CURRENT POSITION Manager of Support Services, Adams State University, Alamosa, CO DEGREE MLS, Emporia State University, 2016 FAST FACT If she was ever going to have a different career, Raines would become a mycologist.   FOLLOW bit.ly/ABOSRaines Photo courtesy of Brittany Raines

Managing MOVE

The Outreach Department at High Plains Library District in Erie, CO, was a seven-person department when Brittany Raines became supervisor. Under her leadership, it grew to 25 staff spread out across the entire county and was retitled as MOVE (Mobile, Outreach, Virtual, and Experiences).  

From the start, Raines had an eye out for efficiency and redundancy. “One of the big accomplishments was moving the department into a more consistent technical environment,” she says. “It was very paper-based.” That paper represented anything from bookmobile vehicle reports to data on programming at the branches. It was difficult to be efficient, not to mention hard to pull together qualitative and quantitative data. Reconfiguring those processes and reports into digital versions saved time and provided valuable proof of the library’s work. It also helped give Raines the data she needed to use when advocacy was needed around serving patrons at locations with low attendance but many barriers to access.  

Raines also focused on and completed an important analog project. She inherited a project to create nursery rhymes, songs, and finger play booklets in the three languages used by the largest groups of immigrants in the community (Somali, French, and Burmese). Some grant funding had been acquired, but she worked to find more, then hired first-language authors for each language and additional readers.  

Through her efforts, Raines never lost sight of her staff, encouraging them to grow and move up in their careers, even if that meant leaving a temporary gap in her own staff. Four of her original team members have moved up in the organization and point to Raines’s mentorship as one reason why.  

After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the High Plains library system did not release any kind of statement, though many other libraries did. Raines attended a board meeting, made a public comment, and turned in a petition she’d collected signatures for in her role 
as a community member, rather than a library employee. “I was showing our team you can have these impacts in our community, but you have to understand when something is not appropriate to do at work, and what’s appropriate to do on your own time as 
a citizen.” 

Raines has since left High Plains and is now the manager of support services at Adams University in Alamosa, CO, where she provides campus computing and account management support. Drawing on her work at High Plains, she is working on moving paper-based processes to a standardized digital format.