New St. Charles library director talks about strategic plan, rebranding initiative during open house

Being a longtime St. Charles Public Library patron, Becky Blaine was happy to meet and talk to new St. Charles Library Director Kate Buckson.

“I’m excited about a new face coming in with new ideas,” Blaine said. “She sounded very excited about hearing people’s opinions and suggestions.”

Blaine attended Sunday’s open house at the library, where she got to meet Buckson and learn about the library’s latest projects. Blaine is a volunteer at the library and helps out with the library’s community artist gallery.

Buckson started in November as the library’s new director. She replaced Edith Craig, who last April submitted her resignation letter announcing she was stepping down after more than five years in the position. Buckson previously had been executive director of the La Grange Park Public Library District for seven years.

Along with St. Charles, the district serves parts of South Elgin, Wayne and West Chicago. A $18.6 million project to renovate and expand the library was completed in 2021.

Blaine said she is happy with how the project turned out.

“I think they incorporated features from the old library very well,” she said. “But they’ve also added so many new things.”

Buckson talked to those at the open house about how the library is working on a new strategic plan.

“We will be doing a lot of that planning in the next several months, definitely before the end of July,” she said. “So we would love to hear from you and include you in focus groups and in whatever way we can to get your input.”

She also talked about the library’s rebranding plans. The St. Charles Library Board recently hired Fast Forward Libraries to help put together a new strategic plan for the library.

The library’s current strategic plan expired last year. Fast Forward Libraries will help the library put together a new three- to five-year strategic plan. The firm will gather community profile information and facilitate forecasting and visioning sessions with the board and staff to develop the plan.

Buckson said she had good conversations with the community members who attended the open house.

“The community is so welcoming and so generous,” she said. “It’s great to hear people come and talk about how much they love the library. But it’s also really nice to be able to talk about what else we could see on the horizon for the library. So that’s another part of today. It’s an opportunity for me to talk with the community and see what they would like and how we can make that happen.”

In addition to working on a new strategic plan, the library will also be working on a rebranding initiative led by the library’s communications and marketing team.

“They’ll be working with a firm to consider possibilities for modernizing some of the ways that we engage with the community, whether that’s through our newsletter that gets mailed to everyone or even looking at our logo and see if that stands up and just looking at ways we might need to modernize or change our look in order to reach as many people as possible,” Buckson said.