Category: Uncategorized

Are you passionate about sustainability in libraries? Are you looking for a leadership opportunity? If you answered “yes” to both questions, consider running for SustainRT Coordinating Council! We are looking for SustainRT Coordinating Council candidates for the following positions: coordinator-elect, secretary, treasurer, and member-at-large. Officer position descriptions are in the SustainRT bylaws. You can read below what the Coordinating Council is proposing at Officer position descriptions *Draft Revision*.

Candidates must be ALA and SustainRT personal members in good standing. Not a member? Go to the ALA membership page to join or renew!

If you want to know more about these positions or if you want to nominate yourself, please contact Tina Chan (tinachan@mit.edu) by November 30, 2019.

From Officer position descriptions *Draft Revision*:

Coordinator-Elect (Term: 3 years – coordinator-elect, coordinator, immediate past coordinator) Serves as Liaison from the Board for a SustainRT committee, reporting activities and updates at each board meeting, appoints committee chairs for the next Board year. Works with ALA Liaison to update Board listserv for coming year, updates org chart for coming year. Conference attendance: Attend ALA Annual, and preferably attend ALA Midwinter.

Secretary (Term: 2 years) Records meeting minutes, submits for edits and posts to Connect within one week of each meeting. Conference attendance: Attend ALA Annual and ALA Midwinter.

Treasurer (Term: 2 years) Serves as Liaison from the Board to the Membership Committee, reporting activities and updates at each board meeting. Conference attendance: Attend ALA Annual and ALA Midwinter.

Member-at-large (Term: 2 years) Serves as Liaison from the Board for a SustainRT committee, reporting activities and updates at each board meeting. Conference attendance: Attend ALA Annual or ALA Midwinter.

Save half-a-ton of carbon emissions from going into the atmosphere by riding your bicycle from NY to Philadelphia to ALA Midwinter! This will be a 2-day ride and it will be totally fun and will be something to remember forever!

Even if you are not planning on attending ALA Midwinter you are welcome to join us for the ride from NYC or Princeton to Philly!

DAY 1: Leaving NYC – Thursday, January, 23rd. 65 miles the first day to Princeton. 9:00 AM – will Leave from Battery Park City Library (175 North End Ave, New York, NY 10282) and bike to Princeton Public Library (65 miles). Staying overnight – either at a hotel or a friendly librarian’s house.

DAY 2: Leaving from Princeton, NJ – Friday, January 24th. 45 miles to Philadelphia. 9:30 AM – will Leave from Albert Einstein’s House and arrive in Philly at 3:30 PM to sign in for ALA Midwinter.

The objective of this ride is to collaboratively raise awareness of carbon emissions as well as Sustain RT’s mission. Together on our bike ride we will further develop Sustain RT’s community, to forge bonds between members, and to make life-long friendships. We will document the ride with video, and social media posts. We will also stop at sites along the route and visit local libraries. There will also be opportunities to train together before the trip! There will also be opportunities to learn about bike touring, to learn basic bike repair, and to get your bike in touring shape before the ride!

Please sign up via our survey to participate. We hope you can join us!

Note: We will have free safety vests for the first 7 riders to register. Bicycle ride is only one way. We are actively pursuing sponsorship but you are still responsible for any costs that arise, such as ALA conference registration, food, hotel, bicycle repairs, and any possible health expenses.

Are you passionate about sustainability in libraries? Are you looking for a leadership opportunity? If you answered “yes” to both questions, consider running for SustainRT Coordinating Council! We are looking for SustainRT Coordinating Council candidates for the following positions: coordinator-elect, secretary, treasurer, and member-at-large. Officer position descriptions are in the SustainRT bylaws. You can read below what the Coordinating Council is proposing at Officer position descriptions *Draft Revision*.

Candidates must be ALA and SustainRT personal members in good standing. Not a member? Go to the ALA membership page to join or renew!

