Mill Valley Patch
By Phoebe Wall Howard

This year’s sold-out Storybook Ball ~ with a “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” theme ~ raised more than $75,000 for programs benefiting teens and young children at the Mill Valley Library.

Some 400 people attended the May 19 celebration at the Mill Valley Community Center, which was transformed into a Wonka Factory with dancing, crafts, games, face painting and gourmet food and drinks. The Stark Ravens Historical Players performed skits from the book. Art Reactor provided Wonka Vision, where guests were “shrunk” to be on TV. A silent auction and raffle topped the day, and each child left with a copy of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a Wonka Bar complete with golden ticket, and a gigantic smile.

The annual children’s ball has become a signature fundraiser for the Mill Valley Library Foundation. Cherity Payne, Storybooks co-chair, said, “We were especially touched to dedicate this year’s ball to the memory of Walker Rezaian, the Old Mill kindergartener who died in 2011. It truly elevated the meaning of the ball for all of us. Not only were we supporting the library but honoring Walker, who loved going there.”

For more information on the ball, click here

By Julie V. Iovine
Wall Street Journal
May 13, 2013

The St. Louis Public Library’s new Locust Street Atrium.

Talk about imposing: the ceremonial stone stair leading to bronze gates and carved doors; the frieze of inspiring names and the vaulted hall that seems the very definition of hallowed. And the books, bound portals opening to anywhere imaginable, available to all comers.

In cities across the nation, the central public library came into being when the country was young and striving to impress. Charles F. McKim’s Italianate palazzo-style library opened on Boston’s Copley Plaza in 1895; in 1921, Renaissance austerity suited Detroit’s Main Library designed by Cass Gilbert, while architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue chose Egyptian Deco for Los Angeles’s downtown Central Library of 1926. Architecturally grand, the central library was both beacon and monumental tribute to learning and civic pride; a people’s palace with knowledge freely available to all. But, really, when was the last time you spent any time there?

For the first time since Henri Labrouste (1801-1875), currently the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, formulated the conception of the new, democratic library, the central library is fighting for survival. The relevance of these gloriously inflated book boxes is being questioned in an age that looks to the Internet for its intellectual resources.

Branch libraries have long served as community hubs offering book clubs and after-school story times. But central libraries, dedicated to the care and maintenance of weighty collections within ornately crafted and lofty spaces, are having to recast themselves. Thanks to the shift of emphasis to online resources over hard copies, the prevalence of mobile technologies and changing approaches to studying and learning, libraries have a different social purpose. “I used to be greeted by a sea of faces with questions like how to spell ‘Albuquerque,’” said Amy E. Ryan, a career librarian since the 1970s and now president of the Boston Public Library. “That’s all over. It’s now about providing an experience.”

The change in function has brought pressure to change libraries’ form. This can entail new, purpose-built structures that are more open and adaptable, such as Rem Koolhaas’s 2004 Seattle Public Library; or, more controversially, it can involve interventions in existing, often historic structures that are considered emotional touchstones in their communities.

The New York Public Library, for instance, has just announced it will go ahead with its plan to transform the 1911 Carrère and Hastings central library on Fifth Avenue into a combined circulating and research library. The plan, by British architect Norman Foster, is to remove the seven stories of book stacks directly below the Rose Reading Room and to decant into the vacated 78-foot-wide Bryant Park-facing space the contents and activities of two nearby circulating libraries. Those branches would be shuttered and their buildings sold. The renderings on the library’s website call this reconceived building “A Center of Inspiration for all New Yorkers.”

A related transformation is already under way at the Boston Public Library, the first large municipally funded library in the U.S. Decades ago, the administration responded to growing pains of the McKim building, lavished with marble ornament, John Singer Sargent murals and Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculptures, by moving all circulation services to an adjacent 1972 addition by Philip Johnson.

But last year, the Boston Public Library initiated a new strategic plan for making the central library a—dare one call it—happening place. Changes, however, will be focused on the Johnson building, a dour Brutalist affair that has neither aged well nor inspired much love. (Computers are kept in flip-top desks that lock down at night; a cassette player was chained to a desk; outlets at reading tables are capped, gouged or missing.) Plans by architect William Rawn Associates have not been completed yet, but the hope is to make the entrance more transparent and welcoming, to turn the colossal atrium into more of a “living room,” to add retail and to create a digitally interactive all-purpose space for teens that is the latest must-have for all public libraries. As for the McKim building, it’s untouchable. “It’s like the Vatican,” Ms. Ryan said. “Bostonians have a passionate, deep-seated affection for the place.”

