Org.
Julie Edwards: And I'm going to start letting people in.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Okay.
Julie Edwards: welcome everyone.
Julie Edwards: I see many of you joining us. I'm Julie Edwards with Niche Academy. We will start the webinar here in about 3 min, but just wanted to open the room. Give everybody a chance to come in, get settled, feel free. If you would like to hop over to the chat, say, Hi, let us know where you're from. We do
Julie Edwards: publish the Chat transcripts with this many librarians in one room. There's often great information that goes back and forth in the chat. You do not have to use the chat if you don't want to, but if you would like to say Hi! And let us know where you're from, we'd love to see.
Julie Edwards: Hey? Mississippi coming in first, hey? Tennessee, Arizona. I got the southern part of the country represented.
Julie Edwards: Hello, New York, all right.
Julie Edwards: Oh, we have some fans of Adrian, that's great. Hi, Hi, South Carolina.
Julie Edwards: California Palm Springs. That sounds lovely. I was just down in Joshua Tree for
Julie Edwards: a while, and it was so nice.
Julie Edwards: Hey, Tiggard, hey, Trinidad and Tobago! Welcome, international colleagues. Hi! Joy in Montana!
Julie Edwards: Hello, Jamaica! As in Jamaica as in the island where we should all be right now, instead of in cold, wet Montana. Hi, Canada!
Julie Edwards: Hey, Marilyn, love seeing where everybody is from. Hi, Cape Cod!
Julie Edwards: Hi, Columbus.
Julie Edwards: Texas, hey, Raleigh! So nice to see everybody. Those of you who've been in webinars with me, you know, this is like my favorite thing, like it's like the nerd version of the license plate game, and I love it. Hey, Alaska.
Julie Edwards: Hi, Florida. Virginia.
Julie Edwards: So nice to see Eric
Julie Edwards: so nice to see so many colleagues from all over the country. Oh, Michael, thanks. Yeah, it is fun to see our colleagues from all over the world. Actually right. Hey, North Dakota!
Julie Edwards: It is my goal. It is my personal goal one of these days to get somebody from every Us. State in these webinars. and we've come close. We've had 46 out of 50 States one time, hey? West Virginia.
Julie Edwards: Indiana. Great! So nice to see so many of you. So we are right at the top of the hour. Keep coming in. Keep saying, Hi, if you would like to, but we are. Gonna go ahead and get started. So welcome again. Everybody. I'm Julie Edwards. I'm a librarian and instructional designer with niche Academy. I am joining you today from Missoula, Montana.
Julie Edwards: and I would like to welcome you to this webinar on policy writing and implementation with an equity lens. So let me start by briefly introducing Niche Academy. We are an easy to use all in one learning platform to help libraries create and deliver effective training and measure success.
Julie Edwards: Our platform is the perfect tool. If you're looking to increase your E resour usage move programming.
Julie Edwards: including story times online without having to worry about copyright
Julie Edwards: and deliver and track training for staff development. If you're interested in finding out more about our e-learning solution chatting with a member of our team, hearing what your colleagues in other libraries have to say, I will drop a link to our website in the chat, so you can check us out there.
Julie Edwards: We are recording this webinar and I will make the recording, the slides, the chat, and the audio transcripts available. In a few days all of that will be posted on our blog, and you will also get an email from me tomorrow or Friday, with all of with the link to all of that information
Julie Edwards: you're welcome to turn on closed captioning at the bottom of your screen. If you would like to use that.
Julie Edwards: please continue to say Hi! And chat with each other in the chat box. But if you have questions for Adrian, please use the question and answer box. It's not unusual for us to get many hundreds of people at these webinars. We're already over 200, and we're just getting started. So things do get lost in the chat. I'll do my best to moderate the QA. At the end of the webinar. So please go ahead and drop those questions in the QA. Box.
Julie Edwards: This webinar series is part of our commitment to solving bigger problems together.
Julie Edwards: providing continuing education in the library world. I am always genuinely happy to see so many of you joining us today. You can check out our upcoming webinars and register for those on our blog. I'll drop the link to that in the chat as well. And without further ado I would like to welcome our presenter today. Adrian Doman Culkin. Adrian is a public library administrator with over 30 years experience in public and academic libraries.
Julie Edwards: Her passion projects at work include equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism efforts, library assessment and strategic planning. Adrian is currently the library manager at the Sherwood Oregon Public Library, a member of the library of Washington County Cooperative Services. With that I would like to welcome Adrian and turn the webinar over to her.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Wonderful! Thank you so much. Thank you, Julie. Anish Academy, and all of you watching, and Hello! To my Oregon colleagues that made it to thank you so much for taking an interest in this topic. I'm delighted, and I'm honored to share this space with you. I'd love it if you could show me a thumbs up. If you have ever hoped a policy would just write itself
Adrienne Doman Calkins: anybody.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Hanson
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and I just realized I can't see the interactions. But II assume that we're getting lots of thumbs up. That's great. Well, I have to. And since it doesn't actually happen that way, then I have for you today this webinar. The purpose is to share ways to approach policy writing as a process rather than a product. So often we focus on what the final policy should be, and not as much on how to get there. So let's unpack that.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And by process, I mean, it might not be linear.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: It may be circuitous.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: It may be difficult. You'll need endurance.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: So over these next 45 min I will share concrete tips and conceptual approaches for policy writing and implementation.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And here's what I'm gonna cover. I have a bit of a prologue. Talk about using an equity and trauma informed lens process and pitfalls. Know your fill in the blank research, writing feedback loops, and then ending with holistic approach and final thoughts and time for questions.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And here I'd love to know more about those of you in the in the audience. And, Julie, if you could, please bring up the poll for policy writing experience, I invite everyone to share where you are starting from today. What level of policy experience do you have as a beginner.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: intermediate
Adrienne Doman Calkins: or experience? And actually, I'm seeing question number 2. Let's just go with that one. We'll go with question number 2, number one up there. Now, it says, Question 2, and then it says, What type of library are you at? That's what I see. No, that's okay. We could do that one first. Yeah. So so then, this question is, if you could, please bring up excuse me, please indicate what type of library you are at. Is it public, academic
school, or other? Or perhaps not a library?
Julie Edwards: Alright. So let's share. Can you see the results there. Oh, yes, good, alright! So we have the majority. 74 at public libraries.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: next, with academic couple of people from school, library hooray! And then 16 of you from other or not a library. Wonderful. This helps me to know more about where you may be coming from. And then the next question. There we go, is, what level of policy experience do you have? Would you consider yourself beginner intermediate or advanced by your own measure?
Adrienne Doman Calkins: By advanced? You could think of it as experienced. Sometimes I have a hard time self indicating you know it advanced.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: This one
Adrienne Doman Calkins: isn't letting me click on it. The last. Oh, there we go, oops.
Julie Edwards: So can you see the results there?
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Yes, yes, we have. Beginner is 51% of you intermediate 42% and advanced 8%.
Excellent. Thank you. I really appreciate that. It's nice to know where we're coming from. And I'm gonna try and kind of shoot for the middle a bit, and and for those of you that are advanced you might hear some things that are familiar for all of you. I welcome you to contact me after the webinar. If you have deeper questions.
and I want to share about my context. So this is where I am. I'm it. As Julie said. I'm the library manager at Sherwood Public Library in Oregon, on the west coast of the Us. It's about 25 min south of Portland, in a suburban town of about 20,000 people. We serve the outlying rural areas as well. So total service populations, about 25,000 people. We have 11 fte here we all wear a lot of hats. I'm the lead staff person working on policies.
I'm also an employee of the city. and I report to a community services director with the city manager.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: our mayor and city council are elected as the governing body, and there are various boards and commissions that advise on city work, and I work very closely with our Library Advisory Board with policy, review and recommendations. I don't expect this matches anybody's scenario exactly, but I thought it would give you context of where I'm coming from.
And then it's been a fairly recent change that our library policies must be adopted by city council. So previously. Library policies were
Adrienne Doman Calkins: approved by the board, the library, advisory board, and library staff, and went to city administration and the city attorney. And then these people are still involved in making policy recommendations to council. So for what it's worth. The latest policy that we officially updated just in October was our collection development policy, and that includes our request for reconsideration procedures
that policy because there were a few bumps in the road. Administratively and politically it took us 9 drafts. It took almost a year. It was a long, a long time
before that. The last policy we did was behavior policy, and that one
Adrienne Doman Calkins: was before this change, for policies went to council. It took about half the time.
half the effort. It was not fine, just politically divided at all. and then pre pandemic generally. Our cadence was to review and revise one to 2 policies a year.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: They were usually fairly easy compared to these last 2. The next time I'll likely batch 3 or 4 kind of easy, non-political policies in a batch to go to council.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and then our library is also a member of Washington County Cooperative library services, which is a consortium of public libraries. In Oregon there are 13 member libraries where each are separate organizations. Some of the city, some of us nonprofits. We share a collections and they're central services provided by the cooperative staff or Wcc. Ls staff.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: So then there's a whole pipeline there of policies and Wccl. Policy group, which I'm on reviews and approves various library policies. We make recommendation to another group called Wccl Executive board that group is advisory to elected officials at the county level, which are county commissioners.
And so all of this is to say that I have some experience with a lot of layers and complexity of governing. I'm also coming from a small staff where we are spread very thin and trying to fit policy work into the other business of running a library.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Okay, so let's dive in. This is my nutshell version of using an equity and trauma informed lens. These are some of the big picture ideas behind
behind this I do have some practical questions later in the webinar that I'll be sharing to walk through using a lens, and there are further resources in the bibliography at the end that you'll get
Adrienne Doman Calkins: So first and foremost, we want to actively dismantle systems of oppression, and, you know, might hear this also referred to as institutional racism or white supremacy culture, that there are relics of
uneven power. Dynamics in the very fabric of our organizations and our policies that we may not even see, because it's just always been that way. And so, looking with a fine inner tooth comb, and looking with more awareness, will help us see
some of those power dynamics, and then we need to move from neutrality to anti racism. Neutrality. I think it used to be seen that libraries should be neutral, that that was a safe place to be, that we're not gonna take a stance, and for some things that's true. But in order to do this work we have to take a stance, and we have to be active and
really
Adrienne Doman Calkins: lean into antiracism work. or it won't get done.
And then, moving from the equity point of view to the trauma informed point of view, we will also want to create physical and psychological safety. so that can be in our spaces, in our libraries and our policies and our procedures, in our services, and everything that we provide to our public, and we want it to be safe. And recognizing that especially now, communities and individuals are struggling, so Covid certainly made things worse
Adrienne Doman Calkins: for so many people, and there's trauma to that. And then there's also things like
Adrienne Doman Calkins: wars in other parts of the world, and people's rights being taken away. And you know, dealing with maybe loss or job status and economic instability. All these things
Adrienne Doman Calkins: make our communities and our staff have extra stress. And so that means that we're doing this work with reduced capacity and also a stronger need. And we want to galvanize ourselves and our libraries and our policies.
