Staff Profile - February 2014

Raymond Neal’s 13 1/2 years experience at JPL has been largely spent managing the Main Library’s Florida Collection until he became the Murray Hill Branch Manager. Raymond is married to the lady whom he is happily pictured with, Janice Best, part-time Library Associate Senior at Olga L. Bradham and Etta L. Brooks Branch (NW) since July 2013.  Raymond, as you will see, has a high appreciation for his Murray Hill employees and his astute supervisors through the years.

Q: You are experiencing a relatively new position, Branch Manager/Senior Librarian at MH, after heading the Main Library’s Florida Collection for ten years.  What are the differences in managing a unique department at Main compared to managing a library in a well-established area of Jacksonville?

A: There are some similarities, but the differences that do exist are vast. For the better part of a decade, all I really had to do was manage the material in a single-subject collection and the staff that worked in the area.  I did not particularly pay attention to things in the system that did not directly impact my ability to run my section and be one of the rotating PICs at Main, so there were a lot of things (particularly Children and Teen programming) that I had to learn on the fly. Luckily, I had been a Librarian at Bradham & Brooks (NW) for the first couple of years I worked for JPL, so circulation and cash handling were not completely foreign concepts to me. It took me a little time to relearn what I had known in the early 2000s, but it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

Q: What past experience has helped you the most in morphing to Murray Hill Branch Manager?

A: As I mentioned above, being a Librarian at Bradham & Brooks greatly helped me ease into branch life. What made the transition easier wasn’t really anything that I knew, but the great staff here at Murray Hill. Most of them had experience working in branches and some of them stayed at this location during the “Great Transition of 2012”, so they were a terrific resource for helping me adjust. I also have had three astute Regional Managers in Erica Brown, Jane Harris, and Marshelle Berry. They helped me deal with each new type of crisis I encountered with wise guidance and much patience.

Q: Each of JPL’s libraries has its own unique customer base; how do you address those needs at Murray Hill Branch?

A: Murray Hill is a great location. Since it’s a pretty densely populated residential area, many of our customers walk here and come in on a daily basis. There are a number of young families in the area, and they’ve been enjoying Chiquita Powell’s programming efforts. Our numbers have been steadily rising in that area since she joined us in November 2012. As with most other locations, we have a number of job seekers in here regularly. WorkSource comes out Wednesday afternoons to help those folks on their quests. The sense of neighborhood is strong in this area.  We do feel like we’re a part of a community and not just a building in a random location in Jacksonville. With that sort of sense of place in mind, I helped our Friends group set up a series of programs last fall on the history of Murray Hill. They worked with the Murray Hill Preservation Association and Metrojacksonville.com to put together three fantastic programs that everyone in the neighborhood loved. We had to move the final program to the Murray Hill Theater next door because we could not fit the 106 people that attended into MH’s meeting room.

Q:  What would you like to see improved at Murray Hill Branch?

A: It seems like an odd thing to mention, but our customers really need some electrical outlets! So many people come to the library these days to use our Wi-Fi. If they’re here for any length of time, they’ll need to plug in their laptops and other devices. In addition to those folks, we’re one of the locations that allow customers to check out laptops. We currently only have two outlets in the public area, so we put down a multi-outlet power strip at each outlet and now we have people constantly clustered in these two corners at the front of the building. I took an idea that former manager Daniel Kibler first proposed (giving folks more comfortable access by installing a “laptop bar” along the front of the building), revised it and submitted it for approval as a special project. It may be in the pipeline for future projects right now.

Q: Tell us something about yourself most of us would not know.

A: I’m really not sure what folks would not know about me – I tend to wear most of my passions on my sleeve. Most people that know me know that I’m interested in comics and graphic novels, sports (Clemson University, Carolina Panthers, and New York Yankees) and pop culture. You may not know I was an Art & Art History major in college. That background really helped me when I was in Special Collections—techniques from classes in printmaking came in handy for repairing materials in Special Collections and knowledge from various design classes helped when I was part of JPL’s digitization project. I may not be a professional artist, but that educational background has helped me immensely in the library world.