Present: Mary Farwell, Chairperson; Mac Broderick, Treasurer; Mary Leger, Secretary; Heather Shumway, Director.
Secretary's Report: Minutes from the January 10, 2006 meeting were approved and filed.
Treasurer's Report: Approved and filed.
Director's Report: Attached
Unfinished Business:
New Business:
Items We Are Tracking:
Next meeting: March 21, 2006 6:15PM
Collection Development & Acquisitions:
Hurray! Weeding the collection is complete! I finished weeding in the young adult room, marking the entire library having been weeded within the past year. Now that the weeding is complete, I am focusing on rebuilding particularly weak areas. Working with the new acquisitions module has allowed me to track our spending in particular collection areas. I originally allotted $1000 to young adult nonfiction. It has rapidly become clear to me that this amount is far too low. One of the biggest reasons this was not enough is the disproportionately expensive nature of young adult nonfiction titles. An average cost per title is $18-$22 with no discount, as compared to an adult title of average cost of $24.95 becomes only $13.85 after our discount. Unfortunately, there appears to be no cost savings tricks to avoid this that I can find as of yet. Young adult and children's nonfiction titles are generally not reviewed in the journals and is mostly sold by individual book vendors who bring examples of the titles to the library for perusal. On the one hand, this is a better format because the librarian is able to review each series and select the books that are the best for the needs of the collection. In addition, the books purchased through vendors generally have a reinforced binding to help them last a good deal longer. These are both strong reasons to purchase from vendors, but the costs are truly much higher. All of that said, it is an area that we will need to look at increasing funding for in the years to come. For this budget cycle, I have transferred $300 from the adult nonfiction and $200 from the young adult fiction to the young adult nonfiction.
We have completed our renewal process for our serial subscriptions. We have diversified our purchasing to include 3 vendors who will handle our serial subscriptions. We will now be using Tenth Muse and Blue Dolphin. I must confess to two errors which will have a slight impact on the library. The first being that I was not aware that we needed to renew our subscriptions far in advance of the end of the year, so there may be a lag of 6-8 weeks for several of our titles to be on our shelves, creating holes in the continuation of titles. The second error was that I chose not to use Tenth Muse because I could not find enough information about them and placed our order with Ebsco for all of the titles we would have subscribed to with Tenth Muse. The end result being that Ebsco will be charging us $10 per title to cancel our order. In light of this, I have discontinued the titles with Ebsco where our cost savings was more than $10 and placed the order with Tenth Muse. My change of opinion came after speaking with another library director in the state who has used them for about 6 months now and is very happy with their service. I must say that the response I received from Tenth Muse was on the opposite end of the spectrum than I received from Ebsco, and I told Ebsco outright that we would be discontinuing our titles that we could find elsewhere next year, as a result of their pricing and poor customer service.
Correspondence:
Responses from patrons we received this month:
Suggestion Box: Just wanted to say thank you for making this facility such a warm and inviting place to be. When I come to spend time here hours go by before I even realize the time (have closed this place a time or two). Anyway, thanks so much! The staff here are so helpful and patient with everyone. It's a great place! Paula Vernile.
Response to email announcement about audiobooks:
I agree with this email and check out MANY books on tape, either CD's or cassette tapes. I love the fact that unabridged tapes are the priority. I have been hooked on audio books for a couple of years and really appreciate the fact that the Hooksett Public Library has a GREAT selection. Thank you. Betsy Beck
Circulation:
LeeAnn and I have completed our new patron folders, which we are quite proud of. LeeAnn has been working noticeably well with new patrons providing tours and information about the library to each new patron. LeeAnn recently noted the number of things there is to tell and how easily it is to get carried away when showing someone all of the great services we provide. The response from patrons is as varied as the people who come in, some have 50 questions about the library and others just want to be left to find it themselves. I am very pleased with the work that we are now doing in this area.
Children's Department:
Vickie hosted Principal's night where Mr. Estey & Mrs. Soucy read stories to children during an evening storytime. We had a very disappointing turn-out of children, but feel that it was due to over-programming and scheduling of other events on that night, which is something we will work to be aware of more in the future. Advertisements were posted in the PTA newsletter, in the Banner, on our website and here at the library, so we feel confident that we advertised it well.
After completing the program, Vickie showed the two principals our reference databases that would be relevant to their age groups. I feel that this "teachable moment" that Vickie conducted was incredibly valuable in our efforts to educate the schools about our resources. Vickie is now working on creating a list of resources on our databases that are relevant for the younger grades.