So I'm going to move into
Adrienne Doman Calkins: questions that we can ask ourselves as we're looking at our policies? No, our, our
Adrienne Doman Calkins: our organization's values reflected in our policies. How can we improve that?
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Who does the policy serve who is not served? No. Is it just serving staff, for example, or one group of people more than another?
Think about whose voices contributed to the policy whose voices are missing. and who has the power.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and can it be distributed? There are some more questions. Who has the most influence over enforcing the policy? Do they have the knowledge and skill needed to do so fairly?
Adrienne Doman Calkins: What stress and burdens are there in using the current policy. And can we alleviate that?
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Might it might the the policy or enforcing the policy, trigger past traumas, biases, or judgments? And how can this be avoided. So, for example, think about these questions in terms of enforcing a behavior policy, and whether someone is going to be excluded from all library services.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: or think about policing in libraries that may alleviate stress for some people and be re-traumatizing for others?
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And some more questions think about? Is the policy accessible? Is it accessible for the language that it's in? Is it accessible for use with a screen? Reader? What about any supplementary processes or forms that go with that are those also accessible
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and think about, where does the policy live in our work? How big or central is it? And by this, I mean conceptually, you know, is it? Something that touches all the work we do? And I think, for example, collection development policy is
Adrienne Doman Calkins: core policy of what libraries are about. and a behavior policy is also what I would think of is the the next largest or most most central policy, because that affects every person
Adrienne Doman Calkins: visiting the library all the staff, every hour that we're open. And so let this guide the level of effort you put into it.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Think about how we can build scaffolding around the values and protocols expected.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and so by scaffolding. I am thinking of different supports that are going to get us from where we are to where we want to be. And one of those supports is training.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And by training I also mean training that we might do as a group. But it's also we're training ourselves. And so that includes reading and learning and watching webinars and all the things we can do to absorb more background knowledge.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: So Edi A or equity, diversity, inclusion and antiracism and social justice. Trainings are going to really help with values and mindset.
And we can look within library land, of course, for training. We can also look for trainings from grass roots and non profit sectors where there's even more of an emphasis on community engagement. You'll come across terms like language, justice, and and other access issues that are going to be very well spelled out.
And then for trauma informed services, there are library specific sources. But it is a newer topic for us in library land, I think. Also, look at research in the healthcare sector, mental health, social services and education.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Look to your local social services in your communities. So think of it! The people, the staff, the community who's coming into our libraries, they may have certain needs, and maybe they come into library. They may not be behavior issues that escalate to a point of needing to think about the behavior policy. But if we think about all the behaviors that we see, and our role is not just to say this is bad behavior, but also, what can we do
when we notice people's needs and help be an advocate for them, or connect them to resources that may help them. So, being most informed, we can be about local social services, making referrals, and then also partnering with some of them to perhaps come to a staff meeting and do a training. So we know what services they provide and how we can best connect
Adrienne Doman Calkins: think about also older adults. You may have a senior center. You may have veterans services, maybe a domestic violence, shelter, other shelters, food pantries, those sorts of things.
Mental health and suicide. Prevention. Training is also going to be useful to provide empathy for people who are. maybe, you know, at the end of their rope, and maybe seeing some things at the library that are alarming, that we may be, instead of seeing this as
Adrienne Doman Calkins: poor behaviour, maybe it's someone reaching out, and if the more staff who have suicide prevention training, the more empathy we can have in working with the public.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And then I also include Lgbtqi, plus affirmation and inclusion training. So this also helps us to to meet the needs of our community better to be very accepting of everyone in our community, and also to know that there are people who may identify, especially as Trans who have
safety issues. That may may happen in a library like, for example, in a bathroom. If someone were to be bullied because they're using a bathroom that someone else doesn't think they should.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And disability awareness training is also gonna be very useful for having policies that are encompassing for everybody and welcoming, and think about non apparent disabilities as well. Sometimes we think so much about disabilities that we can see, but there may are many that we can't see that might be learning disabilities or different things happening mentally.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And then. So these training ideas are mostly gonna help with behavior policies and just mindset in general. But then, if you're working on collection development policy, of course, intellectual freedom skills, you can look at your the Ala Intellectual Freedom Committee in Oregon. We have Oregon Library Association, has an Intellectual Freedom Committee reach out your State Library. They probably have resources, and in this category I would also include training on reading. So that
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and as in taking materials out of the collection, because
everybody in the library is interacting with the collection. And if they know more about why we're taking something out based on condition, and that it's not because of the content. Then it helps the collection to be a fuller collection. Help us us all answer questions about weeding. Why, these books are free, you know, on your free card, or getting recycled, or being sold to the friends.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and then for more training ideas. And this is as you get into deeper kind of
Adrienne Doman Calkins: perhaps worrisome behavior with behavior policies, de-escalation techniques for us. We got training from our police department on about de escalating. We've had others and private sector come, talk to us also, do scenarios with staff and talk about when to call police when to call 9 1 one, when to call a non emergency number. If you have that.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and what happens when you do so realistically, what to expect for timing what to expect for an officer who may show up
Adrienne Doman Calkins: also for those of you who may be in very rural areas or in small communities, you might not have someone who can come right away. And and so, having a strategy for staff of A, you know, perhaps, rather than calling the sheriff
and expecting someone to show up right away, perhaps, is the person who's running the tavern across the street, or the person who's in the you know the other business down the road that can also be a backup for you.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And then, in my experience, as as you start to really dive into a behavior policy and asking for staff input, then then people sometimes naturally go to what if? What if we have a worst case scenario. What do I do then? And what is the policy do for me? And so training ideas for that can include self defense, active shooter training. Also think about Narcan and Cpr. And first Aid.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and not that these trainings are going to be spelled out in your policy, but because we're talking about difficult situations, then our gaps in our training become more obvious, and it will give staff more confidence will give us all more confidence if we know how to respond in these emergencies.
