David Michael Miller
After the new Central Library opened in September 2013, library officials began looking at other parts of the system to see where investments could be made. Some novel ideas were put into practice. Libraries are now feeding children and reaching out to parents in their homes for literacy training.
One of the first big capital projects after the Central Library renovation was a new Meadowridge Library. It now shares a common space — including a community kitchen — with the Meadowood Neighborhood Center.
“We just opened that up,” says Greg Mickells, library director. “We have a lot of students coming from Toki Middle School. They might get to the library and the neighborhood center around 3 o’clock, right after school, and they’ll stay until 9 o’clock when we close. For a lot of those kids, the last meal they’ve had was lunch.”
Another innovation is the result of a partnership between the Madison Public Library and the city and county’s shared department of public health. It’s called Parents as First Teachers.
“When you’re dealing with the 0-to-5 age range, particularly with underserved populations, a lot of time those families don’t make it into a library, or they’re not aware that a library is available to them,” Mickells says. Nurses already visit the homes of young families to provide nutrition and child development instruction. Librarians are now also training the health care workers so they can add literacy to their mission.
“The visiting nurses are really excited about it, we’re really excited about it,” he says. “That’s what’s really key.”
The library is searching for funding so that nurses can leave packages of structured literacy materials.
Fundraising also continues for a new Pinney branch library, currently at 204 Cottage Grove Road. A new, expanded library will be a few blocks away, at the intersection of Cottage Grove and Dempsey roads, in the Royster Commons development. As part of that work, another program, Tell Us, is being rolled out on the east side. It will soon expand to the entire city.
A problem in the past has been that meetings about libraries take place in libraries, and therefore reach only people who already use them. Instead, the library now sends out packets to churches and community groups, soliciting feedback.
“This is a new process that was developed by our library planner to gather community input rather than having a meeting in the library,” says Tana Elias, library digital services and marketing manager. “We know that there are populations in Madison that we are serving well. We know that there are populations in Madison that we could be serving much better. It’s a matter of finding those populations, making sure that we’re accessible to them.”
Finally, a new strategic plan is in its early stages. It will “provide some guidance and some benchmarks for us, so we can identify areas that we need to work on as we go forward, and will help us implement some operational aspects,” says Mickells. “You might have a great idea for a program, but you only have so many resources. This really gives us a tool so that we can determine which kind of programming we might be doing — or not.”
