When Dianne Basso moved to Colorado in 2011 after years overseas, she couldn’t wait to get a library membership.
A lifelong reader, Basso had been living in countries where English wasn’t the official language and libraries weren’t very accessible to her. She joined three library systems around Denver and was soon attending library events, going to seminars to learn about online security and various computer programs, and taking the children of refugee families she volunteers with for visits to the library’s children’s section.
Basso heads to the library for help with printing and scanning, and for troubleshooting issues with her cell phone or computer. More recently, Arapahoe Libraries’ digital media librarian has been helping her to digitize old family photos and movies, as well as a cassette recording of a conversation between Basso’s aunt and her mother, who died in 1998. It’s the only recording Basso has of her mother’s voice.
“I was thrilled to learn how easy it is to use the library,” Basso says. “They do a lot of amazing things, and I love it all. I’m usually there at least once a week.”
Basso’s experience reflects an ambitious effort by Arapahoe Libraries, which serves more than 270,000 patrons in Colorado’s third-largest county, to reimagine the role of libraries in a digital era and adopt AI and other technologies to improve operations and increase community impact.
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With around 360 employees, Arapahoe Libraries operates eight community libraries, a bookmobile, and a library at the county detention center. Its growing array of services ranges from online learning courses and English classes to personalized business support and library lending machines at locations around the community.
Library patrons can print 3D items and work on DIY projects at the library’s makerspace and will soon be able to check out video games.
Arapahoe Libraries is also aiming to be the first library system nationwide to offer AI-equipped PCs for checkout by government agencies and businesses. The computers will have an installed local AI environment, allowing government agencies or businesses to put their data onto the computer with a flash drive, run AI tools against the data and wipe everything when they’re finished.
Since the machines are air-gapped – not connected to the internet – all data remains local to the machine, ensuring full privacy when the machine is returned and erased.
Additionally, plans are underway to transform Arapahoe Libraries’ former administration building, largely vacated during the coronavirus pandemic, into a state-of-the-art community meeting space. The revamped facility, expected to open in 2025, will feature coworking and meeting spaces reservable at no cost, a cafe, a podcasting studio and an incubator program for startups to demo and test new technologies.
“It’s sort of our vision of the library of the future, if you will,” says Anthony White, director of innovation and technology for Arapahoe Libraries. “We now have new opportunities to provide access to so many services and resources that folks would have never imagined previously with the library.”
As with many organizations, those opportunities – and challenges – for Arapahoe Libraries were partially rooted in a pandemic-driven need to work and collaborate online. In 2020, White says, the organization had a lot of disparate, disconnected systems, with employees communicating mostly by email and a few using various chat functions.
Arapahoe Libraries adopted Microsoft Teams as a foundational technology, giving employees access to video conferencing, calling and chat in one place, and switched its entire phone infrastructure to Teams.
Chats soon replaced cumbersome email threads. Staff began connecting more across departments and branches, reaching out to colleagues directly to get questions answered faster. Employees at the call center could field inquiries from patrons and forward calls to anyone in the organization directly within Teams, and staff no longer needed to be at a branch to use the library’s phone system.
Teams chat has made it easier to collaborate, says Carrie Jost, Arapahoe Libraries’ director of creative spaces. She mentions an initiative, kickstarted over Teams chat, to open a new digital media station at one of the libraries.
“Previously, that would have been a meeting, which we would have had to schedule weeks ahead to carve out the time for everybody to get together and have the conversation,” Jost says.
“Chat lets us facilitate a conversation that allows people to weigh in, give their opinions, ask questions and come to a consensus about next steps. It really saves a lot of time.”
Employees are also using the Viva Engage app in Teams to share what’s happening at their branches. One employee posted about her branch’s 10th anniversary celebration, which included a cake shared with patrons; another shared photos of a cooking class celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. The platform gets new posts daily, Jost says, and has strengthened workplace culture among employees scattered across a large geographic area.
“It’s really fun to see what’s going on out there, and that makes us feel connected to all the different library branches,” she says. “It’s really encouraging, and it’s a good reminder that everybody who works here is such an interesting and creative person and they have so much to offer.”
Becky Taylor, Arapahoe Libraries’ library materials services supervisor, has been using Microsoft’s Planner app in Teams to keep track of her busy calendar and manage the workflow for preparing new items for circulation. The organization’s “Library of Things” collection includes items like games, robotic devices and tools, which must be tested, photographed, catalogued, labeled, accompanied with instructions and properly packaged – a process that typically involves five or six employees.
“It requires a lot of collaboration to figure out how to circulate those items in a library,” Taylor says. “We use Planner to organize that.”
‘Improve that human connection’
Arapahoe Libraries’ adoption of Teams is part of a broader digital strategy to help manage data and improve operations. The organization is implementing other Microsoft technologies including Power Automate, Fabric, Viva Glint and Viva Pulse, and Dynamics 365.
Once Teams was in place, Arapahoe Libraries created a custom copilot to help employees navigate the organization’s lending services manual, which spells out processes for all types of loans and use cases. Employees who previously had to comb through the 300-page manual can instead ask the copilot how to handle an interlibrary loan or check out a board game.
That has reduced the time to get an answer from up to 5 minutes down to around 15 seconds, White says, and made for richer interactions with patrons.
“A lot of people who are coming in, they get to know our staff members and our staff members get to know them. They share updates about their lives,” White says. “The more you can reduce what feels like transactional time, the more we improve that human connection, which to me improves customer service.”
Arapahoe Libraries created another custom copilot for its ticketing system, used by staff to report issues handled by the organization’s facilities, IT, communications and collections departments – anything from a burnt-out light bulb to a cataloguing error. The copilot, Taylor says, has sped up the process for resolving issues by asking for all the necessary information when a ticket is filed.
“We were able to really customize it to have it ask for all the details we need to fix the issue,” says Taylor. “That really cut down on back-and-forth communication. We’ve been able to close tickets faster.”
‘Equity of access’
As e-books and connected devices became ubiquitous over the past 15 years, public libraries have continued to evolve from what White calls a “brand of shushing and books on the shelf” to community hubs serving a broad variety of needs.
Arapahoe Libraries patrons can get help with resume writing, practice English skills in a conversation group or get free technology help in an approachable environment. Earlier this year, Arapahoe Libraries held a prom clothing swap where teens could pick up prom outfits at no cost.
The organization’s community resource specialists help connect people with resources like food stamps and housing. The county detention center is near Arapahoe Libraries’ future coworking space, where former inmates will be able to get tech assistance and help with tasks like printing documents.
White says while the ways the organization serves people has changed over the years, its core principles have not.
“It’s really about equity of access, making sure we are lifting up all members of our community and providing as many services, spaces and opportunities as possible within our community,” he says.
The library is drawing patrons like Jean Temple, who grew up around libraries; her father served on a Colorado library board and Temple’s first job, at 14, involved repairing and reshelving books at a public library.
Temple’s library use dropped off after she started a career and had a child. But by 2023, she was retired and finally had time to think about the old U-matic video tape recordings she inherited from her brother, who died in 2005. With help from Arapahoe Libraries, Temple was able to convert the recordings her brother made and put them on a flash drive so she could watch them at home.
Temple has enjoyed discovering what Arapahoe Libraries offers, including the ability to peruse the newspaper without a subscription or grab a coffee at one of its two cafes.
“I hadn’t been into the library in a while, and I was pretty impressed with what they had,” she says. “It is really cool.”
