Learn, Change, Grow at Calgary Public Library

Posted by David Holden

Members from the Library Service Design team shared their innovative plans.

Barb Burgraff introduced our guest speaker, Bill Ptacek, CEO of the Calgary Public Library.

Our speaker, Bill Ptacek	Bill opened with his goal of building the greatest public library in the world! More than just the new building, great collection, and buildings’ renovations … Secret weapon is the design teams, we met them as eight of them spoke about their area of responsibility Kristen Duke introduced herself as Service Design Lead with focus on early literacy. The early years are so important for literacy development Want families to see the library as a destination for learning, reading, making community connections, and building skills for accessing new resources, and play.
Loquacious library ladies	Stephanie Nemcsok spoke about Story truck, a program to take books and literacy to day homes in the NE Visit each day home once a week for a month for story time, songs, and play This is to overcome the built in barriers to children (who spend time in day homes) from visiting the library and its services They assist the care givers with continuing this literacy exposure between visits This is often very exciting for the kids Kate Schutz is the design service lead responsible for introducing the library to students and teachers Math Quest is a numeracy program to help students put a real life need for math to the test in the world around them Jackie Flowers spoke about what the library is doing in the summer to reduce the “learning loss” over the summer
The library gets a new book !	More than just a reading program, more of a learning program with 20,000 participants last summer Carrie Kitchen spoke about teen services and digital literacy One of their programs introduced coding (computer programming) to the community 152 sessions reaching 3,500 participants Rosemary Griebel spoke about wanting all Calgarians to be actively engaged in reading every day because reading contributes to many positive behaviours and habits Teneya Gwin spoke about indigenous services and community engagement Heather Robertson is Director, Service Design. She spoke about the wonderful team she gets to work with (whom we just met) Heather also spoke about the new spaces that are being developed along with their new building
Barb Burggraf consoles our speaker	Bill Ptacek wrapped up with a summary of the increase in library visits over the last couple of years to over 6.6 million visits annually (up almost 6.5%) and their plans to ensure sustainability of the library in our city Bill answered several interesting questions from our members Barb Burgraff also thanked our speaker.