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May 5, 1997: Interim Report to City Council

5/5/1997

LIBRARY 21 COMMITTEE: INTERIM REPORT

To the Honorable City Council:

The Library 21 Committee is nearing the end of Phase III of its process and we wanted to give you another interim report of what we've accomplished and where we are headed. This report will build on our report of November 13, 1996. We are also incorporating by reference, all the minutes and Work Group reports produced since our last report. All of these materials are in the Library 21 notebook in the Council Office. As of April 15, 1997, the Committee has held sixteen meetings.Each one of which has had a deliberate purpose and has moved us along in our work.

Library 21 Mission

Our mission is to "provide a set of recommendations to the City Manager for a library system that includes the roles, services and physical requirements to equitably meet the needs of the people of Cambridge and enhance the quality of life in the City for the 21st century."

Media Coverage

Since June of 1996, we have placed approximately 25 articles in the Cambridge Chronicle, TAB and Boston Globe. These articles are a mix of op-ed pieces, features in the paper and notices of meetings.

Outreach

We have used a variety of strategies to keep people appraised of meetings, of current thinking about libraries today: we have an extensive mailing list of people who receive meeting notices; minutes, reports, press releases and other materials are posted on the Committee's Web page and in the main and branch libraries; and we held a library symposium last fall, "The Public Library in the 21st Century."

We've met with over 40 agencies and organizations; received dozens of letters and e-mail messages. Several of our Committee members have built a database of all of the comments; we have over 2,000 entries. This information represents people's opinions of what they would like to see somewhere in Cambridge's public library system. See 'Phase II' below.

Overview of the Process and Status

Phase I: Getting organized May to July 1996

Status: complete

Milestone Products: mission statement developed, work groups established