If you want to know more about these positions or if you want to nominate yourself, please contact Tina Chan (tinachan@mit.edu) by November 20, 2019.

From Officer position descriptions *Draft Revision*:

Coordinator-Elect (Term: 3 years – coordinator-elect, coordinator, immediate past coordinator) Serves as Liaison from the Board for a SustainRT committee, reporting activities and updates at each board meeting, appoints committee chairs for the next Board year. Works with ALA Liaison to update Board listserv for coming year, updates org chart for coming year. Conference attendance: Attend ALA Annual, and preferably attend ALA Midwinter.

Secretary (Term: 2 years) Records meeting minutes, submits for edits and posts to Connect within one week of each meeting. Conference attendance: Attend ALA Annual and ALA Midwinter. Treasurer (Term: 2 years) Serves as Liaison from the Board to the Membership Committee, reporting activities and updates at each board meeting. Conference attendance: Attend ALA Annual and ALA Midwinter.

Member-at-large (Term: 2 years) Serves as Liaison from the Board for a SustainRT committee, reporting activities and updates at each board meeting. Conference attendance: Attend ALA Annual or ALA Midwinter.

Join SustainRT Online Education Committee for an encore presentation from the 2019 ALA conference.

Growing Communities Together: Libraries and Gardens

Time: October 3, 2019, 1-2pm CST

Presenters: Kathy McKay, Pete Villasenor, Meg Wilson, Carrie Banks

Register, at: https://forms.gle/dp1sUXMSdyGFY6Ae8

Description: Curious about the green things outside the library’s windows? Or are you craving green things outside the library’s windows? Find out more about how libraries are are embracing gardens. Are you interested in LEED certification or just making your library more sustainable? Does your local food pantry need fresh produce? Are the children in the children’s room getting antsy? Are your teens bored? Does your ESL class need a focus? Do your students need a break? Or a hands-on science activity? Gardens are the answer. Learn from model programs around the country. Hear from Peter Villasenor, Branch Manager at Oakland Public Library’s Cesar Chavez Branch, about their bilingual seed library and container garden. Explore the National Library of Medicine’s healing garden with the Master Gardener who tends it. Discover the 17 indoor gardens of the Gwinnett County Public Library, you will be amazed by their harvests. Take home your very own seeds to get you started on your own garden. Remember when you have a library and a garden, you have everything you need!

It is with much relief and hopeful anticipation for the year ahead that we report  SustainRT is once again sustainably staffed! After a tumultuous winter and early spring (marked by multiple leadership departures), a successful spring election and a period of intense committee volunteer recruitment resulted in a re-energized SustainRT Board and six fully staffed committees. We are especially delighted to report that SustainRT finally reached the membership threshold in 2018 (membership equivalent to at least 1% of personal ALA memberships) that qualified us to elect our first dedicated ALA Councilor in Spring 2019.

In spite of the administrative shakeup of the past year, good things did happen with SustainRT this past year. The Membership Committee, with the help of SustainRT’s first LIS intern, launched a mentoring program in late Spring 2019. The Online Education and Programming Committees launched multiple virtual and in-person educational opportunities. The Booklist Committee launched the first, annual SustainRT “Top 10” list of recommended books for children about the environment, playing in nature, gardening, and more, and the Environmental Scan Taskforce launched the Sustainable Libraries Database in  Zotero (submissions are always welcomed). The Governance Committee, with the help of SRRT’s Al Kagan, worked to help ALA Endowment Trustees consider the advantages to more ESG investments for the ALA endowment and took the lead on the ALA 2019 Annual SustainRT Chair’s program on carbon offsets for travel.

If you are interested in the work of SustainRT, please join us in the year ahead!

Uta
SustainRT Coordinator
www.ala.org/rt/sustainrt

______________________________

Uta Hussong-Christian
Associate Professor  | Science Librarian
Oregon State University

Hello SustainRT members,

Do you want to be involved with SustainRT? Were you involved in the past and want to contribute again? If so, consider joining SustainRT’s nominating committee! We seek members who will recruit our next board members. With your help, we will recruit for a coordinator elect, member-at-large, treasurer, and secretary. The time commitment to be part of the nominating committee will be from September-early December 2019.

