Personnel – Michael needed surgery and was out for 3 and ½ weeks. He returned to work December 9 and is doing well. We had a CCS Honor Society student do several hours of community service for us in December.
4th Quarter programs –We have been doing monthly take and make craft kits since September. These are very popular. We also did a Milkweed starter kit giveaway to encourage Monarch Butterflies. In October we had a small book sale out front during the Fall Festival. This was good for exposure and we earned $138. In December during the Hometown Holidays celebration we did a children’s book giveaway, and also gave away small bottles of hand sanitizer, and small candy canes – 127 items were gratefully taken. We tried a re-boot of Story Time by having a drop-in for a story one day a week. This was not as successful as hoped, though Michael was out with COVID during the planning phase so the publicity was late and not as effective as it could have been. Farm2Library continued through the end of October with the last of the food being taken by the end of November–we will hopefully resume in the spring, probably April. We had 903 people take advantage of the program and they were very appreciative. We have a “food angel” (Amanda Steen) who brings us day-old baked items from Hannaford as well as miscellaneous other foods on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. I post the availability of the food on Facebook and point it out to people who come in. This has proven to be quite popular. In the two months since the Farm 2 Library food ended we have had 99 people take items donated by Amanda.
Upcoming programs – We will continue to do take and make craft programs monthly, but not during the Summer. We have bobblehead templates for Bobblehead Day on Jan. 7. We also have some new ideas for pre-school programing and will be doing a few in-house programs making use of supplies we already have. We are also working on plans for the Summer Reading Programing.
SALS & Directors’ Council – SALS islooking into sharing access to certain items in Overdrive with MVLS. There would not be extra cost involved, though certain settings in the program would need to be the same for the two systems. There is also a possibility of sharing with UHLS and MHLS. There is a SALS econtent group made up of volunteer library directors and Jill Ryder from SALS. They have been looking at the cost to libraries especially in response to Saratoga County pulling and later reinstating though reducing funding to support the program. The most current information is that $35,000 is in the Saratoga County budget for this, and Hamilton and Warren Counties also have allocated money in their budgets to help out. We now have access to magazines in Overdrive at no cost to us – Thank you to GLE, CPH, and SAR.
NYS library advocacy day is set for Feb 28 and will be virtual.
The Farm 2 Library program was mentioned by name in a presentation at the United Nations.
Joint Automation Council / computers – JA is planning to poll members to ask if they are meeting our needs and if we have any library tech dreams.
Phishing training will be required for everyone who uses the SALS email system. This will be a yearly training. I’m not sure if there will be a fee for that, or if our JA fees may cover this. There is a push to get cyber insurance – if you haven’t watched the tape of the meeting you should do that.
Friends – The annual book sale will be on Saturday July 29.
Maintenance –Furnace was serviced in November. Front porch will be power washed April 3.
Other – The subscription price for the NYTimes Book Review is going up.
Michael wants to attend the NYLA/YAS meeting in Lake George on April 28. We are NYLA members so the discount price should apply. Registration and pricing are not yet up. Last year it cost $160 for non-members and $150 for members. NYLA has changed their billing practices for institutions. We used to be billed through SALS, but they now want libraries to do that on their own. I’ll be checking into this.
NARCAN kits are available.
One of the libraries polled the rest of us about Fax pricing and whether anyone gave discounts or waived the cost of faxes to social services (for food stamps, HEAP, etc.). The larger libraries and some others don’t charge for faxing at all, one library reduces their cost to $1 for 1 page, $2 for 2-10 pages, and $5 for 10+ pages. I don’t think we should do away with all the Fax fees as that covers the cost of the phone bill. We are also the cheapest option for Faxing in the town (though I have heard that the Town Hall will send faxes to social services for free.) Do you want to reduce or eliminate the fees for Faxing to social services or leave things as they are?
Meetings attended in fourth quarter 2022 (most were virtual):
- 10/13 Gwen Rowland -Alzheimer’s information
- 10/21 Directors’ Council
- 10/25 webinar
- 11/16 Directors’ Council
- 11/29 Jennifer Kietzman & Louise Kirkpatrick from the Town Image committee met with a few of us to talk about what they could help us with if a grant that the Town has applied for gets funded. They shared the names of Facebook groups that we could use to push out library information.
- 12/8 Cyber Insurance webinar
- 12/16 Directors’ Council