Cindy Fesemyer

Meetings are something every librarian deals with throughout their career. This book shows you how to make sure they are all successful and engaging. Some meetings drag on seemingly without end, while others are engaging and productive. The difference – meeting preparation and skilled facilitation! Via this fun and interactive workbook readers will learn about meeting structures and facilitation skills that, with practice, will improve meetings of all kinds. Authors Cindy Fesemyer and Amanda Standerfer discuss group dynamics, facilitation core competencies, and tools to use for in-person and virtual meetings. Contributors Mia Henry and Martin Alvarado add content on diversity, equity and inclusion, and working with multilingual and multicultural groups. This interactive book includes many worksheets to help you envision and structure successful meetings, build meeting agendas, practice facilitation skills, prepare for potentially difficult facilitation situations, and close your meeting in a way that prepares you for the next one. Readers will find themselves ready to structure and facilitate more productive meetings, as well as lively library and community conversations. As facilitation is not currently taught in many, if any, library school programs, this book fills in the gaps and allows library professionals to learn very practical skills at their own pace. In addition to worksheets throughout the text, readers are given exercises to help them practice the various skills required for effective facilitation.

Meetings are something every librarian deals with throughout their career. This book shows you how to make sure they are all successful and engaging. Some meetings drag on seemingly without end, while others are engaging and productive. The difference – meeting preparation and skilled facilitation! Via this fun and interactive workbook readers will learn about meeting structures and facilitation skills that, with practice, will improve meetings of all kinds. Authors Cindy Fesemyer and Amanda Standerfer discuss group dynamics, facilitation core competencies, and tools to use for in-person and virtual meetings. Contributors Mia Henry and Martin Alvarado add content on diversity, equity and inclusion, and working with multilingual and multicultural groups. This interactive book includes many worksheets to help you envision and structure successful meetings, build meeting agendas, practice facilitation skills, prepare for potentially difficult facilitation situations, and close your meeting in a way that prepares you for the next one. Readers will find themselves ready to structure and facilitate more productive meetings, as well as lively library and community conversations. As facilitation is not currently taught in many, if any, library school programs, this book fills in the gaps and allows library professionals to learn very practical skills at their own pace. In addition to worksheets throughout the text, readers are given exercises to help them practice the various skills required for effective facilitation.

Most libraries in the US are small in size and rural in location. And, since most of them don’t require a degree to be hired as Library Director, many new hires step into the position with limited management or librarianship experience. This handbook will quickly get new directors up to speed on managing staff, drafting budgets, crafting policies, overseeing a building and its collections, and strengthening the library’s place in the community. The authors, with years of small library management experience between them, offer expert guidance on all those topics and many more besides. Small public library directors at all stages of their career, as well as their board members and library trustees, will benefit from this handbook’s up-to-date perspectives on what it takes to run your library in today’s post-pandemic, politically polarized, technologically advanced, socially isolated world; receive to-the-point advice on governance, strategic planning, human resources, policy development, facilities, services and programs, and other foundational tasks; become informed on how to safeguard intellectual freedom, handle challenges to materials and programming, and protect patron privacy; get pointers on broadening their personal network, understanding what outside resources are available, and spearheading effective advocacy and community engagement; learn from real-life “Success Stories” and “On the Job” words of wisdom sprinkled throughout the text; and find adaptable templates, self-enrichment activities, and other tools to facilitate ongoing professional development.