Challenges
A. Organizational Factors
1. Knowledge and skills of 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.” – R1
2. Technology
- “Better Internet, all the way around. That’s the main thing, and it sounds like a broken record, but we have probably the worst Internet ever. And it doesn’t matter what service you use. It’s not good here.” – R5
3. Space
- “But I’ve also had people come in and request space to have an online class to be able to do something through Zoom, but we don’t have any extra space. I’m actually tucked away in a closet that belongs to somebody else right now. Space is a big issue for us as well.” – R8
4. Finance
- I mean, this is a really poor county. So I mean my yearly budget for everything is about $70,000 right now. That includes the two salaries and everything. I know there’s some libraries that have lower budgets, but we’re down there at the bottom. Externally, I would definitely say money. And then we need the money for the staffing. And take care of the building and stuff. – R2
5. Policy
- “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.” – R1
B. Community-Related Factors
- “I think we’ve exposed, talking to you, we don’t even know a lot of the farm community people to serve them. So that would definitely be a hole we have, because one: we don’t know what we would do. And we don’t know what we would say, and we don’t know who and where they are.” – R2
- “Just more how to reach out to these places, you know, to these farmers who may not know we’re here. Because they only come to town once, twice a week. Letting them know that we’re available—in whatever way that may be. We have flyers and things that we hand out. But like I said, when somebody only comes into the city once or twice a week to pick up supplies, they may not think, ‘Oh, hey! Let me go by the library.’ Learning how to reach out to those people—one, without making them feel bad about needing the help.” – R5
C. Partnerships
- “[Local organization] which is a mile down the road from us—we partner with them a lot, but we don’t partner with their ag group very often, and they have a very active ag group—ag, rodeo, rifle team, all of that. And I know that the people that go to the rodeo—which, the rodeo is huge every year here—are the people that are in these communities, and so partnering with them more, I think, would be helpful.” – R4
- “As far as weaknesses go, it’s just that we haven’t built those relationships with this specific demographic that you’re talking about. It’s not that we’ve ignored them. Our [library branch] is very important to us, and making sure—. I don’t think I’m talking out of school when I say that getting a new building for the [library branch] is high on our director’s desire list because having that branch is very important to us. But we just I don’t think have any current specific relationship with the group that you’re talking about. And so that would have to start from scratch.” – R7
D. External Factors
- “Just the ability to get where we need to get. So like I said, it would be personal vehicles if we had to go somewhere. And the city has city trucks but they’re for city workers. We’re a city worker, but we don’t get to use city equipment if that makes sense. So we’re kind of the afterthought.” – R1
- “The two things I ask of [the county commissioners]: to help me staff the library and to take care of my building. And I don’t ask them for anything else, and that’s how we got into grant writing. So, yeah, programming money and all sorts of things. How could I leverage with the county commissioners? Last year, we had an open house and fed them dinner, and two out of nine came. We’ll probably try to do something else like that to even get them inside the library. So we’re working on that. That’s challenging. We’re low on the priority list of most of the county commissioners. So. I don’t feel like I can leverage that at all.” – R2