Administrative Reports for the month of September (October 20, 2016 Board Meeting) Adult Services In September we welcomed Kim Wiggins as the latest addition to our Adult Services Librarian staff. Kim has filled the part time position left vacant when Colleen Marquis moved on. Adult Services staff knows Kim well because she has served our department as a valuable page for quite some time. Kim is nearly finished with her Master’s degree in Information and Library Science at Wayne State University, and we are happy to have her on board!!! September was busy with program planning for Fall and Winter 2017, genealogy inquiries, lots of activity related to the Local History Collection, and plenty of patron questions and requests. Books & Brewskis met to talk about the Dave Eggers’ title Your Fathers Where are They? And ​ the Prophets, do They Live Forever - 6 people attended. ​ Brice Bush - Adult Services Coordinator Youth Services The Youth Services Department has been working hard to organize and fill folios for our 1000 Books Before Kindergarten program. This ​ ​ year-round, self-paced program focuses on making reading a daily habit for families with young children. The goal is simple as the title suggests, but for every 100 books that are read to a child, they will receive a sticker and a chance to write their name on our 1000 Books wall (near the Story Room). Our official kick-off date was October 3rd (we had several families come in to sign up even though we had no programming that day). Each of our member and service libraries are participating in promoting the program and getting families involved. Thank you to Matt Wiliford, our Marketing Manager, for his suggestions and social media skills in promoting this program. We hope to grow the program through relationships with local organizations like Born to Read and PoWeR Book Bags and our local preschools and daycare centers. Youth Services programming started its fall schedule on September 13th. Our families have been clamoring for our storytimes to begin and showed up in great numbers to support them, like Baby Time, Hear and Say, Wigglers, Mother Goose on the Loose, Story Bag Stories, and Listen, Make and Take. In addition, our regular Lego, Tween, Bingo, and MakerSpace programs also started to see good numbers. Our 30 programs for the month engaged 864 patrons. Our major program for the month was Batman Day, during which we celebrated the world’s most famous superhero with a superhero-themed storytime, a superhero cityscape to take pictures in front of, mask-making, and a special appearance by the Dark Knight himself. Aaron Olson from Sight & Sound also arranged a family viewing of the movie, “Bat Kid” which attracted over 20 attendees on one of our last gorgeous days of September. Thank you to our friends at Top Comics for help in promoting this program. Youth Assistants Matt Archibald and Christopher Spear attended the Library of Michigan Workshop in Houghton Lake on September 15th. The focus of the workshop was twofold: adaptive storytimes and MakerSpace-oriented ideas. They each brought back lots of good ideas as well as a Little Bits kit which we will look to add to our current collection of Little Bits in the department. Christopher runs our MakerSpace program and was inspired to create new program content based on the workshop. Matt will begin a Motion Commotion storytime in November and found a number of great ideas to get himself started. We also added a new collection to the department floor: Juvenile Parent Teacher. This ​ ​ collection will give parents and teachers of young children the ability to pick sensible resources for directing their children’s and students’ educational and developmental experience, without having to leave the Youth Department to do so. The collection is small at this point but we are working with our local homeschool group to make the collection one that will be beneficial to all of our patrons. In the new year, we hope to add math manipulatives, picture book kits, and middle grade fiction kits for families to check out. Our department remains busy, especially with the advent of fall programming. While Walk-In Reference Questions dropped off from August to 962 (a 20% drop), both our phone (121, up 5%) and Digital (16, up 7%) Reference Questions increased slightly. Teen Services In September Teen Services slowed down on programming while the teens got back into the school routine. We had 12 programs with 80 attendees. I was able to, along with two other staff, attend a seminar on STEM programing in the library. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. We learned about unscripted experimentation and the power of failure. We each left the seminar with a programming kit including electrical circuits and project ideas to use at TADL. Linda Smith Teen Services Coordinator Sight & Sound We had a great month in September. The weather was wonderful, the department is full of New & HOT music and movies. This makes our patrons happy. We get feedback every day in the form of positive comments on our collections and displays. It’s fun to share with such a responsive community. Our staff has been busy with patron assistance, collection development and maintenance. Donations have been picking up speed. We packed up specific collection items for each of the five members and branches and sent those out in September. We will be sending out fresh copies of the 2016 TCFF collection and an update on our Foreign film list. On September 17th we participated in a Youth Services organized “Batman Day” by screening the movie BATKID BEGINS: The wish heard around the world. A documentary film is about a 5 year old cancer patient's make-a-wish day in San Francisco when thousands of people turn out to help him realize the dream of being Batkid for a day. It’s a deeply heartwarming film with a message of hope and human kindness. The turnout was surprisingly strong with 34 people in attendance on a perfect late summer day. The McGuire Room audio visual upgrades were underway in the second half of September. Lots of progress was made right up to the last days of the month. The vendor was prompt and responsive to our presentation schedule. The job is nearly complete, and we are now wrapping up the ADA Compliance Assistive Hearing portion of the job. I will give a full report on this in a month after we have time to work with all the new systems and features. I’m working on the 2017 Sight & Sound budget suggestions. Collection development is a focus, both the digital and the physical collections. We are implementing a new optical disc repair unit that can fix scratched CDs and DVDs in October. The ELM-USA service works by charging for each disc repair and is free from service, rental and supply costs. I will offer a full report on this next month. The former preview area is progressing nicely. We had assistance from Gail who picked out a new color called scandinavian sky and Bruce who got us the paint. Keith did the cutting in, I got to roll it on and now we have a fresh space with a light and bright feel. Expect more updates on this as October brings exciting new developments. Our Page staff has a new employee Richard Siladke who started in late September and is doing a fine job. TADL Meeting Room use September 2016 Total Room use: 158 TADL meetings: 55 Personal/Outside Group Meetings: 103 Paid Meetings: 5 Unpaid Meetings: 153 Number of Meetings by Rm August 2016 McGuire Room:21 Thirlby Room: 66 Study Room D: 71 On Aaron’s Desk: McGuire Room AV equipment upgrades, Programming, Staff training, scheduling. Thanks for reading, Aaron Circulation September started out quiet because of school starting back up. I attended the NOCL meeting to discuss our new service area. I shared a map and a list of the counties in the new area. We are down a page and held page interviews in September. We sent 1122 items in MelCat and received 1195. Anita Chouinard Circulation Coordinator Public Service My month was focused on resolving issues related to our moving back to a centralized ordering system for materials. Several years ago, the decision was made to decentralize ordering and have each branch or department responsible for their own. By doing so, staff developed a greater sense of budgeting and collection development. This has certainly been a useful experiment, however the amount of (redundant) staff time it takes to handle ordering this way makes this practice unfeasible moving forward. As an alternative, our subscription to Collection HQ’s ESP allows me to quickly create pre-curated carts for our new collection development team to choose from. These carts, which feature titles ESP indicates should be of the highest interest based on past circulation at TADL, will greatly reduce the amount of staff time involved in collection decisions and increase the likelihood of selecting only items that have the widest appeal. Jill Porter Asst. Director for Public Service Marketing and Communications In anticipation of planning for FY 2017 budget, I have already begun meeting with various media (radio/TV) and print publication representatives to explore the reach and costs of new and existing opportunities to further promote TADL resources, programs and services to area residents and guests. In addition, Andy Schuck and I collaborated on the 1000 Books Before Kindergarten materials. ​ ​ This included designing and ordering magnets and folios for the reading kits. We also sent out some promotion of our Batman Day celebration at the Main Library, on September 17.