Librarians themselves don’t talk about “books” much anymore. The library today, said Michael Colford, the director of library services in Boston, “is more of a platform launching you in all different directions.”

That shift is also much in evidence at the Seattle Public Library, a diamond-scaled stack of origami-folded glass boxes that opened to considerable acclaim almost a decade ago. It is the third central library on the same spot since 1906. At the opening bell, people start streaming in, heading straight for one of 400 public computers, most of them arrayed in rows in a vast, impersonal space called the Mixing Chamber. A conveyor book-drop system sorts 1,400 books per hour. Huge swatches of neon yellows, reds and lime-green swiped across every surface try to provide the color-coding necessary to find one’s way around within the vast black box. “Libraries have to be flexible, more like a shell, so that they can adapt to changes as they come along,” Marcellus Turner, the City Librarian, told me.

In St. Louis, you can get a preview of what the New York Public Library might look like if its plan is realized. The central library is a 1912 Beaux Arts stunner by Cass Gilbert, celebrated architect of New York’s Woolworth Building. It reopened in December after a 15-year, $68 million makeover that included the same surgical removal of a seven-story stack tower envisioned in New York. Now tiers of balconies, pressing almost right up to the narrow slot windows of the rear facade, hold desks loaded with computers. Bold graphics etched in glass or painted in red denote rooms dedicated to “Training” and “Meeting”—more like a corporate headquarters or community hall than a citadel of intellectual inquiry. Voices travel up from the ground floor in a smokestack effect and ricochet around the preserved glazed-white brick walls. (The “new” library prefers buzz over the code of silence of the old library.) How different from the older sections of the library where, for instance, one reading room has restored its carved plaster ceiling reproducing Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence.

In Indianapolis, the original 1917 Beaux Arts central library jettisoned its stacks in 2008 to make way for a six-story glass addition more than twice the size of the original building and connected by a soaring atrium. The addition, a nearly 170,000-square-foot space, includes recumbent rocking chaises for teens; seating pods for toddlers with attached touch screens; and the “Info Vortex,” an interactive projection display for digital exchanges between avatars created by young library users with the help of library staff.

But, as does St. Louis, Indianapolis keeps faith with the past. In the original building there are still comfy leather chairs in front of a flickering gas fire. “Right now we have to have a foot in both worlds,” said M. Jacqueline Nytes, CEO of the library, over breakfast in the atrium café—itself another feature of the “new” library. “It’s a sandwich-generation moment when all the traditional demands haven’t gone away, plus there are all the demands of new technology.”

Still, after surveying everything from the relentlessly high-tech library in Seattle to the mash-ups of history and contemporary event space in St. Louis and Indianapolis, one is left with the broad impression that it isn’t more space libraries need, but for the existing space to meet new needs. The problem is that those needs are changing almost as quickly as they can be expressed, and in unpredictable ways. After 20 years of installing and upgrading public computers in their institutions, libraries now report that the use of these computers is declining. The head librarians in Boston, St. Louis and Seattle all predict the arrival of the “portable librarian,” when all the information most people use is contained within their smartphones. We’re almost there now.

Which brings us back to the New York Public Library. What it has in mind is a high-risk venture. Joe Tortorella of Robert Silman Associates, the engineer hired to remove the stacks from under the Rose Reading Room while it’s still in use, has compared his task to cutting off the legs of a table while a banquet is taking place. And there are always surprises. In St. Louis, the new structural beams had to be passed in through the slot windows when hauling them through the historic building was deemed too dangerous. If New York has to do the same thing, there will be a problem: The tall windows on the Bryant Park side are much narrower.

But it’s the larger question that’s most troubling. Changing New York’s central library to make it more relevant for today’s users makes sense only if “relevance” weren’t such a moving target. Mr. Foster’s arid, corporate aesthetic is no match for the rich, human-scaled classical vocabulary of Carrère and Hastings. The Mid-Manhattan Library across the street would make a much better candidate to be the shell available for continuous makeovers as times and tastes change. Carrère and Hastings’s structure still serves the function for which it was created—to hold books—and inspires awe through the ideals expressed in its architecture and the intellectual resources housed within. It already offers an incomparable “experience,” with plenty of “Inspiration for all New Yorkers” to spare.

