Tag Archives: strategic planning

CMLE, Communication

We need your input: CMLE needs a new name!

Official Office Bear, Orville

CMLE has been making some big changes to our services over the past two to three years; and now we want to re-brand our identity to reflect the organization we are becoming. So we need a new name, and we want your ideas and opinions to make a good decision!

As you may know, CMLE is one of the seven multitype systems in the state of MN. That means we all work to help all types of libraries in our geographic area: schools, publics, academics, and specials, as well as archives and history centers. Our geographic area covers the same territory as the Great River and the East Central public library systems. It’s an opportunity for all of us to work together, to find common solutions to problems we all face, and to always know that we are all part of a larger community of people doing the same kind of work. We do not serve the people in the communities; we serve you guys, and you serve your communities.

We think it’s a pretty great system, and are always looking for new ways we can work to share communication and information across all 300+ members in these 12 counties! (Shhh! Don’t tell the other six systems – but we think our members are pretty clearly the best!) (We may be slightly biased in that assumption, but….)

Our neighboring multitype library system, SAMMIE, is changing their name – and have already decided to change to Prairielands Library Exchange.  Ideally, we would like to do this soon to save the effort of changing names across the state more than once!

We are also working on our Strategic Plan, and are looking at some ideas for branding for that – ideas that will help to guide the work we can do to provide more and better service to our members over the next few years.

So  we are asking for your thoughts and ideas! You can go ahead and suggest some names, or just suggest some words and ideas.  We will work out a selection of name suggestions from these ideas, and take them to the next CMLE Board meeting to see what they think.

Your input is, as always, important in the decisions we make. Our whole purpose is to serve our members; we want you to be active in guiding where we can best put our limited time and resources to provide the best service!

Please fill out the form below. If you want to chat about ideas further, we would be happy to hear from you! Come to our tour of St Cloud State’s library on Jan. 11; come to one of our Office Hours; email ideas; leave them in the comments below; we can set up a time to come visit your library; or just make an appointment to come by our office and chat. (You know we always like to see you!)

Thanks for your ideas! We are looking forward to building another great plan for a few more years of service to our members.

Which of these words to you think are important in the work CMLE does for libraries and archives?(required)

Advocacy, CMLE

CMLE Wants You! Let’s do some strategic planning!

Two-people-talking-logoLet’s talk!

We are approaching the end of our strategic plan, and we need some ideas on new directions to take for the next three years.

Our mission is to serve our members, and to share information resources for everyone. We have been expanding the kinds of information sources we provide – from the weekly newsletter, to the library training podcast, the books/reader’s advisory podcast, the online training programs, the member events, and more.

And now we need to hear from our members. What do you want? What is going to be valuable for you? What kind of library information would be helpful to you?

We know there are a few specific needs across the system:

  • better connections between libraries;
  • more skills, information, and training in advocacy for yourself and your library;
  • an easier way to build library skills of all sorts.

We will be sending out a system-wide survey to everyone, to find out what kinds of ideas and needs you have. For now, we want to build on the work our Board has started, and set up some focus groups to chat with people.

If you have not participated in a focus group before, it might sound intimidating. It’s not. The idea is just to gather a few people together to chat about libraries of the future, and some ideas on how we can continue to work together to make CMLE libraries well-supported and fantastic areas of service to their communities! (No pressure here – we aren’t going to solve all the issues of the library world in an hour session. We are just going to get some ideas and work on being more fabulous!)

If you can come join us for an hour or so, we will give you food and enjoy chatting with you! Let us know what day and time would work for you in December. We will work out some locations to reach out to people across our twelve counties. And if you know of anyone else who would like to express ideas for CMLE, forward this on to them. We are looking to have opinions from anyone who wants to share!

What day/time would generally work for you to chat about CMLE and libraries(required)

CMLE, Communication

CMLE Wants You! Let’s do some strategic planning!

Two-people-talking-logoLet’s talk!

We are approaching the end of our strategic plan, and we need some ideas on new directions to take for the next three years.

Our mission is to serve our members, and to share information resources for everyone. We have been expanding the kinds of information sources we provide – from the weekly newsletter,  to the library training podcast, the books/reader’s advisory podcast, the online training programs, the member events, and more.

And now we need to hear from our members. What do you want? What is going to be valuable for you? What kind of library information would be helpful to you?

We know there are a few specific needs across the system:

  • better connections between libraries;
  • more skills, information, and training in advocacy for yourself and your library;
  • an easier way to build library skills of all sorts.

We will be sending out a system-wide survey to everyone, to find out what kinds of ideas and needs you have. For now, we want to build on the work our Board has started, and set up some focus groups to chat with people.

If you have not participated in a focus group before, it might sound intimidating. It’s not. The idea is just to gather a few people together to chat about libraries of the future, and some ideas on how we can continue to work together to make CMLE libraries well-supported and fantastic areas of service to their communities! (No pressure here – we aren’t going to solve all the issues of the library world in an hour session. We are just going to get some ideas and work on being more fabulous!)

If you can come join us for an hour or so, we will give you food and enjoy chatting with you! Let us know what day and time would work for you in November. We will work out some locations to reach out to people across our twelve counties. And if you know of anyone else who would like to express ideas for CMLE, forward this on to them. We are looking to have opinions from anyone who wants to share!

