Touring PLCMC Week 3

National library week

Began in Charlotte, with big plans and discussions held with relevant staff on how the Main Library would celebrate the end of the week.
Lynette and I attended the meeting to observe how the branch planned a major event. I could not help myself and added a little input into the process.

It is impressive how many local food organisations gave support to the event and donated food for the occassion. The evening would be called an Orientation to the library; a tarot reader, cartoonist, coffee guru, beer tasting, and book disucssion group were also organised for the night event.

Reference Services
We received a grand tour of second floor of the Main Library and the reference collection and services from Mimie on Monday. PLCMC Main library has a large reference colletion which also incorporates "The Foundation Centre Cooperating Collection" which is a collection of resources that people / organisations can use to research funding opportunities from foundations, as well as a vast collection of government documents.
Reference services at the Main library include desk reference, telephone reference, email and a collaborative chat refernce (using 24/7 software) similar to the AskNow chat service operated in Australia.

We actually found time in the day to catch up on our emails and visit a few of the staff in the Main Library and touch base with them again.

Leadership Group Meeting

Tuesday 15 April - saw us make a presentation about YPRL to the Leadership Group (which includes Library Managers and Region Managers)
John from North County is a great chair for this meeting and keeps attendees to the agenda and ensures actions result from the discussions.
It was a good opportunity to meet up with the Branch Managers and to learn more about the world they work in.

Jail Visit
Wednesday 16 April
In the morning Jane and Lynette went to JAIL!!!!!!

Oh yeah U'all we did not pass go nor collect $200........... actually this is Book Club Program PLCMC that Kate at Morrison Library runs. Similar programs are also run through the Outreach department at Main Library where they have five staff in total visiting the jail and various times running a range of programs.

The jail was a Central Juvinelle Jail for Teens, Kate from Morrision picked us up from our Hotel and took us to the centre. She attends the jail on a fortnightly basis and does an amazing job encouraging the youth to read and discuss literature.
We met with 6 guys who immediately wanted to know if we boxed back at home with the kangaroos! Do you remember the moving "Kangaroo Joe"? I think they have seen this too many times.

The guys were fasinacted with our accent and kept asking us questions to hear us speak. I also think they enjoyed learning more about Australia and no doubt bragged when the returned to their division that they had meet two blonde aussie girls today at their book group. I could have spent hours at this program as to my amazment all the guys had read the book and all got deeply involved in the discussion.

Community Engagement Team / Novello Press
The afternoon saw us meet with the Community Engagement Team for lunch at the Restaurants for Reading event. This is a fundraising event involving a number of resturants in the area which give a percentage of money made over the lunch period to the library - hmmm something we should try to make happen in Australia.
The lunch was an opportunity to meet members of this team and better understand their roles. We also grasped a better understanding of the Novello Program run in the library thanks to Amy.
Novello Press is a PLCMC sponsored literary publisher.
It specialises in local authors in the North Carolina area, and run major events program for the community annually. We now have a book each to contribute to the YPRL collection so Novello can now claim they can be found "internationally"!

The remainder of the afternoon was spent with Frank Director of Research, Innovation and Strategy ......... sharing ideas about branding, online training and core competancies and collaborative sharing of web resources.
The conversation was so involved that before we all knew it it was 6pm.

While walking home and stopped by Mimosa Grill (now a favorite eat out of ours) and sat outside for dinner.The weather is interesting here as it is still quite cool at lunch time yet when 5pm comes around it warms up again until around 10pm, like a summer evening.

Library Visits
Thursday 17 April
And the week is flying by as it has for the last two weeks (has it only been two weeks!!!). We have made a wonderful new friend in Lori a staff member in the department of training and she kindly took us on a round of branch tours.
We visited Scaleybark, Hickory Grove (this branch is moving and will be redevelopmente in the near future), Carmel and North County Branches. At the North County branch we attended the annual Collection Management seminar which gave us insight into how the organisation runs the collection side of libraries.

We stopped off on our way home to visit our first Home Depot store and boy was Lynette in heaven - can we organise a crate to send things home????!!!! No we did not buy anything but it was so tempting. Following this visit we negotiated the bus system to find our way home to the hotel.

Friday 18 April
A late start in the day because of the National Library week parties at ImaginOn and Main Library, which we attended both (we liketo share)
The morning off gave us the opportunity to travel the Light Rail to where ever it ended up. It is funny as we find ourselves often assisting locals travelling the light rail on where it goes or how to buy a ticket and hey we are the tourists...I guess it is the Librarian in us always willing to assist the community.
To our delight we found the last stop was by a shopping centre (which is designed more like our home maker centres) and did a little retail thearpy (shoe and clothes shopping!). As it drew near to lunch we discovered a "Hooters" close by.......yeaph I said "Hooters". So what can we do???? One must experience a little American culutre when it is on offer...and yes we went to Hooters for lunch!!!
Sorry to offend any of you out there but it had to be done and we needed to experience the great America icon for u'all !
We are yet to experience GRITS though. After are rather questionable meal (stick with the drinks) we had a photo with the Hooter girls much to the jealousy of the blokes in the resturant, (they wished they had their cameras).

After this entertaiment we headed back on the light rail to Main Library to assist in the setup of the evening party. The night at Main was very impressive with amazing food and a mix of young and old audience. The visit to ImagineOn saw us being intorduced to a drink called RAZZLE DAZZLE (lemonade, sugar, ice and strawberries) which provided plenty of zing (not the type Libby at YPRL refers to!!) ALL I can say is what a sugar rush and boy did it make me talk faster....if that indeed is possible.
We decided it should have come with a WARNING notice, I pity the parents of the night!!!!!

They had a huge audience of 500 attending the theatre performance plus an audience in ImagineOn. Both programs where amazing and well attended. Well done to all staff and there combined effort resulting in a successful evening event.

After the events we gathered a few staff together for what has become a regular Friday activity for us and headed off to Therapy!

Saturday 19 April
Not a day of rest for us yet! We headed to Concord Mills (a factory outlet centre twice the size we have at home) and did a quick fix of retail thearpy.

We zoomed home to change for the muscial Wicked. Anne from Main Library had kindly offered us tickets; in almost the front row; for the musical as she had already seen it for the matinee
What an amazing experince and Australia does not get the show until 2010!

We then rushed home and headed off with Susan for a whirlwind tour of Charlotte and then to a great dinner at Mark and Kates place with staff from PLCMC. I was a great night and a chance to catch up with Mark amd Kim who are coming to Australia in September.