Personnel – Gretchen has worked for ¾ of a year. April 15 will start her second year and at that point she will be eligible for time off as noted in the Employee Handbook. Gretchen has been doing a fine job, especially with children’s programming. Goals for her this year include setting up a yearly schedule for reading the shelves and weeding in the Children’s Room as well as continuing to provide programming for children, working with the public at the circulation desk, and continuing to learn procedures.
4th Quarter programs –Farm 2 Library ended with great numbers again this year. The Food Angel program is continuing on a sporadic basis. These food giveaways are very popular. Story Time has regular attendees as well as the occasional family who drops in. Other programs in the quarter include a fairy house craft, All-Hallows Read, and a special gingerbread themed story and craft for Hometown Holidays which were well attended. We had a Hands Only CPR training/workshop in October. We had a Fairy House display by Louise Adie in the Fall that was quite popular. We decorated a tree for the Mill Museum’s Festival of Trees.
Upcoming programs – Story Time resumes January 10. We will have a program on Bring Your Child to the Library Day February 1. Gretchen has been in touch with the CCS librarian and will hopefully go to the school for periodic outreach programs. Planning has begun for the Summer Reading Program. We are applying for The Big Read grant in cooperation with other SALS libraries. Erica Freudenberger from SALS is coordinating the application. We have secured cooperation from 2 local groups/artists and are working on what we will do here for local programming for the grant. The grant in awarded in April and if we get it the programs will take place between September of this year and June of next year.
SALS & Directors’ Council – Websites must now be accessible and will be audited for compliance. Jack from SALS looked ours over, made a few adjustments and we are ok. A representative from Amazon was at the last meeting explaining about a new type of business account for non-profits and libraries. She gave instructions so that we could change our dormant account from one that is in my name but linked to the library’s information to an account in the library’s name which includes our tax-exempt status. Mango Languages gave a pitch at a recent meeting and I believe they will be sending a proposal that includes the entire SALS consortium. The Blue Envelope program is now available in Saratoga County.
Joint Automation Council / computers – Microsoft Office changed their pricing to libraries which jumped from $65 per computer to $300 per computer. JA staff is trying to negotiate that down and is also exploring other options. JA Fees will be $183.59 more for us this year. We may be moving to MFA logins for Polaris (we currently use that for our email (Outlook).
SCPL has officially left the JA. The changes that brings to us have been worked out & we shouldn’t see too much of an effect here. We have been encouraged to look at our lending policies and see how this will affect how we treat SCPL borrowers if they should want to borrow from us. I propose the highlighted change to our current policy in order to clarify that.
Friends – The annual book sale will take place July 26.
Maintenance – Last year we had a lot of big fixes that needed to be addressed. Hopefully that means that this year we will only need to do our usual maintenance items – rug cleaning, window cleaning, maintenance service on the A/C and furnace. At our budget workshop it was suggested that we look into having our lighting accessed and recommendations made to update it.
Other – The Tax Cap report was filed. We can ask for $74,300 through the CCS budget proposition. This number can be brought to the school at any time.
I continue to weed books, and clean out and update files as time allows.
Meetings attended in 4th quarter of 2024:
10/15 Directors Council 11/22 Baker & Taylor workshop 12/17 Directors Council