The library board met last night, as it does the third Thursday of every month. Each month, the board approves new invoices, reviews the current state of the budget, looks at circulation and other statistics from the month prior, and, if necessary, decides on changes to library policy.
At last night’s meeting, I presented a summary of materials and fees recovered by Unique, our collections agency:
We continue to be pleased with the service of Unique Management Inc., the collections agency we use to assist in retrieving materials and fees. Thus far, we’ve submitted 269 accounts that have a combined $33,547 in fees and unreturned materials. We’ve recovered $4,426.75 in fees and $6,946.20 in materials and paid Unique $2,341.20 for their services.
I also gave an update on development of a new website for the library:
We’ve begun work on the new website and have notified the city of our plans. An unknown going into the project was the possibility of integrating the PAC and our events reservation system into the WordPress site thus, from a user’s perspective, creating seamless transitions between pages that currently have sometimes-disorienting differences in layout and style. We’re happy to report that we’ve discovered a path to full integration with these components and the work is progressing well. You can keep tabs on the project at http://catalog.johnstonlibrary.com/wordpress/.
The library is due for development of a new strategic plan. The process includes gathering input from selected members of the community via a focus group. Our focus group will be held April 7th.
I’ve been attending meetings of metro-area library directors that have been organized by a group of private citizen advocates and municipal administrators called Capital Crossroads. Capital Crossroads’ goal is to encourage inter-city cooperation between like departments. After an initial brainstorming session, Library directors selected two projects to work together on: 1) Better coordination of training for front-line staff; and 2) Instituting an online, public catalog that allows searching and placing requests across participating libraries’ collections. For an update on the status and results of these efforts please see the presentations included in this month’s board folder (linked below).
See the agenda, statistics sheet, and other documents from this meeting at http://catalog.johnstonlibrary.com/board/2016-01/. Going forward, I plan to post summaries like this following each board meeting. Remember that all documents related to board meetings are accessible via the “Library Board” link on the intranet under the “Staff Resources” menu.