What day/time would generally work for you to chat about CMLE and libraries(required)

Academic, Check this out:, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

From the Director

1 Comment

This fiscal year concludes on June 30, 2013, and it has been a whirlwind of change and transitions in Central MN Libraries Exchange (CMLE)!  It’s good to look back over the year, while also looking forward to next year and exciting new possibilities! I’ve included a few highlights as a warm up to writing year-end reports soon:

  • Beginning last July, CMLE vowed to Refocus, Retool, and Evolve at the conclusion of its strategic planning process. The Governing Board helped us make some hard decisions. The most significant one was the sunsetting of our physical interlibrary loan service after a 10 year downward spiral in usage. Costs for providing the service have not decreased, so the cost/benefit analysis spoke loudly to all involved. We continue to assist users of that service in finding alternate ways to order interlibrary loans.
  • The Board got even more excited about the results of an opportunity analysis for CMLE, some of which you experienced this year.
  • Beginning in September, we replaced our quarterly newsletter and began to use our  weekly communication streams including our Weekly Review email messages, our blog posts, Facebook and Twitter. The first month we made this change, we went from 62 hits on our blog to 584! News on the street was that our users loved this change and we loved the new freedom and immediacy that a blogging platform provided to us. By January, we more than doubled our September blog hits at 1,506!
  • We offered two popular e-book events in the fall; one for academics, one for K-12 media personnel. We also continued our Bridging Information Literacy Across Libraries initiative work, including a college student survey to 400 students, and beginning development of a video.
  • Kate Bessey left CMLE in January to return to her librarian role at Rasmussen College.
  • Michelle Kiley began as our invaluable new Information Specialist upon Kate’s departure.
  • I took a six week medical leave of absence to replace a very worn out hip in mid-February. Ouch, but much better now!
  • Upon my return we initiated seven Quick Question Polls (QQP’s) on various topics to gather data to help us refocus our programming in FY14.
  • In early June, I will return to the orthopedic workshop for a new knee. I know, it’s been a tough year!  Michelle proved her ability to hold down the fort during my first leave, and will valiantly do the same this summer.

Our summer CMLE to-do list is quite different from our weekly work during the academic year. Summer is an important time for administrative work including year-end reports, discount agreements, internal system updates, program planning, and  our commitments to library conference planning too. So, it might seem a  bit sad, but our Weekly Review and associated blog posts will be on a short hiatus during the summer months, but we will be back in the Fall! We will continue to wrap our arms around the glut of library news and opportunity, distill it down to an easy to digest format, and write it up again for you starting in September. We remain committed to offering tips, shortcuts and application ideas too. According to one of our QQP’s, many of you will be gearing down a bit in your professional  summer reading too, so we hope this little blip in service gives everyone a refreshing “breather”. Watch your email in the event that something significant happens this summer that we feel a need to share immediately. Otherwise, enjoy quiet moments of summer serenity curled up with a good book under a big shady tree. Summer is a great time to renew and refresh. See you online in the Fall!

Didn’t have time to read any of our blog posts this year? Go to http://cmleinfofeed.wordpress.com/ and meander through this year’s posts!

 
CMLE Director, Patricia Post
CMLE Director, Patricia Post
 
  Patricia Post, Director
  Central MN Libraries Exchange (CMLE)
  A Minnesota Multitype Library System
  St. Cloud State University, Miller Center 130-D
  720 4th Ave. So.
  St. Cloud, MN  56301-4498
 
  Phone: 320-308-4779  Fax: 320-308-5131
  E-mail: papost@stcloudstate.edu 
Academic, Check this out:, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Welcome & Service Changes: From the Director

First off, welcome back to a new academic year! Our K-12 and college libraries are gearing up just as the public libraries breathe a sigh of relief after their summer reading programs come to an end. We have lots of exciting news at CMLE, so hang in there for a few minutes, and let me know if you have concerns or questions! Hopefully, during our eight month strategic planning process, we did our homework, and our plans for the future will meet your needs. If not, please know that I welcome any and all of your suggestions!

Our mission: CMLE is a Central Minnesota library hub, a clearinghouse of talent, materials, and expertise for all types of libraries.

Our new strategic focus areas for the next three years include:

  1. Refined focus on K-12 media center needs
  2. Convening and bridging libraries around issues
  3. Stretching dollars: Cost avoidance and cost savings

For more detail on our Strategic Framework and our Strategic Workplan, go here

New Communication Streams: Our staff strives to get you important library/school media information, yet keep your life uncluttered. With our new communication strategy we hope to reach you wherever you are:

  • Each Thursday, you will receive a CMLE Weekly Review message recapping our blog posts of the week. Just click on the links of what interests you; it is as easy as that! So, going forward, you will receive fewer emails from CMLE, but will lose no content from us.
  • Twitter: Find us, follow us, and we’ll follow you back!  Our Twitter handle is CMLEMN
  • Facebook: Find us by searching for “Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange”.  Please “Like Us” right away so you never have to do this search again!

Service Changes….

Interlibrary Loan (ILL): After conducting  a 10-year trend analysis which showed consistent drop in ILL requests,  and a cost-benefit analysis of what it costs us to provide this service, our governing Board is in agreement that we sunset our physical ILL service. However, we do not want to end our tradition of resource sharing in Central MN and will evolve resource sharing into more digital resources. We will spend this academic year helping users of the ILL service to find alternative methods for getting the resources they need before our end date of June 30, 2013. We will also be unveiling new resource sharing strategies soon, so stay tuned!

 Annual Meeting: After careful debate and thought, the Board agreed that we can serve more of you better if we convene some smaller, targeted gatherings around the region rather than one big event. Please watch for more detail about possibilities, and if there is a conversation you would like us to convene, please let us know. Example: Would you enjoy a conversation about information literacy with academic, K-12, public, and special librarians to hear what works best in their settings? Information literacy and e-books are already on our wish list of possibilities, what is on yours?

As we work through this exciting but difficult transitional year, know that we are seeking ways to further assess and serve your needs, and engage you. We hope that some of our new ideas including our new communication streams provide new opportunity and energy in your world.

Patricia Post, Director of CMLE