And then, in general, with all trainings, I'm always a big fan of scripts and role plays and cheat sheets. I think it's really helpful to practice and get it in body, memory of saying certain things, or having a script for a few generic situations, that then we can add to and adjust as needed as a situation may arise.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And so I'm gonna go on to empathy and enforcement.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And and so for me, I'm thinking mostly about the behavior policy with this. Think about how consistent are we with enforcement? Do people get second chances equally
and and think about truly?
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Let's say one person comes in. Maybe they're rowdy in the kids area and causing a great big scene, you know. Are they treated the same as somebody else of a different age, or a different gender or different skin color, and you know everybody should be treated equally. And so, if we can have.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and
Adrienne Doman Calkins: policies that help us to do that. We're going to be more more welcoming and more equal is the process to request a reconsideration accessible. And this is, you know, language. But it's also the level of difficulty. Is it welcoming? Now? II think we probably all agree. We don't want a lot of requests for reconsideration. We maybe don't want any. But we also need to know. Recognize that people in this country have a right to question what we have in our library. And so our policy should spell that out as something that's approachable for them.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And are we reducing biases in our reporting? So let's say, with behavior policy, we may have some kind of staff log, and we're keeping track. And you know this person came in. They did this.
and and
Adrienne Doman Calkins: what about our description in that staff log can have biases reduced. What are there things that we're noticing because we all have biases? And so the more where we are of our biases, the more we can reduce them.
Sometimes I might think.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: you know, if this person were switched with a different person, would I report this the same way, and that helps me to clean out, you know. Make it a very very neutral report, and then other things to think about is, if you have any kind of form or log, there should not be any mention of race. There's no need to have race or ethnicity. We're not in the business of guessing. It doesn't need to be on there.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Be also familiar with behaviors correlated with dementia, autism, brain injury, etc. And of course I'm not a doctor. I'm not a you know, expert on these topics, but I know some some familiarity with, say, in our libraries we may have people who are keeping
whose noise volume is really high, you know, or we may have issues of theft.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And for us, and sure would we've noticed. There's a correlation with some people who still most often are older adults and and talking to the manager of the senior center. I'm learning there is a correlation with early onset dementia, sometimes that dementia and theft and the person may not even realize that they're doing it.
and and brain injury sometimes, too, that we could have a conversation with someone. And perhaps we're interacting with them because of the behavior policy, perhaps giving a warning. Or perhaps they're not remembering the the conversation that we had last week, and that may show up in ways similar as dementia or other memory loss situations.
And so we just wanna have empathy for how a person
Adrienne Doman Calkins: may not be in control of their behavior.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Okay, I wanna talk about tools to support the work. So we use a cloud based behavior, log and form. We're using Microsoft teams and fill in fill in. If we're doing an exclusion, we do that, it populates in excel cloud based. Excel
worksheet. And then we also have more of a chat for minor things that we use, and that's been really helpful because we can do that in real time from any workstation. Even if someone's working from home, they're going to see that
I also have exclusion letters that I write, if it's a one week or longer, and I've really made an effort to make more positive tone in that letter and
Adrienne Doman Calkins: path to returning. We we allow curbside and online services. Still, if someone's been excluded for the collection development policy, I have a request for reconsideration form that's ready. But it's not on the website because I don't want someone coming into the front desk and saying, Here, I'm ready to, you know, start a request for reconsideration process. That's something that we would
Adrienne Doman Calkins: rewind. Some have some conversations first.
and then I have a scoring matrix also that's prepared. Haven't had to use it yet, but it's based on the policy to keep everything very transparent. And then, of course, policies and forms translated to other languages.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: We want to talk about the policy pipeline.
and I think it should always be communicating early and often about what is in that pipeline and why and when I say communicating, I'm thinking, with Library Advisory Board with
whoever you're governing
Adrienne Doman Calkins: body is, if you have a board or your staff, or both, and there should always be a next policy, we should know why certain policies are outdated or less effective. And what can be done?
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Say your intentions and recommendations to these groups out loud and policy work is constant. If one is done, another should be about to begin. For me. I prioritize what policies need to be revised by the date that they were last reviewed
targeting every 3 years or so. Kind of Covid. Put a little bit of a pause in some of that.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: something might be a higher priority. If there's anything obviously out of date where it's causing a problem, or it's inconsistent or inaccurate.
Think about first amendment auditors that are known to target public libraries where they have a right to video record staff. And does your behavior policy say anything about video recording
is your collection development policy and review process going to protect staff? Does your behavior policy have levels of enforcement?
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And are there any new regulations, legal regulations, or agreements that should be reflected in your policies like an intergovernmental agreement, or maybe a State's definition of your public library.
Can you codify Ali ethics into your policies if you haven't already.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and so more on process. Think about who recommends, approves, and adopts, and if you don't know, then speak to your supervisors, speak to. You, know the the powers that be. Generally speaking, it would be staff recommend, a board approves, and your governing body, or the you know, the executive level is adopting the policy.
If you have a board, think of them as your think, Tank. and if you don't have a board, perhaps you want to create a steering committee, or if your board maybe, is not interested in this, you know that you can have a temporary steering committee to work on a policy.
