Karen Hyman

Reinventing the Customer Centered Library: 12 questions for 2009

Karen Hyman
Executive Director, South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative


Change requires upheaval. It’s past time for big changes in attitude, approach and environment to attract and delight your customer and make the day more rewarding for you! What's stopping you? Come and hear about 12 steps with maximum impact for 2009.

Benefits and Learning Objectives
1) Participants will clear the decks of all of the policies and procedures that perpetuate the past and do not serve us and our customers well.
2) Participants will understand and anticipate the needs, wants and desires of customers today with innovative approaches to library environment and services.
3) Participants will make opportunities for innovative customer service central to every library decision.

Karen Hyman has worked in public libraries, as a State Library Consultant, and as Executive Director of the South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative where she develops services for 600 member libraries. Her chief inspiration is her role as a library user which “clears the vision wonderfully.”

Karen’s 12-step Reinventing Your Library programs have been a feature at every Public Library Association Conference since 2000 and have been presented at library conferences, staff days and trustee workshops in 37 states/provinces in the US and Canada.

Publications that people remember include “What Makes a Project Work?” (American Libraries, April 2006); “Struggling in a One-Stop Home-Shopping World, or People Want What They Want When They Want It –-Don’t You?” in Library Networks in the New Millennium: Top Ten Trends, American Library Association, 2000; and “Customer Service and the Rule of 1965: Stalled on the Way to the New Millennium” in American Libraries, October 1999.

Karen was the 1997 Librarian of the Year for the New Jersey Library Association and received their 2002 Library Service Award. She is the recipient of the 2003 Leadership Achievement Award from the ASCLA Division of the American Library Association.

CONTACT INFORMATION
South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative, 10 Foster Avenue, Suite F-3, Gibbsboro, NJ 08034
Phone: 856 346-1222 Fax: 856 346-2839 Email: hyman@sjrlc.org