| Competencies | Evidence from Interviews and Surveys |
|---|---|
| Grant writing | “Yeah, I think money is always the need, obviously. We did write a grant this year that’s going to help us help people connect to the Internet.” – Respondent 4 “Well, I think we could always improve with our resources here, electronically as well as print resources. We do have a healthy budget when it comes to obtaining databases, but the money is also used for other subject matters. So, I would say funding would be a need for the library when it comes to helping our farming community.” – Respondent 9 |
| Ability to communicate in languages other than English (e.g., Spanish) | “Like I said, if it’s a highly Spanish-speaking environment, that can be a challenge. I mean, I know enough words to get me by, but not enough to explain how things really go. I think language is a big barrier. I have patience, so I’m able to listen and work through whatever.” – Respondent 1 “Again, it’s the language barrier, definitely. And we don’t have enough contact with the community. There’s no back and forth between minority farmworkers, minority or English-as-a-second-language speakers in general, whether it’s agricultural, or construction, or whatever—for us to be able to help them, or for them to be able to help us find out what their needs are.” – Respondent 8 |
| Community engagement (i.e., contextual knowledge, including farmer needs and expectations) | “We work with our local farmers’ market.” – Respondent 1 “If we actually did something specifically for farming, we might reach some people we haven’t reached. But that’s where we’d need training, because I wouldn’t even know what to do.” – Respondent 2 “This summer, we’ve been serving a free lunch through [the Y.M.C.A.], and we’ve seen a lot of new families with that. It’s for children eighteen and under.” – Respondent 2 “We have a seed library that people come in and take seeds and leave seeds.” – Respondent 2 |
| Building and sustaining “win-win” innovative partnerships (e.g., ability to leverage partnerships) | “Our partnership needs to be developed more with [the local university] and their agricultural side. They do have a very good program over there, and I would like to collaborate a little bit more with what they’ve got going on, and how we can help assist them. I know a lot of times they’re out learning in the field and things, too, but it would be cool to kind of work on that a little bit more. Especially pulling in more computer science along with, because everything is sort of digital.” – Respondent 1 “I think a good one would be to get with [the local university]. They have an ag program that talks about mechanical equipment. My husband, specifically, he actually is a technician…so he works with computers and with farmers in the community. It’s just hard to reach that category because they’re busy. So off-season, it would be great to be able to provide classes and such. But going out and finding out what the actual needs are: That would be probably the better solution to how to reach them, because it’s difficult with different seasons.” – Respondent 1 “We work with a [local nonprofit], and she works with families who have children under five. And she goes into the homes, so she would literally go into the homes. We work with her.” – Respondent 2 “I have worked with the Tennessee Extension office with gardening, and we have a 4-H homeschool group that meets here in the library. And we’ve offered them programs here. So I’ve worked several times with the 4-H extension agents.” – Respondent 2 |
| Project management (i.e., managing time, HR, scope, communication, finance, etc. for planning and organizing festivals, social events in and out of libraries, multi-tasking) | “[Patrons] don’t have the time, like a student would have, to sit in class and learn every little thing that they need to know.” – Respondent 1 “I know [coworker] is very good at talking to people and reaching out to others. Like they don’t necessarily know that we are here to help them with those types of things, and making sure that they’re aware that we can help them with that.” – Respondent 6 |
| Research methods (i.e., data collection, analysis, visualization) | “But for the area, we would probably need to figure out the things that farmers are in need most of. I think that that would be better, because some of them, I know that their only focus is their business or their machines. And so that’s difficult to get them into an actual computer class without figuring out their needs.” – Respondent 1 “Well, we do have soft skills training here that’s done all year round. Everything from learning how to navigate onto the Internet, learning how to navigate on various databases, learning Microsoft Office and Google Suite. So we have that here. We have a wonderful trainer that works every week and that is her main job—for soft skills training.” – Respondent 9 |