The Storybook Ball Online Auction is now OPEN:

Browse, bid and come back for more. Auction items include vacation packages, indulgent spa services, camps, family photography, fine dining, fun things to do over the summer and much more. Now is your chance to not only get all the great items you want, but to do it knowing you are helping support programming for children and teens at the Mill Valley Library. So tell your friends, family, and community that bidding is open to everyone and now underway!

www.biddingforgood.com/storybookball2013

Storybook Ball 100 Bottle Wine Raffle:

We are selling 100 tickets for $100 each for the chance to win 100 bottles of wine. This raffle will help us raise $10,000 for children and teen’s programming at the library. You can either stock your cellar or throw one, two, or three amazing parties…. All of the wine has been donated…with plenty of amazing bottles. I would love to see a friend win! To purchase a ticket, please email mvstorybooks@gmail.com.

On May 19, the Mill Valley Community Center will be transformed from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. into a whimsical fantasy experience for children. The theme: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Children ages 4 to 10 will be transported to the Wonka Factory itself, where they will be entertained by dancing, crafts and the Stark Ravens Historical Players dressed as book characters. The afternoon also includes delicious food. (Complimentary wine and beer is available to adults.) There is also a raffle and silent auction. As is tradition each year, every child will go home with a copy of the book.

Tickets cost $50 each and may be purchased online only at www.millvalleylibrary.org/storybooks.

“Our family has been a proud sponsor of the Mill Valley Library Foundation’s Storybook Ball for the past three years,” said Jim Dox of Mill Valley. “Our three granddaughters and their parents eagerly look forward to the Ball with all of its wonderful activities.”

In 2011, the debut ball featured “Alice in Wonderland,” followed by “The Wizard of Oz” in 2012. Last year, more than 300 people attended.

“Funding from Storybooks allows the Library to offer more diverse and sophisticated programming, and to provide programs which would otherwise not be possible with limited funding, all of which adds up to a better Library and a better community,” said City Librarian Anji Brenner.

Proceeds underwrite Wednesdays on Stage in the summer, the First Thursdays and Creative Writing Workshops for teens, the Sunday Specials for families and much more.

This year’s Storybook Ball is dedicated to Walker Rezaian, a 5-year-old kindergartener from Old Mill Elementary School who died in 2011. The Rezaian Family decided to give a grant from the Walker Rezaian Memorial Fund to the Storybook Ball as a way to give back to the community and because the library is a very special place to the family.

Each book given to children on May 19 will include a bookplate noting the dedication of the ball to Walker’s memory.

“The Storybook Ball celebrates the wonderful sense of community in Mill Valley. It will be a magical afternoon made possible by the hard work of the Storybooks committee,” said event co-chair Cherity Payne. “The dedication of the ball to Walker’s memory makes it even more meaningful for all of us.”

The Foundation supports a wide variety of Library initiatives. It has been the lead source of funds for the First Friday series of adult events as well as for the children’s Wednesdays-on-Stage programs that take place during the summer. The Foundation funds teen programs throughout the year, like creative writing workshops and late night study halls. Another area where the Foundation provides critical funding is technology: the e-reader and e-book initiative have been primarily funded by the Foundation. This year and in 2012, the Foundation has also funded a new, state of the art computer lab as well as classes and workshops.

For a breakdown of Foundation funding over the past 3 years, please read further here.

By Cate Lecuyer
Mill Valley Patch

Young poets captivated a packed house on March 1 during the Mill Valley Public Library’s return of its

Young poets captivated a packed house on March 1 during the Mill Valley Public Library’s return of its First Friday Slam Poetry Competition.

The local teens, from Tamalpais and Branson high, were rife with emotion and delivered deeply personal stanzas. For some, it was their first time performing in public.

The first place prize of an iPad Mini went to Hannah Yerington, a Tam High junior who wrote poem about her Jewish heritage. Leah Kelley, a senior at Branson High School, walked away with the second prize of a $50 gift certificate to Mill Valley Music, and third place finisher Kel Mandingo-Stoba, a senior at Tam High, received a $25 Sol Food gift certificate.

All 14 contestants received $20 in “library bucks,” which can be used to pay off Mill Valley Library fines or purchase books at the monthly Friends of the Library Book Sale.

Click here to watch the video.

