Director's Thoughts #7

Today, yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that and the weeks leading up to this point were spent getting our system ready to migrate to the cloud. And not just my library, but our whole consortium, so you can imagine the amount of work that goes into a project like this. And on top of that our IT guy retired about six weeks ago, leaving the library and our township IT staff without a lot of information, but we’ve persevered in the past month and a half and I have definitely learned a lot.

Which got me thinking, even though I’m the director and in charge of our library, I believe it’s so important to lead by example. Take this week for example, I spent time cleaning out an old aquarium with vinegar water to get it ready for our library turtle, constructed some shelves so that we can shift our collection, shifted some of the adult collection, helped migrate our 20 staff machines to go live on our new cloud-based ILS, amidst a host of other day-to-day tasks that take time.

Plus, if you read my post from yesterday, I helped an older gentleman get his birth certificate (what a ridiculous process!). And I make it a point to help out at whatever desk I’m sitting at, so if a patron comes up to the desk and I’m there – I jump right in.

Because that’s my job, not only to push and pull our library into the future, but to ensure that our day-to-day operations are running smoothly and to lead by example. And this weekend’s example – take a break! It’s been a really long week and I’m so looking forward to the weekend (once I get the last few bugs figured out from our migration). Happy Friday!