Coming up soon, February 28 will be Comic Book Night in the young adult area. The owners from Double Midnight Comics and Alan Pinney will be attending. Vickie is working on the details now to advertise the event, we are thinking of making it a pizza and comics book night, proving that even we at the HPL can be "cool" sometimes.
Building Maintenance:
The new town maintenance man, Armand, has begun and has been to the library to fix our laundry list of minor problems. In addition, he removed the young adult reference and young adult video shelving for us. We will be looking at repainting the young adult study room and rearranging the furniture a bit to make it more inviting to teens. The wall behind the YA videos has been plastered but not painted as we discarded our paint collection somewhere along the way. The wall will soon be covered by permanent shelving, so it should not matter much.
I have been in touch with Skyline Roofing and determined that GenFlex Roofing Systems holds the warranty for our roof. They have issued a work order to Skyline Roofing to check and fix the leak.
Equipment:
The upstairs main printer has begun to have difficulty lifting paper from the tray. We had previously thought that this was under a maintenance contract, only to discover that the contract had been allowed to lapse somewhere during the Directorial transitions. We are now searching for reasonably priced and competent repair workers to fix the problem. The printer is 8 years old, but this is the first of its problems in a very long time. I would like to fix the printer and evaluate its use and life-expectancy over the next six months, after which we can determine if it needs to be replaced or kept. In addition, HP will not allow us to create a maintenance contract until the machine is in working order.
We have been the recipient of two very nice, but out of the ordinary donations this month. First, we took our video monitoring system monitor to be fixed at Chestnut County Electronics. When we picked it up, the owner chose to not charge the library for the work, but to donate his time and services. He is a regular library user and was happy to be able to contribute to the library in some way. Secondly, we were visited by a representative from the Odd Fellows Association who gave us a reading lamp with a magnifier attachment for our reading area. We will need to write thank you notes for both. We have sent a brief write-up and picture to the Banner for the Odd Fellows donation.
Programs:
Our co-sponsored program with the Hooksett Kiwanis hosting a dinner and speaker, John Clayton was a fantastic success! Approximately 35 people attended the dinner which was provided by the catering service at Southern New Hampshire University. Individuals were charged the cost of a regular dinner served on campus, and Kiwanis picked up the remainder expense of having it hosted the dinner off-campus. Those in attendance had a wonderful time, and I hope to have John Clayton here again when he publishes his next book.
Our success in co-hosting the program brings me to the direction I would like to pursue with our future programming. That is, to connect with other organizations in town who have a relatively strong membership, but often struggle with meeting and event attendance.
Over the next month, I will be looking into classes for sign language, computers and scrap booking. The sign language class has been requested by a local Mom who would like to learn with her young child and feels that others would be interested. I will be working with Kathy Scott to plan her introductory level computer classes and based on their success examine some higher level classes. Lastly, we were contacted by a scrap booking professional who wants to host a get together for scrap bookers to bring their current projects and just work for several hours, similar to a quilting bee.
Publicicity:
The staff has been working diligently to provide weekly updates to the Hooksett Banner. Several times, our more lengthy entries have warranted their own article, which has given us great press. I recently sent a thank you to Ginger for the inclusion and special care of our articles and received a very nice response from her.
Staff News:
Jeff has installed our second ready reference catalog and we are already making use of it showing patrons how to access our online databases. He has converted one of the old staff computers to a new patron internet computer and has updated the format of the initial log-on screen to make it much easier for patrons. He has decided to completely strip each of the computer and rebuild them from scratch. This process is the cleanest and insures that a computer savvy patron won't be able to retrieve old staff documents.
Friends of the Library:
The Friends have chosen Margaret Harlan as their new President, and Margaret is off and running! I must say I am most impressed with her organization and motivation in getting the group headed in the right direction. The Friends are ready to take on the Books for Babies as soon as I have a chance to pull it together and hand over to them.
The Friends have decided to sponsor the following museum passes: Canterbury Shaker Village (new), Children's Metamorphosis, Currier Art Museum, and Manchester Historical Assn. It is my understanding that they had sponsored these in the past but we missed it this past year and the library paid for each of them.
The Friends will be co-sponsoring a Saturday afternoon concert with Patrick Hebert, providing baked goods and a local presence.
Looking Ahead:
This next month I will be focusing on starting our music collection, organizing and then handing over our Books for Babies program and reviewing our technology plans with Jeff to determine our goals for the next three years for computer placement.