I recommend reviewing values ethics and best practices annually. and communicate about trends and risks and trends, especially about book banning. You know that it tends to be by outside groups. It can be multiple titles at once
communicate to your board that staff at some libraries are targeted, and that there's legal risk to the organization. If an item is censored.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: share behavior issues and aggregate your board or your you know, the the executive level may not realize all the types of behavior issues that you're working with and so sharing, that will give more support for revising your policy.
and then also share informal complaints about the collection with the board or your group there, so that they also know what kinds of things to expect in that are specific for our community.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: II like to think of it as create calm urgency. You know, policy work is not optional time spent now will save time. Later.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Wanna talk bit more about process. You may need new policies, too. Not just revising. So is there significant work being done that is not reflected in a policy, perhaps have been misunderstandings about that work. Is the library criticized for mission creep, for providing certain services or favoritism for working with local businesses or clubs?
Would a programming policy or partnership policy or display policy, help to make that work more transparent and and to support staff and think about staff engagement and policy evaluation. I speak more to this later on as well. Think about what training supports your own skills and what training your staff will need
Adrienne Doman Calkins: reach out to advisors. Consider consultants, interns, and I haven't done this yet. But AI, I think you know, could also be a tool for double checking values and a policy.
and then find who your advocates are, your allies and your accomplices. These people could help support your policy getting adopted, they might help support you, getting some research done
Adrienne Doman Calkins: for pitfalls. Be ready to be bipartisan. So in Sherwood it's a is a fairly conservative counsel. The collection development policy had a lot of edits that were asked, and I learned
Adrienne Doman Calkins: learn to make adjustments and thinking about what? What was crucial to the policy and what could be changed?
Think about when your budget is due, and who approves it. Is it the same group of people? Because if it is, you may want to time these. So they're very separated in the calendar.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and if you can't be in the room with the people, let's say who are approving it. We're discussing whether to approve it. Then write the memo and put all the detail in there about why certain wording is changed, and why it needs to be in there
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and then be aware of the balance of transparency and oversharing procedural detail. I usually can lean toward transparency. But sometimes I've had things on our public website like diversity audits of the collection and realize that others felt that then we didn't need to have a diverse collection, because we'd already done that.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: If the policy work gets messy. That doesn't mean you should stop
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and know your chain of command, the approval and adoption requirements, legal requirements, your community, local politics and school board issues, you know. If you're not at a school, let's say here in a public library, the School board issues are affecting the whole community, and people talk to each other, and it's really important to know what those issues are.
Of course, stakeholders, other work priorities and deadlines maybe not just our own, but ones that are coming from our elected body and know what the end goal is. There's core pieces of that policy. You want to get done.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: So let's begin and choose one policy and make it better. And I want to talk about research writing and feedback loops.
Now for me, when I'm actually digging in and writing, it can be so hard to create that bubble I can get very distracted. There's a lot of
Adrienne Doman Calkins: There's a lot of things buying from my time, and so I literally have to close the door and maybe play a certain kind of music. Have the white noise, you know. Clear everything off, but I'm not gonna be able to clear everything off my desk. I have to just get the couple of big things that were due that week and then and then start. And I love to embrace the concept of slow librarianship. It was popularized by Meredith Farkas. And
Adrienne Doman Calkins: I think of this phrase when I'm done with this, whatever the thing is, I think I'm supposed to be working on. I get to work on that policy, and that's my reward. I get to carve out that space for deeper thinking.
and if there's no deadline, make one plan your year around your board meetings, or whatever meetings you have with people who are going to approve your policies.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And then you're going to research, get a lot of samples, but don't feel like you have to get all the samples.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And so
Adrienne Doman Calkins: I believe there are 2 types of policy writers, I believe, people who develop policies fall into these 2 categories of one who primarily help staff in our work, while also where we're. Excuse me, we're writing the policy primarily as a tool for staff, while also, of course, having it as a public document, and those who see policies more for the public. First and foremost, while also supporting staff.
And what I've noticed is that the first group who view policies as a staff tool. First, tend to have longer policies with more details. The second group prioritizing public facing
policies will usually have a shorter policy with less detail that might, that detail might be in procedures, it might be in staff training materials. I think that's lovely.
It's just not what I do, at least not at the stage of my career. It is what it is I'm not saying mine are better, or that you know either one is better. But I do think it's important to know what your organization style is, what your staff want, what they need, what level of interaction your public has with policies, in what the approval and adoption. Layers of your governance structure are.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: So here's a take away as you research policies, and you see pieces you like from various policies, because we all borrow from each other.
try to look at the form and the structure, the detail or the implied detail, the values and the word choices. If a policy. Seems like it's a very different style that you're looking for. It may be that you can still
Adrienne Doman Calkins: fill in gaps or take away detail and have it match your needs.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And so we're at the research stage. And we're gonna use Google a lot. But a lot of other tools as well be aware of various names for similar policies. For example, II call it behavior policy. Some libraries will say rules of use policy. There are other names.
Policies might be split out like where they might be merged. A collection development policy may or may not also include the request for reconsideration within it.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: look to your State library for policy examples and other libraries, neighboring libraries, big systems, trendsetters, comparable size libraries or not.
colleagues, listservs, email people directly, I think, for those of us that work deeply with policies. It's a huge compliment to have an email from someone saying, Hey, could you tell me how you're planning to edit that one. I know that you're working on it right now
and then. I know, at least in Washington State. There's a clearing house at the Washington State Library. There's a clearing house for policies that can be very helpful.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and I really believe if you fall in love with a policy, for it's me if you fall in love with a library for any reason for programming and your staff you've collaborated with, go look at their policies because their policies are probably gonna be
equally as good. And then, of course, there are whole books and articles on the topic outside of googling things and finding samples of policies, and I have some in the resources.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and for those of us in public libraries. I know there's often standards for public libraries. I know there are other standard tools for other types of libraries in Oregon. The Oregon Library Association, Public Library standards refer to policies in in some of their best practices. And we also have an Oregon that you're welcome to find the Oregon Library Association edi toolkit, which has some resources for policies.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Okay, so we're going. We're going into the writing stage. So I love the idea of embracing the dirty draft or a drafty draft. You know a draft doesn't have to be shareable at the beginning or elegant. Just make an edible editable copy, name it, draft one turn on track changes and start getting in there and highlighting and adding comments.
spend 20 or 30 min doing this, and you've started. That's the biggest hurdle. Sometimes it's just starting
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and then repeat as needed add citations from your early research in the comments. You're not gonna keep those citations in the final, but it will help answer questions and perhaps support. If you need to justify why you made changes
and add questions. You don't have the answers to yet.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and then build in feedback loops. So
Adrienne Doman Calkins: what I like to do is, give the Board the original policy and say, we're working on reviewing this. These are kind of the big picture concepts of where I want to have edits. They should already know why.
and then, of course, follow expectations for organization it may need be. You need to inform certain groups like your elected officials, or so on that this is in the pipeline share draft, one with the core staff who do that work like your selectors or your lead staff.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and then use synchronous and asynchronous discussion. In person virtual. Incorporate that feedback into your next draft, and then repeat the cycle with more research, and share with all the staff and get input. And you may not get a lot of engagement. But it can also be really surprising how much thought all staff at all levels, put into policies.
and so take draft 3 or whatever you're on to your board for feedback.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Consider a consultant review if you haven't yet, and I've only done this once with paid a stipend for someone to take a look at a collection development policy with an equity lens and was very, very useful. I wasn't able to keep everything I learned there, but a lot of
the content informed work that I was doing at the county level as well.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and then you're gonna have an iterative process timed with those board meetings. And so if you've got your calendar and you know you're gonna take in the next draft, and so on, and and know when you hope to be finalizing things.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Now I work in a city. We have a city attorney. I can run all my policies by the city attorney. But if you're if you're doing that as a special cost outside legal review.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: please do so. If there's any risk of litigation or appeal especially.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And so we're starting to wrap up a bit. I wanna talk about governing body communication. And now you know, recognizing my context is with city Council, and I'm privy to what's happening with the County Board of Commissioners.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: There are different tools that are often used as the structure of government.
And so
Adrienne Doman Calkins: a memo, an official memo in my case to city Council was given out from this that I wrote, went to the city manager for review, the attorney for review, my supervisor for review, and then it was delivered to council, and then council had an opportunity to weigh in. Do they want further discussion or not? And in my case they said this most recently with the collection development policy, they said, No, we're good. We're ready to vote on this at consent agenda.
But these other things we were prepared to do, and I've heard from colleagues in Oregon that this often happens to so small group discussions. I was part of several small group discussions with Staff, but meanwhile the city manager was having small group discussions with elected officials of one or 2 of them at a time, so that they didn't have a quorum and didn't trigger public meeting law.
And then work session presentation would be a public meeting. I was preparing a work session presentation. I didn't actually have to do it this last time, but many of my colleagues, I've heard have had to do this.
and there's no voting. But it's a really more casual way of having a meeting with all the elected officials present where they get to ask questions. You can generally give them a packet of information ahead of time.
and then another tool can be a presentation at a full on council meeting, or whatever your your governing body is with. Perhaps QA. Would be a public meeting. There could be public comments from from people who come to that meeting.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And then the easiest route is consent, agenda, where item is approved along with minutes, and so on. If there's anything that's been discussed previously, and it's just voted on as a big chunk of information that the elected body is voting on
Adrienne Doman Calkins: with any of these. Any time is up for vote.
There's generally a resolution and staff report, and your organization will have templates for that. In the staff report. You can add a little bit more detail generally, and and refer back to some of those citations you had. Refer back to some of the legal obligations you may have to have certain pieces in your policy, and and why you're choosing at this time to edit them.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And so then, hopefully, we've gotten to this point where we're celebrating. I think it's important to celebrate all 3 of these accomplishments with adopting the policy being the final. But if you've gotten to a point where your Board has recommended the policy, or your board is approving a policy, and then, when the policy is finally adopted, some organizations, I think, consider, approve the final step.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Some will go from recommend to adopt whatever your organization does. Just be very aware of the terminology. So that you don't accidentally say something is adopted by a group that doesn't have the authority to do so. And then, you know, really celebrate. And all the staff we're participating and engaging. And so it's a chance to share the new policy and a hip, hip, hooray! And and feel accomplished, and then take a little break before doing the next one.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And so I want to take some pause here to talk about the holistic approach with policy writing. I talked about how we're doing research and thinking about the scaffolding and the staff supports and think about
you know done is better than perfect that that policy, once you've gotten it through all these pieces, and you finally have it that
Adrienne Doman Calkins: you can still be thinking of it as
Adrienne Doman Calkins: less than perfect. And that's okay, and that the next time you come back to review it. You can add, you can form, you can shape it. You can use what you learn from that policy experience with the next policy experience and and keep thinking about training supports and different things that staff may need, that you may need for becoming more equitable in the approach to policies.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and then I have a list of resources. It may be a little too small to read right here, but I just want you to know that you have them. One of these resources is also an article I wrote
a little while ago about the behavior policy that also has a bibliography with even deeper research in it.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And with that I am already to my question, slide II got here a little bit earlier, so II thank you all for being here, and I really appreciate it, and I welcome any questions you may have.
