JOHN SZABO: Good morning, welcome to L.A.
The city of angels.
We are absolutely delighted to have all of you here in fabulous downtown Los Angeles
and the wonderful central library of the Los Angeles Public Library.
My name, I know many of you, it's wonderful to see so many familiar faces.
I'm John Szabo.
So thrilled that you all are here.
Particularly, I was telling more of this earlier, because of the conversation that we are all
having today about engaging communities.
At the Los Angeles Public Library, we are all about this work.
About engaging communities and about looking at how, as public libraries, how we can do
meaningful work and help communities and neighborhoods address some of the biggest issues they face.
I think public libraries are incredibly well positioned to have that kind of impact.
Particularly delighted to be having this conversation at the Los Angeles Public Library.
Recently, we're still on cloud nine because we were in Washington a couple weeks ago as
a recipient of the National Medal.
[applause] >> Thank you very much.
We thank the Institute for the Museum of Library Services
for that.
Our community member, one of the things you do is select a community member who represents
the good work your library does.
I think that's a challenging test for any library or museum to do that.
And for us, in L.A., with the 4 million people in the city that we serve, very, very challenging.
We could not have picked a more wonderful person to represent the people of this city
than Sergio Sanchez.
He and his wife Francesca came citizens through the Los Angeles Public Library and our citizenship
which we'll be chatting about later in the day.
Incredibly eloquent, talking about the public library services and its impact on his life.
The bus trip was 1,000 photographs and pointing out monuments and a grand experience and what
wonderful things it said about libraries, I think, and about our nation.
That here, Sergio, who had become a citizen just a year ago, through the library was having
this kind of experience, in the White House, with Michelle Obama and talk about the library
and what it meant to him was over the top fabulous.
Public libraries are workforce development institutions, they're integration institutions,
they're public health institutions, we're all about learning, school readiness and the
opportunity to talk about leveraging public libraries to do work in those areas, I'm so
excited to have that conversation today.
It's a full day, I know, but please, take a moment, if but 30 seconds to venture out
to see this amazing building.
It is one of California's grandest buildings.
One of the world's, I'm totally bias, but one of the world's most fabulous libraries.
The portion of the library you're in now was built in 1926, four years after King Tut's
tomb was discovered.
Hence the mosaic pyramid, the fabulous globe chandelier in the rotunda with the 48 lights
representing the 48 states in the union when the library was opened.
We have sphinxes in the library and the building suffered a very tragic fire in 1986.
400,000 volumes were destroyed, much of the building was destroyed, but the effort to
rebuild started the L.A. conservancy movement.
It
is quite grand.
You can see the waterful of escalators and all the multiple subject departments that
we have.
It's a building that Angelino's absolutely love and adore.
The passage of measure L restored an enormous amount of funding back to the library and
allowed us to hire staff back and restore hours of operation and has been really wonderful.
We also have in the getty gallery, off the main rotunda, an exhibit going in, you might
peek in there.
It's called to live and die in L.A.
We're taking this opportunity, not just to talk about menus and there's a fabulous coffee
table book that may be for sale in the library store, I don't know.
Called to live and dine in L.A. It's really magnificent, but we're taking this as an opportunity,
speaking of engaging community to talk about hunger in L.A., to talk about food insecurity,
to talk about food deserts and have that conversation throughout our branch libraries across city.
We did a similar project with our sheet music collection called songs in the key of L.A.
Where we had an awesome concert in downtown L.A. where Stevie Wonder performed music off
the dusty sheet music collection of the Los Angeles Public Library.
So, without further adieu, I want to thank you all so much for being here.
Just thrilled and I'd like to introduce now, the marvelous, wonderful, Maura Marx, acting
director of the Institute.
[applause] >> MAURA MARX: I just wish the marvelous,
wonderful John would keep talking about the great things going on in Los Angeles.
It's so exciting to be here and hear about that work.
And you know, thank you for making my task easy.
I'm Maura Marx, the acting director of the Institute.
We welcome you to the third of our convenings that we're holding this year.
This one is a little bit different than the first two that we've held.
The first two, one was in Washington, D.C., it was on the national digital platform, the
second was in Kansas City, and that was on learning and libraries and both of those were
really very directly related to our funding priorities.
We decided we couldn't let convening season pass without having a third convening, that
is not related to a funding priority, but that holds up the wonderful work going on
in libraries that is about serving diverse needs of the community.
And how libraries are evolving to do that and I think Los Angeles is such a wonderful
example of that.
We were so thrilled to be at the White House with John and with Sergio and to hear the
story of Sergio and Francesca and their son and how their lives were truly changed.
Sergio and Francesca came to the library because of their son, having no idea that their lives
would be enriched so much and they would go on the path to citizenship and achieving the
GED and all these doors would open to them just by going to their library.
We wanted to hear from you what your strategies are.
What your partnerships are.
Any insights you have, so we can hold them up for the rest of the profession.
That's why we're here today.
We think libraries promote a better quality of life in communities.
We want to hear your insights about ways to do that.
I had a lot more to say, but John said it so beautifully and eloquently that I won't
even try.
So, I should welcome the hopefully many visitors who are joining us via live stream.
At our last two convenings, we had over 400 people at each.
So, welcome to you, out there.
You can participate, even if you're not in the room with us via Twitter.
The hashtag for today is IMLSFocus.
Comment, send us questions, we'll monitor it throughout the day and we'll feed those
comments and questions to moderators.
We'd love to have that kind of input from anyone on the live stream.
And I also just wanted to, for those of you out there, remark on who's in the room today.
Our program staff at IMLS did a terrific job.
You can look on our website, actually if you just look at the IMLS focus website, you can
see the full list of attendees, but program staff just did a very thoughtful job of inviting
our grantees from public, state, university, tribal, city, suburban, rural libraries, library
associations, partners, both federal and nonprofit.
So we have a great group here today with a lot of expertise.
And I will get out of the way and let them start to share that expertise.
That's the other admonishment, please, to those of you in the room, please do share.
This is not sort of sit back and relax meeting where you can hide back there, this is a meeting
where we really want to hear from you.
And...when you do share, there, because of the live stream, we have the microphone, the
floater mic, please speak into it, say your name and affiliation so that people know who
you are and that we can record that.
Other housekeeping notes.
The schedule John and I were on for half an hour which we're not going to use, so we will
have time, hopefully to go out and visit places in the library, we encourage you to do that.
The restrooms are sort of down the hall to the right and then to the left, keep going
left.
Coffee and breakfast and lunch, I think most of you have found out the door, up to the
right.
And with that...I'm going to hand it over to the first session.
Thank you all for being here.
[applause]