BoomerGirl Diary

Like a clever writer who is adept at luring her readers into an intriguing mystery, Gina Millsap enjoys adding a twist of drama when strangers ask her what she does for a living.

“I’ll tell them that I’m the CEO for a $17 million organization that employs 240 people and focuses on information,” says Millsap.

After fueling their curiosity and creating suspense, Millsap will spring her surprise ending.

“Then, I’ll tell them I’m a librarian and enjoy seeing their reaction.”

Let the record show that suspense and drama are just two of a wide variety of emotions available from a visit to Millsap’s version of a corporate headquarters–The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library.

“We like to point out that we touch lives from cradle to grave,” smiles Millsap, the high-energy administrator who has been on the job as the library director for just over a year. She was selected for the role in August 2005, following an extensive national search and became the first female in 50 years to ascend to the library’s top administrative position.

“When I came here and met the board and the staff, what I heard was, ‘Okay, we’ve got this new building and we’ve got a few years under our belt, so now, we are ready to be the best library ever’,” said Millsap. “Not just the best in Topeka or Kansas. We want to be the best in the United States.

“And I said to myself, ‘I’m there. That’s what I want. I want to lead that library’.”

Millsap accepted the challenge of elevating the library to elite status with open arms. In Topeka, she found a beautiful new facility, a highly-motivated staff and a strong commitment by the library board and local community.

”I’m not a maintainer,” said Millsap, who arrived in Topeka following nine years as executive director of the Ames (Iowa) Public Library.

“I didn’t want to be someplace where people thought everything was perfect and couldn’t be made better. I want to be in a place where we have a staff that is hungry to deliver more and better and be responsive to the community.”

Millsap, who has been in various roles of library service for nearly 30 years, replaced David L. Leamon, who capped his 13-year career as the library’s executive director with the completion of the $23 million library construction and renovation, which opened to the public in January, 2002.

As a result, the library complex serves as a civic showpiece for the entire community. Among the celebrities who have visited and toured the facility is Laura Bush. The First Lady of the United States visited Topeka on January 9, 2002 to dedicate the library’s youth services department and to read a storybook to a group of children from Robinson Elementary School.

That visit helped put the library on the national map.

If numbers are any indication of the library’s popularity, consider the following statistics from 2005:

• During the year, the library registered over 14,000 new card holders and had over 2.1 million items checked out in the community. In addition, librarians answered over 155,000 reference questions.

• More than 5,000 people took a computer class and more than 94,000 people attended 5,780 meetings in the building.

• Overall, there are over 90,000 card holders and last year the library welcomed 985,711 total visitors.

Under Millsap’s push for more and better, the numbers this year continue to improve.

“Every month this year we’ve set records for circulation and we want that to continue,” said Millsap. “The community made a big investment in this library.”

Others are taking note of that investment. The Kansas Public Library Ranking service has just recently named The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library as the state’s top major resource center for libraries serving a population of 100,000 or over. It is the first time that the library has reached this position.

Today, the library boasts a growing collection of over 550,000 items including books, CD’s, DVDs, videos, magazines, periodicals, Talking Books and an extensive and permanent art collection.

Millsap spent her youth on the move, relocating in a variety of communities with her Marine Corps family. Her parents finally settled in Columbia, Missouri where Millsap enrolled as a freshman at the University of Missouri. She was a biology major starting her junior year at MU, but a conversation with her mother offered inspiration for a different career path.

“I started in biology, but I was not crazy about chemistry,” recalled Millsap. “I loved literature and I was talking with my mom one day and she asked if I had ever considered a career in libraries.”

It was Mom who reminded her that when starting over in a new community one of her first priorities was obtaining a library card.

“I started thinking about it,” said Millsap. “I used libraries all the time when I was young. They made me feel at home when I went to a new town. I love what libraries do. They help people.”

Millsap altered her career path and, in a manner of speaking, opened up a new chapter in her life. She landed an internship at the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia while working on her master’s degree in library science. That experience opened the door for a 20-year working relationship at the three-county regional library.

“I changed responsibilities every four or five year; it was a great opportunity,” recalls Millsap. “I couldn’t have asked for a better way to start as a librarian and grow in the profession.”

She left Columbia in 1996 to take the leadership role of the Ames Public Library. “It was a different experience to move from a regional library to a city library,” said Millsap. “But it was a wonderful experience. We had a very committed board and community.”

“I learned a lot about working with local government and city leaders,” said Millsap. “I learned that it’s just as important to fill potholes in the street as it is to fill the minds and hearts of citizens with great literature.”

Now Millsap is busy applying her collective literacy wisdom on behalf of the citizens of Topeka. Her first priority after taking over the leadership role was, appropriately for a library, to make sure everyone on the staff was on the same page.

“We interviewed everyone on the staff, either individually or as a group, to seek their thoughts on what we were doing well or what we needed to be doing. We took that feedback and developed our organizational priorities which is essentially our ‘to do’ list for about a two year period,” says Millsap.

Millsap and her staff are at the halfway point of implementing the new set of priorities for the library. The emphasis, for now, is focusing on customer service.

“We’ve added a greeter in the entrance rotunda to help provide immediate direction when you enter the library,” said Millsap. “We are introducing elements of visual merchandising into the library. We are moving away from a very traditional stacks oriented Dewey Decimal system, to what we call ‘neighborhoods of information’. We are repackaging information in ways that make it easier for our customers to find things.”

Librarians, as Millsap will acknowledge, are “the best search engines.” She feels a key element in the reorganization process is finding ways to make information resources at arms length to the consumer. Millsap is developing blueprints that will customize how information is delivered by moving her staff out from behind the “fortress of information” desks and circulating among the stacks where the questions need answered.

“We are in the information business and our goal is to help our public be good information consumers,” adds Millsap. “We want to help people help themselves, recognizing that everyone’s time is valuable.”

Like any successful CEO, Millsap fully understands that time is valuable for those who seek information from the library.

But it’s the only investment needed in this $17 million information-based organization that just about guarantees a meaningful return for its consumers.