We are so pleased with the fantastic turnout and support for the Mill Valley Library Foundation at our 1^st Sweetwater Music Hall “Rock ‘n’ Soul” Fundraiser.

Dom Zimmer, head of Floating Records, had the amazing idea of having a benefit concert to raise funds for the library and pulled together two top local bands, Marble Party and Dredgetown, who played pro bono and kept the crowd enthralled.

Over 270 paid tickets were sold. The night raised close to $4000 for the Library Foundation, showcased the talents of these local musicians, and brought a new crowd into contact with the Library Foundation’s mission.

Thank you, Don, for spearheading this event – we’re already talking about next year’s event, so keep your dancing shoes handy!

Purchase tickets here

Read the recent article from the Mill Valley Patch below the poster

Don Zimmer to Host Benefit Concert for Mill Valley Library at Sweetwater Music Hall

The bands Dredgetown and Marble Party will perform on January 29 at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $25, and proceeds benefit the library.

By KAREN ANN CULLOTTA
New York Times
December 27, 2012

At the bustling public library in Arlington Heights, Ill., requests by three patrons to place any title on hold prompt a savvy computer tracking system to order an additional copy of the coveted item. That policy was intended to eliminate the frustration of long waits to check out best sellers and other popular books. But it has had some unintended consequences, too: the library’s shelves are now stocked with 36 copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Of course, librarians acknowledge that when patrons’ passion for the sexy series lacking in literary merit cools in a year or two, the majority of volumes in the “Fifty Shades” trilogy will probably be plucked from the shelves and sold at the Friends of the Library’s used-book sales, alongside other poorly circulated, donated and out-of-date materials.

“A library has limited shelf space, so you almost have to think of it as a store, and stock it with the things that people want,” said Jason Kuhl, the executive director of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library. Renovations will turn part of the library’s first floor into an area resembling a bookshop that officials are calling the Marketplace, with cozy seating, vending machines and, above all, an abundance of best sellers.

As librarians across the nation struggle with the task of redefining their roles and responsibilities in a digital age, many public libraries are seeing an opportunity to fill the void created by the loss of traditional bookstores. They are increasingly adapting their collections and services based on the demands of library patrons, whom they now call customers.

Today’s libraries are reinventing themselves as vibrant town squares, showcasing the latest best sellers, lending Kindles loaded with e-books, and offering grass-roots technology training centers. Faced with the need to compete for shrinking municipal finances, libraries are determined to prove they can respond as quickly to the needs of the taxpayers as the police and fire department can.

“I think public libraries used to seem intimidating to many people, but today, they are becoming much more user-friendly, and are no longer these big, impersonal mausoleums,” said Jeannette Woodward, a former librarian and author of “Creating the Customer-Driven Library: Building on the Bookstore Model.”

“Public libraries tread a fine line,” Ms. Woodward said. “They want to make people happy, and get them in the habit of coming into the library for popular best sellers, even if some of it might be considered junk. But libraries also understand the need for providing good information, which often can only be found at the library.”

Cheryl Hurley, the president of the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher in New York “dedicated to preserving America’s best and most significant writing,” said the trend of libraries that cater to the public’s demand for best sellers is not surprising, especially given the ravages of the recession on public budgets.

Still, Ms. Hurley remains confident that libraries will never relinquish their responsibility to also provide patrons with the opportunity to discover literary works of merit, be it the classics, or more recent fiction from novelists like Philip Roth, whose work is both critically acclaimed and immensely popular.

“The political ramifications for libraries today can result in driving the collection more and more from what the people want, rather than libraries shaping the tastes of the readers,” Ms. Hurley said. “But one of the joys of visiting the public library is the serendipity of discovering another book, even though you were actually looking for that best seller that you thought you wanted.”

“It’s all about balancing the library’s mission and its marketing, and that is always a tricky dance,” she added.

While print books, both fiction and nonfiction, still make up the bulk of most library collections — e-books amount to to less than 2 percent of many collections in part because some publishers limit their availability at libraries — building renovation plans rarely include expanding shelf space for print products. Instead, many libraries are culling their collections and adapting floor plans to accommodate technology training programs, as well as mini-conference rooms that offer private, quiet spaces frequently requested by self-employed consultants meeting with clients, as well as teenagers needing space to huddle over group projects.

