Director’s Thoughts – 12/20/2023

I can’t believe 2023 is almost over. It’s like I blinked and it’s gone! It was a really busy year for my library and I’m so happy with where we ended up in terms of of serving our community. We kept some of our tried and true ideas, while also branching out to try new things. As a director, I’m always encouraging the staff to try something new. It might not go the way we plan, but it always teaches us something new even if it doesn’t work out the way we think it will.

Materials

With a lot of staff retirements over the past couple of years, we took the opportunity to reevaluate our technical services department and really start looking at how we want our processes to look rather than how it fits into what we currently have.

Our collection both in the catalog and on the shelf hasn’t looked better. We’ve spent a lot of time weeding old material across the library to make room for new titles as well are remove outdated and incorrect information from the shelves. And while weeding is never a project that can be completely finished, I have a staff member ready and willing to create a plan to move forward to keep up with weeding rather than getting bogged down with it.

We also did a great job in spending our budget, really spreading the budget evenly across the year to again, not only purchase the new titles (and duplicates if necessary), but to also fill in places as we drastically weeded some of our nonfiction sections. Learn more about funding from last month’s post.

Programs

We offered literally hundreds of programs this year alone. And with thousands of people attending, I’d have to say we’re doing a really great job of offering programs that people want. We started a new program for adults with disabilities that provides a space and time to get together with crafts or other activities available. It’s become very popular because many of the programs that existed pre-COVID didn’t come back afterward. We’ve also been offering chess lessons for the past year for kids and it’s one of the most popular classes for our elementary and early middle school kids.

While we offer a number of opportunities for volunteer hours for teens, we’re going to focus on creating new chances for teens to come in for fun programs to hang out with friends – mainly crafts and other activities that are fairly low effort on our part, but allow a place for teens to hang out.

The adult department is also looking at ways to bring in more people through our doors and with a two-sentence horror writing contest this fall and a peppermint explosion (peppermints made out of old CDs and cupcake wrappers) for people to guess how many there are throughout the library, it’s been fun to see what they’re coming up with.

Resources

We became a passport facility last fall and it wasn’t without its trials, but I think we’re starting to manage a little better these days. With 100 passport application passing through our library every month, it’s definitely a service that our community is taking advantage of.

We also began offering Wi-Fi hotspots for checkout. Again, not without a few snags, we’re finding ways to serve our community beyond just the books. They’ve become very helpful to patrons who are traveling or need a little extra Internet access and are rarely available at the desk!

2024

2024 is right around the corner and I’me excited to see how the staff continue to surprise me and work hard for our community. I’m honestly very fortunate to have a great staff to work with who really care for our community and are always looking for new and exciting projects. Here’s to 2024!