Please let me know by September 10 if interested in joining the nominating committee or if you have questions.

Best,
Tina Chan
SustainRT Member-at-Large
tinachan[at]mit.edu

By Kayla Kuni

Libraries are the perfect place to have sustainability discussions since libraries are known for providing educational opportunities. At my former public library, we hosted films that focused on environmentalism followed by community discussion. The library then began hosting a weekly organic farmer’s market (which continues to this day) to better inform local residents about the concept of eating locally and eating with the seasons. I heard several customers ask why they could not buy a tomato from local farmers, but they could get one from Winn Dixie. Our local farmers could then educate our residents about how far that tomato had to travel to arrive at Winn Dixie and how the transportation process of said tomato was actually leaving a huge ecological impact on the environment. The library’s collection provided further evidence for the patron to read in order to confirm what they had learned at the market.

As structures, libraries are being designed with sustainability in mind. The green report cards issued by San Francisco Public Library are inspiring. The report cards take into account the LEED standards of “sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality” (“Green Report Cards,” 2019, para. 2). While the budget for San Francisco Public Libraries is relatively high compared to others, and some may feel that LEED standards are expensive to implement, there are design decisions that come into play when a library building is renovated.

The topic of paper usage (Hitchcock & Willard, 2015, p. 39) is one that is very interesting since libraries tend to print a lot in lieu of storing information on something like a digitized spreadsheet. In some ways libraries are very behind with the times in that certain policies require printed records to be retained. That being said, libraries are often on the cutting edge of digitizing resources. Perhaps librarians can be bigger advocates for change in how we envision records to be retained in the future and why they feel that changes need to be made. The cost of the paper, and the ink for printing, is very high, but what truly alarms me is that so much time is wasted in dealing with paper (Hitchcock & Willard, 2015, p. 39). Hitchcock & Willard’s (2015) suggestion that productivity is lost, resources are wasted, and nothing additional is added to the company’s value, should make any organization consider going paper free.

The topic of sustainability and libraries is one that I have a great deal of interest in. In 2017, I returned to school in order to work on an MBA with an emphasis in sustainable businesses. At the American Library Association Midwinter meeting this past January in Seattle, the ALA Council (of which I am an elected member) voted to include “sustainability” as a core value in librarianship (ALA, 2019). If we are truly passionate about it, we need to have conversations about what sustainability is and what behaviors we need to change to become more sustainable.

References

American Library Association. (2019, January 29). ALA adds sustainability to core values. Retrieved from https://clrc.org/49707-2/

“Green Report Cards.” (2019). San Francisco Public Library. Retrieved from
https://sfpl.org/?pg=2000187201

Hitchcock, D. & Willard, M. (2015). The business guide to sustainability: Practical strategies and tools for organizations (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Kayla Kuni is a librarian at Pasco-Hernando State College. Prior to working for PHSC, Kayla worked in a public library for over six years. In both academic and public libraries, Kayla has taught future business owners how to access resources that will help grow small businesses. In 2017, she was named the Outstanding Public Servant by the West Pasco Chamber of Commerce for her work with the community. Kayla is pursuing an MBA, with an emphasis on sustainability, from the University of South Florida.

By David Seldon

I am a seasoned librarian but a relatively new member of ALA and the Sustainability Round Table (SustainRT). In fact, the joining the SustainRT was the main reason I joined ALA. The size of the Association and large number of active, intelligent, and motivated members of SustainRT is impressive. Joining the Round Table made me feel immediately welcome and empowered. I jumped right in and joined the Governance Committee and started work on important projects like ALA endowment divestment from fossil fuels and participating in adding sustainability to ALA’s core values – rubbing elbows with Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, Uta Hussong-Christian and other remarkable librarians. Wow!