Though an increase in book weeding these days — a practice long known in library parlance as deselection — might be troubling to some bibliophiles, library officials say, many books enjoy a happy life after being sold.

A recent visit to the Friends of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County Warehouse Sale proved to be not unlike wandering into a reader’s nirvana for Jeff Borden, 61. A writer and adjunct professor from Chicago, Mr. Borden said he and his wife, Johanna Brandon, left the November sale with shopping bags brimming with an eclectic and bargain-priced assortment of fiction and nonfiction, including the noir novel “The Leopard,” by Jo Nesbo, and “Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde” by Jeff Guinn.

“The books are piling up all over the house,” said Mr. Borden, who estimated that the couple spent about $50, money that officials said will be given to the library system to finance programs including its children’s story time.

“Great fiction is still being written, as well as rotten fiction,” Mr. Borden added. “To my way of thinking, you need to get them in the door of the library first, and if someone’s search for ‘Shades of Grey’ leads them to read D. H. Lawrence, well, that’s not a bad deal.”

Gretchen Caserotti, the assistant director for public services at the public library in Darien, Conn., said, “We are terrifically excited about the sea change at libraries, and rethinking our model in a new world.”

The Darien library has a three-requests policy similar to the one in Arlington Heights.

“The library should be as they say, a third place — you have home, work or school, and then you come to the library because it is the center and heart of the community,” Ms. Caserotti said. “Our staff is 100 percent committed to hospitality, customer service and welcoming people to the library as if they were visiting our home. We need to remember it is their library, not ours, and they are paying for it.”

During my morning run, I cut through the public library’s parking lot. My books are overdue, I remind myself. Like many Americans in the downturn, I’ve increased my use of the local public library. In 2011, OCLC — a library consortium — reported that library usage increased for 36 million Americans. All told, 69 percent of Americans currently use public libraries. My library is a remarkable value — a banquet of books and periodicals, earnest service, and free WiFi. Lately, libraries are playing an unheralded role in the economic recovery by helping people find work and build businesses.

As the jobless rate hovers around 8 percent, some libraries are stepping up with resume-writing classes and online job-search tutorials. According to research published by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and quoted by Karen Perry, Senior Program Officer for the U.S. Libraries at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 30 million Americans rely on libraries to find a job. For hopeful entrepreneurs, libraries help with free access to otherwise costly business databases like LexisNexis. Some libraries are even helping patrons better understand how to manage their money with unbiased financial information.

Until recently, public libraries had little reason to innovate. Then Google arrived. More disruptive technologies followed, causing an identity crisis for librarians. Now the profession is re-thinking its purpose — a quest that lured a gathering of 350 eager librarians to Telluride, Colorado recently for the R-Squared (Risk and Reward) Conference.

As I circulated, knots of librarians huddled to share ideas and solutions. If there was a common thread it was the need to understand the increasingly complex lives of customers. Pre-Internet, a library could be object oriented — all about books. But the confluence of digitization and a prolonged recession has triggered an evolution that puts a focus on people, not things. Doing so has a ripple effect that invigorates a community. The idea has been backed up by Forrester Research, who asserted that meeting customer needs across a life cycle, through online and off-line touchpoints, is essential to community-based innovation.

Despite the difficulty involved in overhauling a public institution like libraries, the folks gathered in Telluride proved game for the task. To get their juices flowing, they wrapped themselves with live snakes, scaled climbing walls, and listened attentively to inspirational talks on creativity from business leaders including Detroit-based author and venture capitalist Josh Linkner.

Americans need help navigating a way forward — whether it’s to find work or explore a new career path. It’s no wonder people are rediscovering their local libraries as a place to begin. That’s why libraries need to innovate. Otherwise, they risk becoming an object of nostalgia — the emotional step right before irrelevance. Deadly. Research shows that when taxpayers stop expecting public institutions to transform, they invite entrenchment. Consider the battle to reform public education in America. The same hollowing-out could happen to America’s public libraries at a time when we need them most.

There’s hope. It’s heartening to think that there are more public libraries than McDonald’s restaurants in America.

Imagine the impact of their re-animation.

Maybe we don’t need a new government program, or a bailout or a tax incentive to cure what ails us. Perhaps the quickest fix for local stimulus is a public librarian with a fire in the belly to make change. Such a deal.

Photos used with permission of The Risk & Reward Conference.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patricia-martin/libraries-digital-age_b_1942610.html