Director’s Report for March 2004

The Automation Sub-Committee at TdS will be meeting again on March 26^th when the RFP’s (Request for Product) are due back from the automation vendors. We will then be spending time over the next month going over each bid, and then selecting 3 vendors to give demonstrations to a larger audience in June. At this time we are looking to have a new system selected by July so that we can get moving on this project and hopefully have the first libraries switching over to the new system in the beginning of 2005. A lot of work to be done getting the libraries ready for the switch-over, but based on some of the vendors I looked at while I was in Seattle, this will really upgrade our service to our patrons.

Also on March 26^th is the annual Family Fun Fair at the Middle School. Jennifer will once again have a booth at the fair and will be promoting the Summer Reading Program that will be held here at the library. Tazz will also be making an appearance that evening, and should get the campaign to market our program off to a good start!

The Fairmont Area Youth Foundation is once again accepting grant applications for area projects that will benefit the children and youth of Martin County. We had thought that we would submit an application for some children’s kits (puppets paired with books, audio tapes or science kits paired with books), but we would really like to do something for Young Adults. So at PLA I went to a seminar on creating youth spaces in libraries, and came back with some really good ideas on how a Young Adult area should look like, how it should be designed and what it should offer. We decided then to go ahead and try again this year for a grant to upgrade our Young Adult area using ideas and suggestions from this seminar, and hopefully we can get the go ahead. The grant is due March 15^th.

We have begun to receive some of the items we purchased through the Groven Fund which will help us update our library and promote our music collection. The Kiosk is here, the new shelving units to house the CD’s have arrived, and the wiring in the building has been done. I have ordered new classical music and once that arrives and is cataloged I will put that out on the floor, and I will be ordering furniture shortly (I waited till the shelving units arrived so I could match the furniture as closely as possible to the shelving). We will then be putting up some additional information about the Groven Fund so that patrons will have a better appreciation of what the Fund has made possible here in the library.

Lastly, I finally found a website that offers free service for tracking users who visit web pages. It is called WebStat and it monitors traffic visiting our library home page. The nice thing about this service is that it not only counts how often the site was visited, but it can tell you how many different users accessed your site and how many of those people were return visitors. For instance, I had the web counter up for 11 days at the end of February. During that time there were 828 visits to the library web page by 175 total visitors, 25 of which came back on separate occasions. As I continue to market the library and the library web site I can monitor usage of the site and see how we progress.