It didn’t take long for me to learn about the wide range of expertise on sustainability issues within SustainRT. As the former chair of American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Standing Committee on Environmental Sustainability, I had felt fairly isolated when working on sustainability issues. But that feeling of isolation changed when I joined ALA and the SustainRT. There are so many ways to become active and to learn from my new colleagues and to make a difference for the environment and our health, safety and well-being.

Besides working on big issues within ALA, I think the biggest value of being a member of the SustainRT is having access to all of the knowledge and support of the collective group. Often times we get stuck when trying to implement positive change within our own organizations. We might struggle with how to go about getting an energy/eco audit of our buildings to develop a baseline on energy use and greenhouse gases, or we may have difficulty deciding how to talk with management about starting an organization-wide “green committee.” The Round Table forum, webinar events, conference programs and the developing mentorship program are available to us to help us learn from each other to get unstuck and “get sustainability done.” We are here to help each other so don’t hesitate to ask for help, join a committee, participate in a webinar or conference program or just lurk on the forum.

David Selden is a member of the SustainRT Governance Committee and was a panel speaker for the “Carbon Offsets for Sustainability: Why, Where , How,” presented Sunday, June 23, 2019 at ALA Annual.

By Raymond Pun

This short video covers how to integrate information literacy and library resources to support campus sustainability research for STEM programs.

Raymond Pun is the Instruction/Research Librarian at Alder Graduate School of Education. Along with Dr. Gary Shaffer, he is the co-editor of the upcoming volume, The Sustainable Library’s Cookbook (ACRL Publications, Fall 2019) featuring over 40 contributions from academic librarians, teaching faculty and students on best practices and case studies to promote sustainability initiatives, activities and values in the academic library workplace. 

By Mary Beth Lock

Libraries have always been intrinsically connected to sustainability to me. I remember in my formative years finding that libraries were the great equalizer, eliminating barriers to access for people from all walks of life. One of my earliest memories in fact, is feeling literally empowered by receiving my first library card.  I was 6 years old, and suddenly, the entirety of my (now I recognize admittedly little) branch library was available to me. While I spent many an hour in the early reader’s chapter book section pursing Amelia Bedelia, Ramona and Nancy Drew, gleefully checking out what I could carry to read in the next few weeks, I recognized the inherent goodness and rightness that is embedded in such an institution whose very purpose is to share.  That became the basis of my lifelong love of libraries.

Now we have much changed society: one that is both more and less connected to each other, and certainly one that is more online. The value of that branch library may have less significance for today’s first graders as simply a place to find books. But it continues to fill niches for people from across the spectrum of users. Job searchers, and community organizers, and e- and paper book readers all can find reasons to utilize the library.  That foundational “sharing” ethic continues to be valued. But while it was once only the library’s duty to share, businesses have adopted the sharing ethic as well. With ride-share companies like Uber and Lyft; lodging opportunities like Couchsurfing and VRBO; car sharing, like Zipcar, many are recognizing the power of sharing instead of buying. And as we share what we have, we gain abundance. Sharing also has the added bonus of being easier on the environment because less stuff needs to be made. As the three pillars of Sustainability includes the social, the economic and the environmental, I recognize how libraries fulfill all three. The library provides a place to welcome all members of society. They fill the economic gap that divides some people from the information and resources they need. They are good stewards of the limited resources of our earth by allowing for easy sharing of the services and materials they have.  It is why my librarianship and my sustainability ethos are so closely aligned. We, none of us, own what we have. We are just the temporary borrowers of things. To paraphrase Chief Seattle, we borrow all we see from our grandchildren. Libraries of all sorts embody, manifest, and exemplify that position.

Mary Beth Lock is Assistant Dean and Director of Access Services in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. She is a founding member of SustainRT and served on the board as a Member-at-Large from 2015-2017. She has published articles and chapters on sustainability, service models, and entrepreneurship in libraries.