LaRue's Views 2002

For the past several years, I've been reprinting what I've come to think of as "my Christmas column" -- a tradition. I hope you enjoy it.

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What we really need is an all-purpose gift that will satisfy everybody. It should be suitable for all ages. It should require no assembly. It shouldn't need batteries. You shouldn't have to feed it. It should last forever. It should be constantly entertaining. The more the recipient uses it, the more he or she should like it.

And of course, it should be free.

One of the surprises of the Internet was the discovery by thousands of libraries across the country that the hottest information commodity was ... what was going on in our own back yards.

Think about it. You won't use your local library as a portal to Google. You just go to Google.

Certainly, many of the people who use library terminals do go on to search a host of World Wide Web search engines and big databases.

The longer I'm in the library business, the more I realize how deeply the public and private sectors are interconnected.

It's clear that in 2002, Colorado libraries have taken a hit financially. In some ways, this reflects what's happening in the business world. Many commercial operations are suffering a drop in sales, thus in revenue. Those libraries that are dependent on city sales taxes (as in Denver), are also seeing a sharp decline in revenue.

The library has a tape of Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, reading his "A Child's Christmas in Wales." I've been listening to it as I drive.

Thomas, the preternaturally gifted wordsmith, is mesmerizing. On the one hand, he's definitely telling a story, the story of many Christmases in Wales, from the standpoint of a young boy. It's funny and charming.

On the other hand, the sheer, compelling beauty and strangeness of the language sometimes overwhelms the listener with phrases like these:

On November 6, 2002, the Douglas Public Library District conducted two "non-user" focus groups. These were for people who did not have library cards; nor did anyone else in their households.

One focus group consisted of adult men and women from around the county. The second group consisted of young adults.

Let me tell you the story of the DVD gang.

A family -- a man, a woman, a child, and another man -showed up at one
of our branch libraries. They presented Denver identification. Under our
Colorado Library Card program, that was enough to get them all library
cards with us.

They then proceeded to check out about 20 DVD's apiece.

A couple of days later, they showed up at another of our branches. Using
their new cards, they repeated the performance.

Wanted: a library Trustee. Could that be you?

Maren Francis, founder and former owner of the Hooked on Books bookstore, longtime library Trustee, and past President of the Library Board, will be stepping down at the end of this year.

Some people have open faces. Others have closed.

It's the sort of thing you don't even notice until you have kids. You feel it for the first time right there in the birthing room, when all of a sudden you smile the way you probably haven't smiled in decades.

When they're infants, you see all the untrained grimaces and toothless grins. When babies are unhappy, their faces screw up and they wail. When they're happy, it's ear to ear and top of the head to the toes.

Public employees, as I described last week, are accountable through annual evaluations, and the general oversight of their supervisors.

Elected officials are accountable to the voters. If they prove to be unresponsive, or incompetent, they get voted out of office.

But what about appointed officials? For many members of public boards, there are few performance guidelines, and virtually no way to hold members -- or the body as a whole -- up to those guidelines even if they did exist.

I was chatting one day with a friend in another profession who said, "I'm genuinely impressed by the quality of the library's service. Every time I come in, your staff is extraordinary. How do you do that?"

First I gave the glib answer: "We hire smart people." And so we do.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was more to it than that.

A better answer is, "We know what we're looking for, and we try to make it easy for our staff to succeed."