| Negotiation (e.g., clauses and scope of contracts, agreements with partners like Comcast, Goodwill, county government, TN READS, software companies [Hoopla], civil contractors for the renovation of buildings, book vendors, and peer libraries for interlibrary loans, library board members) | “We’re fixing to renovate our building, maybe—probably—with new carpet and new painting.” – Respondent 2 “The county is very poor, and the county commissioners don’t have a real high regard—some of them—for education. One of them is quoted as saying, ‘Look at me. I’m a successful farmer. I got an eighth-grade education. I don’t know why you all want to put so much money in education and libraries.’ So we do fight a kind of mentality here. In fact, I don’t even know the percentage of kids that graduate and go on to college, but it’s not high. My relationship with the county commission is: What we’re trying to get the county to do for us is help us staff the library.” – Respondent 2 “[External challenges] like educating the county commissioners of the value of education and investing in the people.” – Respondent 2 “Our computers, obviously, and some of them prefer the written resources. And if we don’t have a book, we’re more than happy to interlibrary loan it for them. And, of course, we have that available from across the state. We will find whatever it is they need—whether it’s us calling somewhere else and getting that information for them, interlibrary loaning a book about the subject, helping them Internet search. We try to be as helpful as we possibly can because we know that sometimes it takes a special trip here, which uses gas that a lot of them can’t afford. Wear and tear on a vehicle that they can’t afford. And sometimes they even have to get a ride. So, just making sure that when they do come in, we do our best to accommodate them.” – Respondent 5 “I think right now a big need that we have is our Internet is absolutely awful. But we don’t pay for it. We’ve got a deal going on with Comcast in our area where we get free Internet. But the Internet that we get is so slow that I couldn’t even do [this] interview.” – Respondent 6 “We do have digital systems that they can access to get eBooks and audiobooks. Obviously, the Tennessee READS, and the library system provides Hoopla as well as something that people can use, but you’ve got to have the Internet access for it.” – Respondent 8 |
| Media literacy (e.g., recording videos, uploading videos to YouTube) | “But yes, short videos. Being able to say, ‘Go to this YouTube’—which we do have a YouTube channel that I’m supposed to be working on. It’s on the burner. It’s on the list. It’s very far down on the list, but it’ll be great to have that on our YouTube channel. Short videos, like, ‘Here’s your tech help for the week.’ And that would be great. Wonderful. We have a studio to do it. I’m just one individual. I have so many projects. I’m like, I really wish I had 24 hours all the time to just constantly—. But it’s just not—it’s not.” – Respondent 1 “We can do [our professional development requirements] pretty much any way. I know last year some of my hours were watching videos—actually, it was the year before. But some of my hours were watching videos on YouTube on how to edit videos on iMovie. So it was literally just YouTube videos that I counted. But as long as we can prove that it was something that was necessary, they can count.” – Respondent 6 |
| Computer networking (e.g., setting up, maintaining, and troubleshooting hotspots, Internet, and WiFi) | “We’re going to evaluate our whole Wi-Fi Internet system here in the library because it’s fallen behind over the years. So we’d like to up it.” – Respondent 2 “Our weaknesses are not having Internet in the areas it’s needed. That’s not really on us, but we kind of feel like we need to provide the hotspots so they can have the Internet—whether they need the computer itself, the laptop or tablet or whether they just need the hotspot. Being able to provide that for them would be great.” – Respondent 5 |
| Digital literacy (e.g., basic computer skills, application software like Quicken, MS Word for resumes, organizing petting Zoo sessions, Zoom classes, protecting devices, avoiding theft and data leakage) | “[Patrons need help with] the smartphone, the printing, the email. Navigating and writing resumes is a big one. Applying for jobs is another one we get a lot of… We get a lot of ‘I need help resetting passwords. I need help keeping up with my items.’ And it’s not our responsibility. So sometimes it’s like, ‘I can get you so many steps, and then here’s what you have to do.’ So it’s really just navigating apps, sites, answering emails, how to print—the common stuff that we utilize all the time that we think should be second nature: That’s what we run into.” – Respondent 1 “Even a Quicken. I know some people aren’t very good at budgets and things like that—so even just going out and being able to give some kind of generalized financial literacy or something would be good, too. I don’t know how to bridge that yet with our staff.” – Respondent 1 “And we’re having a big finale with a petting zoo—we’ve never done anything like that before.” – Respondent 2 “So our first hotspots that we just completed and we’re finishing up this week, we would check them out for one to two weeks at a time, but we ended up losing three of them.” – Respondent 2 |
