Director’s Report for Feb. 2004

The library was a beneficiary of some very nice articles in the local newspapers this past month. A couple articles were in the Fairmont Sentinel detailing the trip I won to PLA, as well as the wonderful donation that Julie Leichtmann and Edward Jones gave to the library to provide the Value Line Investment Survey for the next 3 years ($1900). There was also a picture of one of our regular patrons reading while attending a wrestling event, and articles in the Martin County Star detailing reading clubs and the grant that Welcome and Dunnell received from REA which allowed them to purchase some furniture for the libraries. It’s a goal of mine to try and have positive articles in the newspapers printed at least once a quarter, as this helps keep the library on the minds of people and businesses from the community.

We will be using some of the money from the Groven Fund to update our library. Money from the fund can be used to update classical music in our collection, and can also be used in ways that support the classical music collection (ie, the security gates were installed at the front doors in the Fairmont location to help safe-guard our music collection). We will be taking out $8000 from the fund which well allow us to do the following:

-----Create a listening area in the front of the library, with two CD listening stations, furniture and new shelving units to store our CD collection.
-----Purchase a kiosk that will allow us to display information regarding our CD collection, as well as other events occurring at the library.

-----Purchase two new computers to be used as catalog look-up stations, which can be used to browse our CD collection as well as the library’s general collection.

-----Purchase additional classical music to update our collection.

There is a lot of ‘busy work’ that I am currently working on, which includes reviewing our technology plan and how it relates to LSTA funding (working in conjunction with TdS on this plan), Annual reports, and the ongoing automation project.

There were two meetings this past month, one in Fairmont and one held in Trimont with the Branch managers. The Fairmont staff will be creating the agenda and they decided quarterly meetings were sufficient unless something special came along. The last meeting dealt mostly with changes in job duties. The Branch managers and I discussed similar issues, and also talked about the Summer Reading Program that will be coming up shortly.