Thursday morning:

It was foggy and cold this morning in La Crosse, but once the fog burned off it became a gorgeous day.

Started out this morning at Kathy Pletcher's talk on "Leading to Excellence." As usual, her talk was well organized, well presented, and filled with good advice about becoming a better leader and manager. She recommended a couple of books, "Breaking the Rules," and "Good to Great" about excellence in management.

Followed that with Fred Heath's presentation about LibQUAL+, the library services evaluation tool. We've talked about using it at our library and it was good to find out more about it from "the source." One of the points he made was, "Only customers judge quality; all other judgments are essentially irrelevant." The idea of having some standard data that can be compared with other school's data is very apealing. His presentation is available at http://webspace.utexas.edu/fh355/www/ (select the Wisconsin La Crosse Powerpoint).

Louise Robbins gave an excellent talk after the WLTA (Wisconsin Library Trustees and Advocates)luncheon: "The Value of Libraries: What Research Tells Us". She presented a summary of some of the research on the value of libraries to their communities: it's all about the outcomes. One of the resources she mentioned was ALA's ROI (Return on Investment) page, which is a useful collection of citations to research on this topic. I'm looking forward to seeing many of these resources linked to from WisconsinLibraries.org once it gets up and running.

One thing about the new WLTA name: Wisconsin Library Trustees and Advocates. I really like that this change makes the group more inclusive, welcoming Friends, Friends groups, and any other library advocates. We benefit from having more voices telling the library story.

And speaking of the library story: I'm on the floor in the back of La Crosse Center D, getting ready for Louise's followup presentation about "The Value of Libraries: Telling the Story." More later.