Baker & Taylor and Kirkus Reviews proudly continues to support diversity and inclusion in libraries. Our partnership with Kirkus has made a great impact as we further promote our leadership campaign, Powering Libraries. Empowering Communities. Kirkus recently interviewed Andrew Chanse, executive director at Spokane Public Library who has proven to be a national leader in creative community outreach.
With the help of Baker & Taylor’s Customized Library Services, Spokane Public Library has been able to make great strides in better equipping the library with more efficient and streamlined processes. Last year, Baker & Taylor’s Customized Library Services ensured the materials Spokane Public Library wanted for their collection arrived stickered, stamped, and shelf-ready. The items were selected using Baker & Taylor’s carts as purchasing guides, which greatly reduced curation efforts. They also recently subscribed to Collection HQ, a suite of powerful collection management tools designed to save systems even more time.
Preview of article by Meghan Labrise, originally published on KirkusReviews.com :
Based on profession and predilection, you’d never guess Andrew Chanse’s love of reading bloomed later in life. The executive director of Spokane Public Library was all comic books until college, when a triumvirate of gateway authors—Vonnegut, Burroughs, and Robbins—led to an abiding affection for 1970s and ’80s lyric narrative poetry.
“I love James Wright,” Chanse says of the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, widely recognized for his experimental language and style. “In fact, I have a lithograph in my office, a letterpress of two of his poems. His sense of a line was amazing.”
When it comes to experimentation, Chanse’s sensibility clearly aligns with Wright’s.
Chanse leads an innovative team of librarians rising to meet the needs of a swiftly changing riverside city in eastern Washington state—one of 2018’s “Cities on the Rise,” according to National Geographic Traveler magazine. Serving 220,000 potential patrons, Spokane Public Library has burgeoned into a nimble six-branch system that excels in creative problem-solving.
“The way we look at things here is, What’s the barrier around information or learning?” says Chanse, who relocated to Spokane from Arizona in 2013. “How can we overcome that? What can we provide?…For the business community, for example, it’s the information, the data, that isn’t at the hands or means of individual business owners.”
Notes In The Margin 