MasterLibrary Blog

The strategic people, building management and technology skills necessary to run the school buildings of the future.
Being a school district facility director in today’s world is not for the faint of heart. Health and safety challenges are higher than they have ever been, long-tenured facility directors are retiring- leaving stacks of paper and poor documentation for successors to muddle through and figure out, budgets are only getting tighter,
and managing and hiring staff is a constant challenge. But despite all of these hurdles, there’s a new generation of facility directors that are stepping up and thriving; finding creative solutions to today’s problems and leading teams across their district’s buildings at a point in time when building maintenance is under a microscope in every community.
These facility professionals are what we call Next Generation Facility Managers (NGFMs) and our most recent eBook examines the traits, tools, and strategies that these leaders use to push school facility management into the future.

This week, we held our quarterly user group meeting to review some of our new features. Below is a recap of what was covered. We are always evolving our products and are grateful to our user community for the collaboration we have with all of you. Many of the new features come as a direct result of your input and thoughtfulness into how to make MasterLibrary better. With that, let's take a closer look! 

To say 2020 has been unlike any other time for school district admins would be a vast understatement. With district schedules and plans in a constant fluid state, being agile in your facility scheduling software for schools is a must at this point. Because of the uncertainty that you face with school schedules, we put together a quick reference list of the most commonly asked questions or “how-to’s” in ML Schedules™ . 

​Being mindful of the challenges COVID-19 presents in indoor spaces, we put together our own HVAC playbook for ML Work Orders based on prevailing guidance and recommendations. This playbook provides step by step instructions on how to set up work orders, PM’s, and inventory procedures to align with the new HVAC recommendations for school districts.

What is a healthy building?
Consider healthy buildings as the next generation in the green building movement. A movement that has been picking up steam well before the pandemic.  According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a healthy building not only includes environmentally responsible and resource-efficient building concepts, but it also integrates human health elements like the reduction of air and sound pollution and access to healthy, sustainable light.
Components of a healthy building
In 2016, the Harvard School of Public Health created the 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building as a standardized and holistic view of how buildings affect the people inside of them. Click the link above to learn more about each foundational element.
 Here’s a summary of each: