Photo by Paul Leeson, courtesy of Bellingham Public Library

Rick Osen is the newest member of the five-person board of trustees at Bellingham Public Library (BPL), WA, but he is no stranger to the library world. Osen served as interim dean of libraries and assistant dean for library administration and planning at Western Washington University for 35 years, retiring in 2014. In February he joined chairman J. Robert Gordon, Rachel Myers, Marilyn Mastor, and Tom Barrett to serve a five-year term on the BPL board, and LJ caught up with him to find out more about his transition from academic librarian to public library trustee. LJ: What have you been working on during your first six months? Rick Osen: Upgrading the central public library facility has been on the agenda for many years—it’s outdated and undersized. There was quite a bit of talk about building a new library right before the recession hit in 2008, and then of course that put everything on hold. But [the upgrade is] coming back up on the radar now and that’s very exciting. There’s nothing immediate in the works, but at least we’re talking about it again. That’s going to be a big topic for the foreseeable future. BPL has strong partnerships with several local libraries and colleges, including your former workplace. What aspects of your academic library experience have you found useful to bring to the public sector? My experience was in library administration, so I did a lot of work over a long time with budgets, personnel, and facilities, and I think some of those skills are things that directly translate into my position as a trustee. All of the libraries in the county—the Whatcom County Library, the city library [BPL], Whatcom Community College, Bellingham Technical College, WWU, and the Northwest Indian College—have cooperated for five or six years now on what we call the One Card program: any library user in any of those six libraries with a card can borrow materials from any of the others. As part of that, the directors of each of those libraries get together once a month. I did service as interim dean for one year shortly before I retired, so that was a good opportunity to hear the issues at all the other libraries. I think that there’s a good background of sharing. How does BPL director Pamela Kiesner feel about having a fellow librarian as a trustee? I think she’s appreciative of that. The other people come from a variety of backgrounds—one person’s a retiree out of the business world, one is an interior designer, one works in a geotechnical firm as one of its partners, and one works for a nonprofit foundation. I’ve known [Kiesner] for several years, part of that through the One Card program. I feel like we’ve had a good relationship over that time and still do, and I think I’m pretty good at recognizing the fact that I’m not administering a library but am serving as a trustee. What advice or information would you give other new trustees coming from a library background? I think it’s [important] to recognize that being a trustee is a different world from being actively involved in the daily running of a library—just recognizing the differences between active management and more of a counseling and advisory role, as well as being more of an advocate. How can librarians to communicate better with trustees, and vice versa? I think it works very well here. Pam [Kiesner] invites her library management group to attend all of the trustees meetings—over time they all attend a certain number of meetings a year—and that promotes a lot of back-and-forth and camaraderie between the library staff and trustees. A representative from the Friends group also attends the trustee meetings. Then we have a member of the city council who is a liaison to the library board, and he attends almost every one of the trustee meetings as well. It sounds like you have a good system there. We do. I think there’s a lot of support, and I’m really enjoying it. I’m still learning, but that’s good—I think it’s wonderful to still have learning opportunities at my age. It’s a great group of people, very committed to advocating for the library.