System Coordinator Meeting - September 13th

I attended a Coordinator’s meeting on Thursday, September 13th. Here are the highlights.

· Transforming Texas Libraries. The Texas State Library (TSL) and the Texas Library Association will be holding a series of meetings on what strategic directions Texas libraries should take in the next decade. It is called Transforming Texas Libraries. Steve Brown, the current President of TLA and Director of the North Richland Hills Public Library, thought of the idea and will be speaking about it at our October System meeting.
· Texas Education Agency (TEA) Study. TSL and TEA will be conducting a study of school libraries in the next year to determine what each agency should provide to this type of library. The report is due by December 2008.
· Long Range Plan Guidelines. We have the first draft of the guidelines. The guidelines state “TSLAC believes that the principal purposes of the systems are to bring libraries, regardless of type, together to share information and expertise, to engage in collaborative projects to strengthen library services for all Texans, and to provide continuing education and consulting services to the libraries in each region.” TSL preliminary budget for Systems in 2010 and 2011 is $4.3 million which is $300,000 less than the FY09 budget. With this amount of funding, NTRLS would receive $489,616 in 2010 and 2011. Our budget this year is $626,000 and our FY09 budget will be around $550,000. TSL stressed that the 2010 and 2011 figures were very preliminary with several factors still to be determined.
· TSL Competitive Grants. Competitive grants up to $75,000(very preliminary figure) will be available for Systems in FY09. The grants are due in March 2008. NTRLS staff will be working on developing a project that reaches multi-type libraries as this seems to be one of the primary focuses of the grants.
· Statewide Contracts for Materials. Contracts will be in place next week. The discounts are very similar to what NTRLS provides to its libraries through its material contracts. There is a fair degree of more paperwork involved to participate in the statewide contracts. The grant contracts should be available on the web sometime this week.
· Statistics. TSL has changed the way they want Systems to report their statistics. They are requiring more granular breakdown of the statistics on a quarterly basis. Reports on CE statistics are now available.