No Shoulda Woulda Couldas Allowed

At our ALSC presentation, we shared what our answers to the Big Storytime Questions were, in the form of our storytime competencies, our observation forms, and our training sequence, all of which are derived from our library’s strategic direction and our thinking through to some storytime goals.

At the end, one question from the audience was, “How did you have the time to do all of this?”

Lori’s answer was a reminder that we didn’t do all of this thinking and developing at once; in fact, we’ve been working on this stuff for years. My answer was, our district supports how the work we do aligns with our strategic direction, and provides us the staff time to do this kind of foundational work.

Those are both true! But the next day I was kicking myself because I realized what we should have emphasized along with those answers.

Yes, we’ve been lucky to have been given time and staff to work on this initiative. But if you don’t have a lot of time, or a lot of staff, you can still get started on doing this work. Take the first step, start small, and tackle one question or one thing to change about storytime. Piece by piece you can work through all the hows and whys of storytime at your library. Write a paragraph about where you’d like your storytime service to go; keep notes on what you’ve decided and why. Whenever you have an opportunity to send a staff member to a training, or your boss gives you a chance to change up your storytime schedule, or to hire a new staff person, or survey your patrons, you’ll have an idea what direction to move in.

Don’t ever get discouraged by how big the task feels or how much you want to do. This is true of any huge project, and it’s true of improving storytimes at your library. There will never be a real end to this process, will there? There will always be new staff members to train, new groups in your community to serve, new research or data to reflect upon and incorporate into your services.

So jump in, get started! Don’t second guess yourself too much. Every step is a good one.

(Thanks Kendra for the title of this post!)