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#4 Reports A. Activities Report Hedberg Public Library Activity Report January 2009 Adult Services In January, Rene’ worked with Margo Harris of La Leche League to create a “Hot Topics” bookmark about pregnancy, breastfeeding, childbirth, and parenting for the HPL Spanish collection. The bookmark will help patrons locate materials in the collection for checkout. Rene’ attended the Diversity Action Team/YWCA/Janesville City Council diversity forum. In January she also met with Rachell Atchinson-Bennett form the Badger Council of Girl Scouts to discuss a possible partnership for a Mother’s Day program at HPL. The Mobile Mexican Consulate visited the Job Center in Janesville for the first time ever at the end of January. HPL, along with the YWCA, the Diversity Action Team, and Pueblos Unidos, organized the visit that helped Latinos apply for and receive passports and important Mexican documents. The event was sponsored by the Blackhawk Community Credit Union and served 1210 people. Rene’ and Laurie Bartz have been planning a bilingual book discussion to be held in March. The book, Breaking Through/Senderos Fronterizos written by Francisco Jimenez, is about the challenges faced by Jimenez himself at age fourteen when his family moved from Mexico to California in an attempt to escape poverty. Racism and hardship are two of the themes of the book which is also available in Spanish. Jean attended the Rock County Health Assessment Planning Committee’s open forum on th January 13. Over 50 people gathered to discuss issues affecting the health of Rock County’s residents. The planning committee will continue to meet monthly through May of this year. The Resident’s Council at Rock Haven invited Jean to present information about library services available to their facility. Fourteen people listened to information about materials available for activities staff to use for programming. The library will set aside requested materials for staff to use each month in their facility. th The highlight of the month for Jean was her participation in the 7 Rock County Homeless Intervention Task Forces’ count on January 28-29. Jean and 61 others spent the hours between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. searching for homeless persons in Rock County. Jean and her crew of four Beloit College students checked likely places along Hwy. 51 from the Dane County line to the city of Beloit. The count is done twice per year to gather numbers used to determine the amount of Housing and Urban Development funding sent to local community agencies. Twenty-one persons were found, most of them in the Beloit area. The 2009 Winter-Spring Nancy Parker adult program series kicked off January 24 with "Graced by the Seasons: Fall and Winter in the Northwoods." Naturalist John Bates narrated a slide show about how various species prepare for and survive the winter. 23 people attended. The next afternoon, January 25, photographer Craig M. Wilson of Madison talked about his kite aerial photography, which has been displayed on the library art walls for the entire month. Craig showed slides and brought the 20' kite he uses to take photos from a remote-controlled camera. 35 people attended. The WIS-ILL Modular Railroading Club held their annual HO gauge model railroad demo in the Program Room all day Saturday, January 31 and Sunday afternoon, February 1. Organizers said the event drew their largest crowd ever, especially on Sunday. Total attendance is estimated at 250-300 people of all ages. Seven more programs are planned for the Parker series, which runs through April. Upcoming topics include recycling, heart health, Indonesian cultures, print-on-demand publishing, a film screening of "Critical Condition" about America's uninsured, NASCAR, and planning a bicycle trip. Building Operations Per Mar Security performed their annual test of our fire alarm system. This process takes about two days to complete since all of the smoke detectors, heat detectors, duct detectors, strobes and horns, and the pull stations are all individually tested and recorded by the Per Mar technician. Two of the smoke detectors and one of the strobe light/horns were found to be defective. Central Services Circulation is up from January 2008. Checkout staff has felt the impact from unemployment with library card registration up 24% compared to last January and more than 50% higher from last month. The breakdown of print circulation, 56% compared to audiovisual circulation, 44% continues to remain constant. Even though HPL continues to be a net borrower by a slight difference of 511 circulations; crossover borrowing by other ALS library residents is higher at HPL. BPL had only 421 circulations at their library from Janesville residents compared to 2,295 circulations at Hedberg from BPL card holders. Total checkouts from OverDrive was slightly down from last month however the number of reserves placed is up. Job Resource Center circulation was about the same as last month. The number of holds filled increased 24% compared to January 2008. Over 100 new patron photos were added to the database. The first road trip to view RFID technology (radio frequency identification) took place Friday th January 30. Six staff from circulation, technical services, administration and computer services went to Indian Trails Public Library in Wheeling, IL and Warren-Newport Public Library in Gurnee, IL to see ITG RFID products at work. Collection Development To paraphrase Dickens, “ It is the best of times; it is the worst of times.” Business is booming for libraries, but budgets are shrinking. With a loss of money for the adult circulating collection, the collection team is requesting funds from the Hedberg Foundation to supplement the operating budget for areas of the collection that require updating or development. These include seed money to establish a new neighborhood, “Home Improvement” or “DIY”; personal finance titles to replace those published in better economic times; more current titles on mental health; and books on art technique/instruction. The new collection of home improvement titles will consolidate items from what are now various Dewey numbers and multiple formats, and will include such subjects as plumbing, electrical