Bourne Library Tackles Strategic Plan, Looks At Cross-Canal Outreach
Crafting a five-year strategic plan in just a few months’ time is no short order, but the Jonathan Bourne Public Library is making great progress toward the state’s October 1 deadline.
A series of think-tank style workshops was well-attended by residents and stakeholders throughout July, and library director Irja Finn reported that 264 respondents filled out the library’s 2024-2028 strategic plan survey. Overall, more than 300 individuals provided input through both the survey and workshops.
That number is a point of pride for her, being more than twice the size of a Town Meeting quorum: “If I can get more survey responses than is a quorum at Town Meeting, I consider myself successful,” she said. “People pass a multimillion-dollar budget with [less than] 200 people; I have 200 people telling me what they want us to do, what they like, what they do not like, and what they want us to do in the future.”
Responses have been compiled for review by the library board of trustees before the actual drafting of the document and public review begins, she said. A summary of those responses and recommended next steps is now available online at the library’s landing page on the town website. In an interview with the Enterprise, Ms. Finn discussed some of the successes she’s seen in her time as library director and mused on the challenges Bourne historically has and is poised to face in the future, most of which hinges on the omnipotent Cape Cod bridges replacement project.
Ms. Finn joined the Jonathan Bourne Public Library, Bourne’s only branch, in October 2019. About six months later, the pandemic shut down public life and changed the way many institutions, including libraries, model their business and offer services.
COVID-19 wasn’t without its challenges, of course, but Ms. Finn’s assessment is that the library “galloped right through it.” One example, she said, was the stunning increase in e-book and electronic audiobook checkouts on the OverDrive Libby platform. Figures that hovered at less than 900 checkouts a month have tripled, averaging 3,000 e-books and audiobooks a month on that platform alone.
“During COVID, we were out in the parking lot teaching people how to use it,” she said of the online platform. The uncertainty of how the virus worked in the early pandemic days resulted in 72-hour book quarantines, Ms. Finn explained.
“It was just unbelievable, so a lot of people who were resistant to e-books bit the bullet, pulled up, and we sat outside and taught them how to do it,” she said. “And now they’ve adopted it, now they’re there and the stats have never gone back down. That’s been really fun.”
While changing demands in regard to library materials definitely factor into the library’s formation of the state-mandated five-year plan, Ms. Finn explained that the concept goes far beyond the scope of what one can find on the library’s physical and virtual shelves; programming, accommodations and community engagement/outreach are all part of it, too.
The previous strategic plan for the Jonathan Bourne Library, which was in effect from 2016 to 2021, included the notion of making the library a venue for the sharing of knowledge. From Ms. Finn’s point of view, this is true of the library that exists today, which stands in stark contrast to the idea that libraries are places meant for just books and strict silence.
“There are some people who still will come to the desk and say ‘In my day, the library was really quiet,’” Ms. Finn said. “And I say those days are gone because we’re offering so much more than in the old days.”
A modern lack of communal spaces, social clubs and civic organizations has altered things, she continued: “Now our lives are really fast, people don’t live near their families; we’re not in neighborhoods like we used to be. You can’t have that kind of engagement.”
Bringing this engagement to the library is and has been a goal for some time now, one that was more or less realized during COVID, when the library was closed to the public and people realized that they had lost something important to them. In response, the library’s reopening was met with a slew of new activities to bring in patrons looking for something other than words on a page. Providing connections that many are lacking in the wake of the pandemic, Ms. Finn said, is an important piece of this puzzle.
“There were four or five ladies who knit, and now we have a knitting group that meets,” Ms. Finn said. “They’re up to 20 [members] and we have three knitting sessions—three!—so it’s become a little bit of more a sense of community and that’s something that in the new strategic plan, we’re looking to wrap our arms around and say ‘this is what people really wanted from us.’”
Every five years, the state requires that public libraries have an approved current strategic plan on file, Ms. Finn explained, in order to be eligible for state aid. Bourne’s payment from the state is around $38,000, she added, so it “behooves cities and towns to have a strategic plan” that is updated regularly in alignment with state requirements. The library’s plan actually expired last year, but grace periods were granted due to the unprecedented years-long implications of the pandemic.
The plan must be submitted to the state by October 1, which is a “very tight timeline,” Ms. Finn said, but a cursory look at survey responses ahead of its closure on August 4 revealed a number of themes that the director mentioned, including patrons’ requests for better lighting and more comfortable chairs, better public relations and communications for those who mainly exist offline, and an expansion of services to the Buzzards Bay and Sagamore sides of the Cape Cod Canal.
“They’d like to see a mobile outreach or some other outreach beyond this building,” she said. “A book bike, bookmobile, or how about just being able to pick up books at town hall?”
Library patrons are currently able to return library books to the Community Center on Main Street in Buzzards Bay anytime, but Ms. Finn did say that she has been in discussions with Town Administrator Marlene V. McCollem about organizing a pilot program that would allow patrons to pick up books on Perry Avenue rather than trekking across the Bourne Bridge.
“There is a lot of angst about September coming with the repairs, let alone the bridge project,” she said. “The bridge project is like a new library, it’s so big I can’t think about it.”
Facility renovations or a start-from-scratch remodel, though, are more aligned with a 30- to 50-year strategic plan than a three- to five-year plan, Ms. Finn said. The current project is more aimed at coming up with shorter-term goals that can be accomplished through action plans, which are reviewed annually by the state’s board of library commissioners.
“There will be two public meetings once we compile the data [from the survey] and the trustees come up with the three that they heard were the best or most vocal,” she said. “We’ll do two presentations to the select board to make sure they’re up to speed and the town government has been very supportive of this process.”
Town government has been exceedingly supportive of the undertaking, she said, even allocating Assistant Town Administrator Elizabeth Hartsgrove to be the head facilitator of the planning process. The project did go out to bid, Ms. Finn explained, but a lack of response spurred the town to take it on in-house.
“Liz had been with us all along in the RFP process,” Ms. Finn said. “I’m kind of happy we did it in-house, it gave us a chance to get to know Liz, get to work with Marlene, and say, ‘Wow, here are two people who use the library also…’ I don’t know that if we had had an external facilitator or consultant it would have worked as well. And the trustees have been very grateful for the help.”
Another show of support came from members of various town boards and committees who attended the workshop sessions held throughout July. Members from the select board, finance committee and the council on aging were among the many in attendance to give feedback. The participation of select board members particularly, Ms. Finn said, will benefit the project in the long run, considering that two presentations will be made to the board for approval before the final submission.
“I think it will help our case because they actually heard from the resident sitting next to them,” Ms. Finn said. “It’s not me saying ‘we really need outreach on the other side [of the canal]’; the person sitting next to them is a constituent there saying that we need outreach on the other side.”
One of the more-looming questions in that regard remains: will people on the other side of the canal be willing to cross the bridges just to get to the library? The topic of mobile library services on the north side of the canal was brought up in all three strategic plan public workshopping sessions, Ms. Finn said.
“That’s something that every single one of the sessions has talked about—I want to come to the library but I don’t want to deal with the traffic [or] I don’t come to your programs” she recalled, “so now we’re looking at other venues for programs. Where can we do what we do here?”
Ms. Finn said that if there is one thing she wants readers to take away from this interview, it was that feedback from all residents, stakeholders and community members is critical.
“If you’re not a library user,” she said, “I want to know why you’re not. What are the barriers?”
The results of the library’s strategic plan survey were to be presented to the board of trustees scheduled for yesterday. The plan is now in the drafting phase, and an upcoming presentation to the select board will be posted on the town website before the October 1 deadline.