| Public relations (e.g., relationship management, social media presence, maintaining a good public image in the local community, publicity of events, attracting and retaining volunteers, marketing) | “So we have a large volunteer base. We had over 1,000 volunteer hours last year, helping cover programs and do some of the things we wanted to do.” – Respondent 2 “At this point, [outreach to the farming community] is non-existent. Even though the county has a significant amount of farmland in more rural areas, I don’t think we’ve done anything to cater specifically to anyone that falls under that “farmworkers” definition. But obviously, I mean, that’s part of the reason that I was happy to talk with you all—as the technology and outreach coordinator, I’m very interested in reaching that group.” – Respondent 7 |
| Leadership (e.g., community leadership, inter-organizational leadership, organizational behavior [e.g., building teams, managing employee resistance], strategic planning [e.g., steering policy making, investment in technology], staffing [e.g., hiring new staff, assigning right tasks to right staff, retaining staff]) | “And we are such a small staff, and that’s sort of the thing that we’re running into with a lot of libraries is—we don’t have enough people to do all the awesome things that we want to do and bring all the information out and about. And it is hard to get people here.” – Respondent 1 “The internal challenge would be just having—. If I’m gone for the day, that kind of puts a hindrance on the staff, because we are a staff of seven full time and two part time. If I wanted to do a half a day going to take care of Internet world out there and helping patrons outside the building, that becomes a challenge because we’re supposed to go in pairs. So that takes two staff members away. It’s just not enough employees to be able to stretch across what we need to.” – Respondent 1 “Sometimes that doesn’t always happen because libraries are very book and library-focused. Technology is sort of the afterthought in the library world right now. And that really bugs me because a lot of everything that we do is run on technology. And there’s not enough of us, I think—especially tech people. There’s probably four in our region. And that’s it for all the libraries. Yeah. And it’s not the same kind of value. To be a technical librarian—a technician, like an IT person: That’s a niche itself. We’re not the same.” – Respondent 1 “I experience resistance every day when I change anything. If I upgrade a computer for a staff person, if I upgrade patron—like we had a real big issue changing all of our patron computers over to Chromeboxes. In the long term, it’s cheaper for the library system, because we don’t have to pay for Word, and we don’t have to pay that kind of licensing. We pay a smaller licensing fee that’s perpetual for the life of the device. I met a lot of resistance with that, because some staff felt like it was taking away something that they knew, and they couldn’t help a patron, and it took too long to learn a new system. And ‘Why can’t we just go back to the way it was?'” – Respondent 1 “And it’s like, Chrome is compatible with Word. So if you’re comfortable, you can still use both. It’s just getting behind the mindset of change. It’s very difficult and hard. And any new technology scares non-native technology people if they’re not with it, and they weren’t born with it. And they’re having to struggle and learn it. And that’s who we help a lot, anyway. We deal a lot with elderly patrons and their smartphones and things like that. So it’s just—if you’re not a native to the digital world, it’s difficult.” – Respondent 1 “We have a weakness that we don’t have enough staff—paid staff—to cover what we do.” – Respondent 2 “Since I’ve been here, I’ve just worked at connecting around the county and connecting and finding out what’s available.” – Respondent 2 “So one of the things I feel—this isn’t so much about farming—but many of the county people lack opportunity. I mean, the closest city is…25 minutes away. So there’s so many things here that you have to go out of the county for. I feel like there’s just been a lack of exposure for the children of life outside. So that’s kind of one of my personal goals, besides the reading which I’m an avid—. I want everybody to be able to read well and have that opportunity. And the reading levels are very low in the county, and then, of course, Covid made it all worse. Like this year, we brought in the Knoxville Zoo. We’ve brought in the Chattanooga Aquarium. We’re giving a free pass to the Discovery Museum when they read twenty minutes a day for twenty days. Part of my passion is exposure to more experiences and a bigger worldview.” – Respondent 2 “I might have one or two staff members that would be anxious if we started leaving the building—like with a bookmobile—because we’re so small. Anxious about leaving the library with just five people here instead of nine or whatever. So that’s the only thing I could foresee is just maybe some nerves about how that would affect the people that are still here in the building—serving the people that come in every day.” – Respondent 4 “We have some reference librarians that want nothing to do with—when it comes to farming—and it’s not that they have an issue with farming. It’s just not their interest.” – Respondent 9 |