Julie Edwards: Thank you so much, Adrienne. That was fantastic. Thank you. We have had a lot of questions come in, and so we'll just dive right into them. Several people have asked if you would be willing to share the materials, reconsideration form and matrix.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Yes, yes, I wanna think about how to do that because I don't. II will happily share. You know, if anybody wants to email me, for example.
I don't really want to live on the web. because I don't, you know, for the same reason I don't put it on our public website. But I'm happy to share copy that has, you know,
a big
Adrienne Doman Calkins: watermark across it, not for distribution. So maybe, Julie. Maybe you and I could talk about if there strategies for doing that. But yes, I'm happy to share.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Thank you.
Julie Edwards: Someone's asking. Could you speak a little more about the policy process regarding the political stressors and working with county and town government when you're working on your collection development policy.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Yes.
yes, I can So
Adrienne Doman Calkins: for sure, when so our council is 7 elected officials, about 4 of them are more conservative, and 3 are are not.
and so we had really great support from the folks who are more liberal and a lot more questions from the other set.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: at the same time that our our Po, I should back up a little bit. So our policy. I was going off of this kind of older procedure that I would take my policies to the city manager to my board, the attorney, and that was, gonna be it. And then I found out when I was partway through the process. Oh, no council needs to approve this too, and I think if I had known that at the very beginning, I think I would have approached it differently, I probably would not have
Adrienne Doman Calkins: led with Set. Some of those early drafts had really strong progressive language in them that I think if I had known Council was going to want to see it. And I, you know.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: perhaps, would have known to not be quite take quite as big of a jump that first time around.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: That said, you know I don't want council to be surprised. And let's say we get a request for reconsideration. And I'm notifying key people in the city.
and they find out then, and then they read the policy. You know. I don't want them to find out about the policy afterwards, so I'm trying to to express gratitude for them to spend the time looking at it. We spent quite a bit of time talking about
accuracy
Adrienne Doman Calkins: as a point. There was a lot of questions about how do you library staff tell? Something is accurate. I thought there would be more questions about well, why does it collection need to be diverse. It didn't have those questions so much, but I did have a question I had. I have a couple of lists in the policy, and one of them
Adrienne Doman Calkins: There was something about diverse collections, and it was the first item in a bulleted list.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and there was a perception that that meant we were spending more money on diverse books.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And then why would we do that? If our population doesn't match the diversity of that being is the top item in the list, and I had to explain, this is this isn't correlated to the budget. And so I actually put that bulleted list
Adrienne Doman Calkins: that bulleted item further down in the list
because of this perception that we would spend
Adrienne Doman Calkins: more than half the budget on diverse titles.
even though we're we were
Adrienne Doman Calkins: trying to add diverse titles all along. So those are a few things. I'm happy to answer more questions on that. But hopefully, that helps a little bit with the sticky points were.
Julie Edwards: thank you. This question came earlier, and I'm not sure maybe I'm gonna ask it. And then we'll go from there. Do you share issues and open meetings or executive sessions? I'm not sure what issues is referring to. But so for me.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: I didn't go to any executive sessions. For this I don't. I haven't been invited to a single executive session. That's not
it's some of the senior leadership, and I am reporting to community Services director. But to my knowledge
Adrienne Doman Calkins: this topic didn't go to executive session. So I went to
staff meetings. I met with the city manager, the city attorney, services director and I. We we went and and I have a city Council liaison to the Library Advisory Board, and we had several meetings. Talking about various stages of this, and then we had some subsets of those meetings, but then the
Adrienne Doman Calkins: council communication came directly from the city manager, or through my memo
and sometimes from my boss getting questions kind of off to the side.
Julie Edwards: Thank you. And there was a little bit of a clarification here when you share general behavioral issues with the trustees, is that in an open meeting?
So I did kind of behavior issues in aggregate. It was technically a public meeting. We didn't have anybody that day who was from the public, and it wasn't recorded but what I did is I just looked back for about 18 months, and I said we had this number of situations where we excluded someone. This number of situations where it was rowdy behavior. This number of situations where it was violence. This, you know, vandalism, graffiti, those sorts of things. So no names, no descriptions, nothing like that.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Excellent. Thank you.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: How does library policy help with accusations of mission creep for public libraries? So I don't. Maybe this is a unique thing for me. But II am
Adrienne Doman Calkins: I? Sometime? II have frequently heard. Just stay in your lane, just work on focus on the books. and that we shouldn't have so much effort and money put into things like programming, or partnerships, or displays, or exhibits, or any of these other
Adrienne Doman Calkins: services that we provide that are separate from the books.
And and then let's say, with partnerships, we do have a partnership policy. I it's up for revision. But we pre pandemic. We were doing a lot of things
Adrienne Doman Calkins: out in the community lot more, and we were doing a
Adrienne Doman Calkins: trivia night at a local wine bar. That's just down a couple of blocks.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: And then we got asked by a brute pub half a mile away, saying, Well, would you do trivia night for us, too, and I'm like, you know, we could only spread ourselves so thin. And so we realize that having a tool where anybody in the city, if they get asked you, why is the library doing this. If we spell out our reasons for how we choose things like partnerships.
then it makes that more transparent that it's not favoritism that we're chose this business and not that business. And we're actually not doing that particular one anymore. But that's
one example.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Excellent. Thank you.
