cluttered noticeboards, databases not being used and a project to publish movies of the construction of the library all be seen as part of how we communicate with our users ? Would it be useful to sort out some principles and ideas about communicating with our users first and then maybe it would be much more obvious the directions the smaller projects should take?

…mine…and a new library’s…

After three weeks’ break I start my new jobshare as Special Services Librarian tomorrow. I’m working Thursdays and Fridays providing IT services and services to teens.

It’s a big life change, and like I did before I went to Aurora, I am writing my thoughts and impressions before it begins so that I can come back after I’ve been there a while and see how I have changed and progressed.

I have some ideas about what I would like to do and where I could put my energies …but I do not know the team there yet, what the needs of the community are, what the library’s aims are, how the budget works, how my skills fit in and how I can best be useful … but I do like the glimpses I have seen so far. My ideas are then really dreams and speculation because I like thinking *something*… they will hit reality soon enough and I wonder how different it will look…

But here is where my head is at tonight…

A building for 2040

* The new building opens in 2010, so in the next 12 months we will be creating the space to serve at least until 2020, and probably 2030 and most likely 2040. How can we anticipate the needs of the community? How can we make it flexible enough to grow as the purpose of the library does? How long will the Environmentally Sustainable Design features be a novelty or will much of it be mainstream within 20 years?

Non-users

* We have a community of non-users who are paying for our library via their property rates. They are going to be checking out the new building when it opens – out of curiousity if nothing else.  How can we make these non-users into passionate users? Should we try? Should we start trying to canvass their opinions now? Do we need to be all things to all rate-payers or do we have greater obligation to some groups in our community? If so, which groups – our existing loyal users? people in the most vulnerable parts of our community? our online community?

Books, books and more books

* During community consultation about the new library in the last few years, the requests have been for  books, books and more books. Some of the new libraries I most admire have created more room for users and less room for books. There are so many new formats, accessed so many different ways. To me much of print publishing has morphed into a “push that product, move those units” cynical marketing exercise, that often does not give or expect sustained intellectual effort by either writer or reader. How can I support what the community obviously wants while bringing to them also the online, alternative and exciting content that exists in other formats and via other channels?

Connecting the community

* One of the most exciting things that public libraries can offer is that “third place” – somewhere neither work nor home that is also their space. My new boss has talked about being the “community’s living room”. Online tools and spaces are being created with great potential to connect communities. What should the library’s role be in showing our users how to use these and setting up and hosting them?(either technically or metaphorically in a social way). Is it a logical extension of moves to create community information services, physical meeting spaces for our communities and running computing skills classes- or just not what we should be spending our time/money doing?

Online presence – how to work this up while focusing so much on a new space

* I would love to work up a consolidated online presence for the library. It would be a great way to keep the community informed about progress with the building and, if energy to keep the conversation going was available, a great way to find out what the community wants from the library. To create any new library channel using social media requires interesting content, engagement, interaction and a strong voice – which takes a lot of staff time. Is this the best use of resources right now? I would love to create weekly three minute movies about the progress of the building and post them to YouTube – including  interviews with the users about what they would like to see. Or a Twitter account with three tweets daily, shared among staff. Or a meebo chat box. Or a Flickr account with photos that change on our home page – showing our programmes and the new building. I’m still not convinced about a Facebook page, but it would be useful to use it as yet another aggregator from the other media channels – maybe via a feed from FriendFeed.

Open Source software

The Library management system at the new library is one I used 15 years ago, and it was great then. I don’t think its capability anywhere near matches Koha or Evergreen. I know that Open Source software costs as much as proprietary software – you hire good people instead of pay license fees. The new library also shares the ILMS with four neighbouring councils as a network. I’d still like to spend some time fiddling with getting Koha or Evergreen up and running to be able to do a good evaluation of how much tweaking would be necessary for it to work for Western Australian public libraries. Again, not sure if it is the best use of time.

I definitely want to install Drupal as a sort of staff intranet – to give staff experience with using it and to see what we need to do to run it ourselves. I am convinced that self-hosted Drupal is the best alternative for a library web-site. Why? The ability to pull data in from other sites, customise it to look however you want , the number of plug-ins to make it do almost anything  plus the large library community using.

I’m also planning to set up a WordPressMU installation. I want to create a knowledge base of information useful for my job. I’d also love to create a public blog where I put useful links and information about new libraries, library spaces and models of service. I’ll be collecting and reading and thinking about these anyhow.

I would love to investigate running SOPAC2 so that users could add ratings, reviews and tags. Not to mention the SMS notification module…or the chance for the OPAC and library website to be just one location, not two siblings that jostle each other in the back seat of the car. Drupal would be the best CMS to use with this – another reason for starting with Drupal. And it would be very, very cool to be able to do this: If you like Roald Dahl books . SOPAC2 needs a connector to the ILMS, which I know has not been written for the system used at my new library. For Koha though…

Kete is another “would love to do” project. I think the idea of a social repository of local knowledge maintained by the community is totally in harmony with libraries today and how they can be in the future.  I would love to have a local kete (knowledge basket) up and running at the time the new library opens

Creators as well as readers

Many online tools require users to create or be part of the site if they are to consume the content. Functional literacy now includes digital literacy. The ability and equipment to fill in forms online is essential for some job applications. People are still buying items cheaply via ads in the newspaper, attending physical meetings for medical support groups and going into shops to purchase items. These things can also be achieved online also – if people know how to.  Should the library be looking at its role to promote literacy and broadening it to include showing people how to better use online spaces?

Teens

There are currently no programmes targeted at  teens. As a small building, there is not a lot of room to set up a gaming area or anything that gives privacy and allows high-energy. The demographics of the area have a low proportion of teens. Many of the families are there so that the kids can go to the nearby private schools – which have very well equipped libraries. I am not sure the best way to create relationships with the teens in the area, given that there are not a lot of them, there are no programmes currently for them and there is not a lot of room in the existing building. A couple of friends have suggested a Teen Advisory Council, which I think is excellent …but I am not sure the best way to get together a group of users and non-users and find out what they want. The library has just introduced the Your Tutor online homework help service, so I could promote this and ask teens what they want …maybe by putting flyers in books …but I’d love to have an event to invite them to on the flyer also.  Just what????

I’m also fascinated with the idea that for people under 15 or so the book is not the primary location of mosts texts/stories. Harry Potter to them is not a book by JK Rowling, it is just as much a series of movies, a computer game, a lot of associated merchandise, and even a whole bunch of fan ficiton. Same with Star Wars. Or Twilight. High School Musical. Hannah Montana. Australian Idol (TV programme, karaoke machine, music deal, website, series of blogs … ). I’m really interested in how this way of looking at stories and connecting around them fits into teen services in a library.

Some frilly stuff

I think that working from home is a environmentally sensible option, and I would like to see the library supporting people who do this. Maybe monthly Freelance Fridays? Or maybe booking the community room as a co-working space once a month for work-at-home folk to bounce ideas off each other?(UPDATE 7 September: by supporting people who work at home, I meant people in the community we serve who work from home, rather than library staff who work from home)

At East Melbourne Library there was no cafe, just a kitchenette outside the community room. I thought this sent a message of welcome to the community. I wonder whether a kitchenette somewhere as well as a cafe would work in the new building?

I want to create a demonstration worm farm on site.

I’d love to somehow start a “Thinker-in-Residence” programme, where someone is supported to stay in the area and run programmes at the library. ( dream on)

MOST IMPORTANTLY …

Balance

I will be initially working just two days a week, with probably one day pre- committed to desk shifts, shelving, book selection, meetings. How can I identify the strategic few things from the list above where it is best to put my energy?