Weekly Report July 18-23
This week we 3,467 circulated items, received 680 items in transit, and sent 651 items. We requested 477 items and filled 411 hold requests; registered 27 patrons for library cards, and added 18 new items. The most popular book this week is The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter by Hazel Gaynor.
For the first time, all of our meeting rooms were booked on Monday morning! We hosted 21 meetings in our conference, study and tutoring room for 54 people, and had 2 no shows.
Our air conditioning is running and we have unlimited access to filtered water for those in need of a cool place to go; thanks to the Board of Health for including us in their Heat Advisory this week.
The Library received a $1,000 grant award for mental health awareness programming in October 2022 from the Coalition for a Healthy Greater Worcester from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Beth covered in youth services; updated the Library’s website, social media, and events calendar; worked on program planning; had a remote assistance session with Rambod from Vadar, worked on 5-year forecasting documents. She submitted bills and wrote 2 applications for CPS funding; prepared Library Board of Trustee materials; and reviewed the Library pages on the Town’s website. We have registered 10 staff and 2 trustees for Community CPR so we can apply for our Food License. Staff from several departments updated opening and closing procedures. She passed a funding opportunity on to the Friends.
We held our 124th job meeting and surpassed our one-year anniversary for substantial completion. Roman Iron came to sand down some edges on the glass staircase rail. The community kitchen fire suppression system passed its annual inspection. Beth provided appliance and door information to Ron from DRA, who is working on our LEED certification application. Beth did a lot of work to edit the list of outstanding items, passing some off to William Blake (thank you William!). Ron walked through with a millworker to get a quote for lowering sinks and counters to ADA compliance.
A visitor put over 30 items for donation through the book return Wednesday, even though the Library was open and the Friends have a book donation bin in the parking lot. There is a high likelihood that the machine will go out of order when the operating instructions displayed on the screen are not being followed. Please follow the on-screen instructions and return ONLY Library items one at a time, through the AMH. The following can cause a breakdown:
• Returning non-library items, such as book donations, that do not go in the book return
• Returning more than one item or stacking items
• Returning items at an angle, so they catch on the edge of the belt and stop the machine
• Returning items edge first instead of spine first or spine to the left– paperbacks and magazines are more likely to catch on the conveyor belt
• Sticking foreign objects into the flap, such as jackets, trash, food…
Our vendor has set up an alert if the AMH jams after hours, so in the future we can put out a message on social media if we know it’s not working. As a reminder, there is no urgency to returning items when the Library is closed—items are never scheduled to be due on Sunday or a holiday, and we do not charge late fees, and items automatically renew.
All staff covered the circulation desks and worked in the sorting room to manage returned items and delivery items. Sandhya worked on out of network requests, home delivery, cleared the Hold Shelf of items not picked up by deadline (we hold for 1 week). She provided Notary Services for 2 patrons. Sandhya submitted several tickets to Bibliotheca – we want to enable email due date slips from the self-checks, make edits to the printed slips, and get alerts when the AMH goes down. She prepared projects for our Friday volunteer for Friday and assisted a patron with a HotSpot when he lost connection to our Wi-Fi during meeting room use. She updated Museum Pass Checkout instructions for staff.
Allie worked on planning August main display, troubleshooting lobby self-check for patron and hold receipt errors, working with Bibliotheca technician on lobby self-check issues, worked extra to fill in for dinner gaps, meeting room reservations, curating content and creating graphics for August newsletter, helping patrons with copying, faxing, scanning to USB, processing deliveries, Libby app, CW MARS app and the Hoopla app. Jane worked on New York Times best seller fiction purchase recommendations, prepared the Dewey Decimal Number of the Week Display for 300-399 (economics, law, folklore), worked on an endcap display, and checked for patrons with the wrong home library. Ranjita worked on the New York Times best seller non-fiction purchase recommendations, organized the Library of Things, and processed requests and returns of from out of network items.
Children’s Room staff assisted patrons, running various programs, and prepping for upcoming programming. Programs offered this week include Summer Movie & Craft, 3 sessions of Summer Bookworms, Summer Stories for Babies and Toddlers, Camp Create with Sticks and Yarn, Summer Preschool Storytime, Summer Bubble Program, Summer Rock Games, Summer LEGO Brick Builders, Summer Songs in the Park, and our second session of Summer Sewing Camp.
Allison shifted a bunch of the YA fiction collection to help make more room on shelves and weeded some older, not circulating items from the YA nonfiction collection. She also worked on collection development to have book orders ready to go when the new Technical Services Librarian is hired. Summer programs this week included Teen Movie Night and Disappointing National Parks. The few people who had signed up for the Parks program cancelled so it was cancelled.
Heidi and Eric answered reference questions. Heidi created library cards for people, and worked on program planning. She also facilitated the Daytimers Book Discussion of The Movement of Stars, by Amy Brill as well as the GPL Mystery Discussion of Breaking Wild, by Diane Les Becquets. Eric updated the Gale database page procedure and the website at https://www.galepages.com/mlin_c_graftpl/all, helped with museum passes/room reservations, and circulation, reached out to Kanopy for pricing information, as we are thinking of moving on from Hoopla, and looking into options for shipping for BWB/getting boxes for weeding materials.