Julie Edwards: Can you talk about the difference between policy, like the behavior policy and the procedure to support the policy like the behavior log. What what do you see as the difference between policy and procedure.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Hmm, that's a good question. I didn't think that include that in the presentation. So I think of policy as a big p procedure is, the little P. Sometimes procedure is in the policy document, but it will. There'll be a heading separating it, and this is procedure
Adrienne Doman Calkins: generally the governing body is approving the policy. But Staff can update the procedure whenever you need to. And then policy is, gonna be more of like, how do you make these decisions. You know, what? What are the major
Adrienne Doman Calkins: considerations, or what's the general kind of big picture methodology of something? What are the core values behind it? And then the procedure is going to be a bit more of into the detail, the day to day work. How exactly do you do that? So you might have
Adrienne Doman Calkins: with the behavior policy
procedure. How do we enforce it? And the behavior log we have as a staff tool. Only it's I mean, technically, there's public record. But we we don't, of course, share that log and so that's a communication tool like you might use email to communicate with staff. We have this cloud based
Adrienne Doman Calkins: log of issues. And so those are issues that
Adrienne Doman Calkins: we're noticing in the library. Procedurally, we're sharing with each other because we're like, well, this is
this is happening. I just warned this person. If it happens again, we're gonna ask them to leave for the day.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and then we've got it log there. So if it happens again the next day or the next day after that, you know, we're gonna have to move down that line of excluding them.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Thank you. And since I mentioned that someone's asking, was there any pushback on using the term exclusion instead of Banning? I've never heard that language used, but I love it. Oh, it! You know the original behavior policy that I inherited when I started working here about 9 and a half years ago or so had that word, and I liked it. The last place I was at also used that word. So
Adrienne Doman Calkins: we never talked about changing it to Banning. But I agree, I think excluding
is a little.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: It's it's not exactly a soft word.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: I mean, it can be traumatizing to be excluded. You know someone's losing privileges and so on. But I think it. It feels less judgmental to me than Banning, for sure.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Thank you, Umhm.
Julie Edwards: What do you do when outside bodies like city councils, create library policy without consulting the library. Any thoughts on that?
Oh, that's an interesting one. Outside bodies like city councils.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: so I have not experienced counsel creating a policy that directly impacted the library that I was not part of the process. In some ways. There's a couple of
Adrienne Doman Calkins: kinda like in the municipal code. I don't know if that's an Oregon term or not. But you know the the policies basically of the city.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: There's a section there for boards and commissions, including the Library Advisory Board, and that was revised a few years ago, and
and and I did have a chance to give input into that. It affected a little bit about the work that I do, and some of the timing of when board members came off of boards and commissions, and so on.
so I don't know. I think if you have
Adrienne Doman Calkins: if you, I guess my advice would be if you don't have a voice and policies that are being created, and you need a voice like start attending those meetings, and if your only option is to use public comment. Then use public comment. You know, if you, if you have a chain of command between you and that group that you can work with your supervisor
Adrienne Doman Calkins: to get your input included. It sounds like something could be broken, and I would say, You know, try and try and work on getting your feedback
ladder.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Thank you.
Julie Edwards: Any thoughts on resolving ideological differences. For example, in reading values and policies.
Julie Edwards: How do you go about that? You talked a little bit about this, maybe just yesterday at it, when you're talking about moving Diversity down the list, but not removing it. Can you speak any more to that.
Is so hard. I
Adrienne Doman Calkins: ideological differences, I mean, I think some of the hardest parts for me of doing this work have been realizing that my values sometimes are a mismatch
Adrienne Doman Calkins: in
Adrienne Doman Calkins: in the larger cities values, and not with everybody, and not in every way, and so on. But I think finding a path for
doing this work, if it doesn't seem like it's supported, can be really difficult.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: finding common ground, I think, is really important
Adrienne Doman Calkins: for us in Sherwood. There's so we're in the in. So Oregon is not the most diverse state in the nation. Perhaps that's a common knowledge. But within Oregon the county I'm in Washington County is the most diverse county in Oregon, and the county government, and many of the
Adrienne Doman Calkins: city governments and agencies in our region are very committed to equity, diversity, inclusion.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: and the city politics are not at that same place.
and so sometimes bringing in
Adrienne Doman Calkins: actions that are happening at the county level or the State level or other. You know other agencies to show that we're being consistent. This isn't just me, you know, and that their best practices that support the work. So our Organ Library Association, public library standards, has a number of things about Edi
Adrienne Doman Calkins: in the standards that I can also point to
Adrienne Doman Calkins: but then I've also learned that the cat
Adrienne Doman Calkins: counselors, who are more conservative. They don't want to have that conversation in a public forum
they want. They wanted my policy to be palatable
Adrienne Doman Calkins: so that everybody could vote on it. It was 100% consensus. It was on consent, agenda. Nobody wanted to argue about it at a public meeting which I'm grateful for in a way, but it meant I had to.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: I had to bring it to the the level that was palatable for everybody. And then it
Adrienne Doman Calkins: I didn't change people's ideology. I guess I just tried to focus on the core pieces of the policy that were most important.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Thank you. I feel like that's a very honest and practical response, you know. Hello, to any city councillors that might be listed. Yeah.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: we are right at the top of the hour, Adrian. Thank you so much. This was excellent. I think the the information that you gave, and the way that you presented it is so valuable to so many of us. Here you're getting thank yous in the chat. This was fantastic, so informative.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Thank you so much. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you. Everybody for being here. Feel free to reach out to me. I'd love to hear what questions you have. Oh, thank you. I love Sidelo. Thank you. So you're welcome.
Julie Edwards: thank you, everybody for attending. We really appreciate it. I will send out all of this great information, the slides, the recording, the Chat Transcript and the audio transcript. In a few days. I really appreciate you joining us on this Wednesday. Hope to see you next week at the next webinar. Until then have a great week. Everyone. Thank you.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Wonderful. Thank you, Julie. Thank you. Everyone really appreciate it.
Adrienne Doman Calkins: Bye-bye. Okay.