When Renelda Sells was a stay-at-home mother, she was always willing to take her three boys out to the hottest spot in town.

“The library was the center of everything,” Sells says of the Carol Stream Public Library, in a close-knit suburb just west of Chicago. “There was always something going on—it was a hub—you ran into everybody at the library. I remember thinking, ‘This is pretty cool: there are a lot of exciting things happening here.’

“I like what a library can be in the community,” she says. “It can be many things to many different people.”

After all, the library had been many things to her: a place to indulge an early love of reading alongside her sisters and brother growing up in Cleveland; a gateway to greater understanding as a college student (and eventual English major) in Massachusetts; and a vibrant resource for her young family, with storytime, author events, book discussions, and community meetings. Knowing she would return to the workforce after the kids were grown, she began to consider the library as a potential employer.

“I remember walking up to one of the reference librarians and asking, ‘What do you have to do to become a librarian?’ ” says Sells, who went on to earn an MLS at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I thought it would be exciting to be in that world, to see what I could contribute as part of a library.”

Today, Sells is the manager of collections and technology at Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library—responsible for coordinating its collection management process, including acquisitions, and integrating new technologies for the system’s 27 branches (and two associated libraries) fanning out around Tampa Bay on Florida’s Gulf Coast. By prioritizing technology and innovation, education, culture and leisure, and community engagement, Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library continues to thrive: In 2018, the system received nearly 4 million visits and circulated more than 11.8 million items. In 2019, it won the Florida Library Association’s Library of the Year award.

“The focus for our library is to remove barriers to access,” Sells says. “Our primary business is customer service. Obviously, with collections, the priority in terms of access is being able to get those materials into the hands of the customer as quickly as possible. Try to eliminate as much friction as possible, do whatever you have to do, to make it easier for the customer to get what they need.”

Ensuring a high volume of quality materials that continue to circulate is just one of the reasons Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library partners with Baker & Taylor, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based distributor of books and entertainment. With high-powered collection-building tools such as collectionHQ and ESP (Evidence-Based Selection Planning), librarians can find the right collection to serve diverse branches ranging from urban centers to rural outposts.

“Roughly 80% of our circulation comes from what’s sitting on the shelf,” Sells says, “which means it’s very important that we have what they’re looking for when they come looking for it. If you don’t put the right material in the right community, it can sit on that shelf and die. Between collectionHQ and ESP, we’re trying to be more intentional about where we place items the first time, to give them a chance at life.”

They also use Lease Books, a program that allows libraries to temporarily increase their supply of popular titles, with the ability to return them when patron demand subsides. When the titles for a Florida statewide young readers initiative are announced each year, for example, they can clear out the old and bring in the new.

“With Lease Books we have that flexibility of pushing in some new things, experimenting, giving them some new life without committing home to materials that may not serve and will have to be weeded,” Sells says.

And to expand Hillsborough County residents’ chances to check out e-materials, Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library recently invested in a Pop Up Library from Baker & Taylor. The plug-in devices, which function as hotspots and don’t require additional staff to operate, allow patrons immediate access to the system’s wealth of e-books wherever they travel. Sells says they plan to equip one of two bookmobile vans, known as Library2Go, with the device, bringing service to senior living facilities and community centers.

“We want to remove the barriers to access but, whatever we do, it needs to be sustainable,” Sells says. “You don’t want to jump [into a new technology] and then you’ve got to get rid of it because you couldn’t handle it.

“Baker & Taylor help us with working towards achieving those priorities in the areas of education, culture and leisure, and community engagement,” she says. “They’re responsive—they listen to our concerns—they’re very good about training. They make good suggestions for improvements we could make, but they’re not heavy-handed or forceful. They’re helpful.”

Megan Labrise is the editor at large and hosts the Fully Booked podcast.