The meeting was opened by FRSI President Jacek Królikowski who encouraged to designing of a new library model. What do you need to be a step ahead during and after the pandemic? One of Jacek Królikowski’s recommendations is that “Libraries can play the role of happiness managers for their users but also for their staff.”

Get Involved! Was a slogan under which Katarzyna Nowicka and Damian Domański of the InicJaTyWy Group presented the idea behind the Group and the activities of most active public library directors who initiate and run local directors groups that make space for sharing knowledge and joint solving problems faced by directors of cultural institutions. The presentation of the IncJaTyWy Group turned out to be an incentive for many participants to join Manage In A Good Style Facebook group.

Next there was the Leadership in Transition discussion panel moderated by Agnieszka Szelągowska of the School of Leaders Foundation and with participation of the Municipal Public Library in Gdynia director Natalia Gromow, mayor of Płużnica commune Marcin Skonieczka, and director of the Communal Culture Center in Ustronie Morskie Łukasz Molski. The panelists discussed the ways of going through the transition processes and learning how to play the role of a leader who wants to implement changes responsibly. They also spoke about their motivations to introduce changes, and what they do to persuade the others, the staff and local community, to follow them. They also presented three various perspectives – of a municipal library, a culture center, and a local government office of a commune. They all shared a view that various leaders’ experience lead to the same conclusion which is: the most important are people.

Workshop sessions that were the space for experience sharing covered such areas as:

• Leadership and building a library staff (by Izabela Bochińska, Marzenna Wojnar),
• Procedures at the time of hybrid library (by Justyna Lytvyn, Anna Orlikowska),
• How much of a library in a library? (by Jolanta Banach, Agnieszka Borkiewicz),
• Mobile libraries and branches – library network in the future (by Katarzyna Roszak, Przemysław Pawlak),
• The festival of setbacks or a story about leaders’ failures (by Damian Domański),
• Cybersecurity Leader at the time of pandemic (by Natalia Maćkiewicz),
• Library as a brand (by Izabela Bochińska, Marzenna Wojnar),
• Where are young people? A library at the times of TikTok (by Paweł Piwowarczyk).

The Forum was organized under the 4th round of the Library Development Program of Polish-American Freedom Foundation. The program is managed by the Information Society Development Foundation established by the PAFF in 2008. Over the years 2009-2015 the program was part of the broader Global Libraries initiative implemented by the Polish-American Freedom Foundation in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which covered 3808 libraries in more than 1,250 municipalities and rural communes, that is almost 60 per cent of libraries in villages and small towns in Poland. Since 2016 the support for libraries has been continued under the strategy of enhancing the effects of the main stage of the Library Development Program. Under the 4th round the program has been joined by almost 250 institutions (libraries and their branches) in 79 municipalities and rural communes, and about 300 librarians that represent them.