repairs, appliance repair, ‘green’ building, remodeling, and construction of outdoor structures. Human Resources/Accounting Software was installed in the business manager’s office to enable the upload of agenda packets and minutes to the City of Janesville website for the Library Board of Trustees and the JATV Cable Advisory Committee. The uploaded documents can be found under Agenda Materials > Committees, Commissions & Boards > Library Board of Trustees or Cable Advisory Committee. Carol Kuntzelman, Maureen Birchfield, Hope Moccero, Sandie Gilbert and Debbie Hessian- Kjornes received “I Made A Difference” Awards for their cross-departmental assistance with heavy holiday library materials returns. The bill list of 2/18/09 includes $2,408.06 of expense for December 2008 and $59,707.96 for February 2009. The January operating statement is preliminary and a final statement will be distributed when complete. Final statements for December 2008 and January 2009 will be available when all end-of-year adjustments have been posted. Reference Services Statistics from the Reference Department: ? Patron questions asked at Reference Desk – 3777 ? Patron questions asked at Service Desk – 2963 ? Combined total of questions at both Desks – 6740 Statistics from InterLibrary Loan: ? Items requested from other libraries for Hedberg patrons – 502 ? Items received from other libraries for Hedberg patrons – 414 ? Requests received from other libraries to borrow Hedberg materials – 821 ? Items lent to other libraries from the Hedberg collection – 522 New digitization project - HPL reference librarians obtained an LSTA grant to have the early Janesville city directories digitized and hosted by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center. The directories range in years from 1857-1931, and give “snapshots in time” – who lived where, what businesses were active, statistics, and general description of the Janesville community. City directories are heavily used by genealogists and local history aficionados. The collection went live at the end of December. In January, HPL Reference staff and the Digital Collections Center completed the final edits to make the collection keyword searchable. The collection can be found at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/WI/subcollections/JanesvillesPastAbout.html#CityCounty or through a link off the Reference & Research page of the hedbergpubliclibrary.org web site. HPL held its first "Job Seeker's Open Lab" on Tuesday January 13, from 4:00-7:00 pm. At the lab, fourteen people were assisted by reference librarians Jean Yeomans Mary Buelow and computer trainer Sheryl Oberle,. Here are some examples of questions that were asked: how to search for job openings on-line how to cut and paste an application into an online job application information about work-at-home jobs information on cover letters how to find part-time jobs "power words" to give a resume more impact how to use the Hotmail's junk mail filter, so important emails are not lost in spam The second "Job Seeker's Open Lab" was held on Wednesday February 11. With an attendance of four this event was much smaller, but the Gazette sent a reporter and photographer. This hopefully will help our publicity for the March Open Lab. There were several distint themes questions running through our reference questions this month. We had several questions about the inaugeration, questions related to job hunting, job applications and skills certification, and a lot of questions about taxes and tax forms. Question of the month: A patron wanted to know what the eight flags on the stage at the presidential inaugeration represented. Reference staff first searched through news coverage of the inaugeration, and found pictures of the flags but no explanation. They did note that the flags were carried by military personnel, so they did an search in Google’s advanced mode for pictures from the inaugeration from .mil (military) websites. A photo from the defenselink.mil website identified the flags and their carriers as the “Joint Ceremonial Honor Guard”, representing all branches of the US Armed Forces. With further searching on americanflags.org, staff identified five of the flags, in order, as US Army, US Marine Corps, US Navy, US Air Force, US coast Guard, and the remaining three flags were surmised to be the Merchant Marine, Vietnam Veterans, and POW/MIA. The flags were accompanied by two rifles. Technical Services TS staff closed out the 2008 materials budget and began invoicing from a more constricted 2009 budget. The new year will see one additional budget line-- that of gaming titles for the YA collection. TS Head Kuntzelman will be meeting with Youth Services staff to establish guidelines on the ordering and processing of titles for the new collection. Youth Services Children’s Services Children’s Room staff began the New Year with a first-ever Mock Caldecott Award discussion. Each staff member nominated two pictures for the discussion, which was designed to encourage development of critical skills in evaluating the art and text in picture books. We had a wonderful discussion that brought out many of the themes the “real” Caldecott Committee would bring out. In fact, the discussion was so thorough that we ran out of time to do the same kind of weighted balloting that is done by award committees. One of the nominated titles was the actual 2009 Caldecott Medal winner: The House in the Night, illustrated by Beth Krommes, and written by Susan Marie Swanson. It’s a beautiful book – check it out. The following week our regular programming began again with our normal round of storytimes. We have noticed that we are seeing quite a few new families in the Children’s Room and more fathers are accompanying their children to programs.” Library Explorers,” an after-school th program for children in Kindergarten-5 Grade, saw 31 attendees, much higher than the programs in the previous semester. Our first “Learning Through Play” weekend drew 147 attendees to the program room, which was filled with snowy weather activities including an igloo made of empty gallon milk jugs. “Learning Sign Language,” an annual program designed to give parents and caregivers the tools to teach basic signs to infants and toddlers was very popular once again, with 65 attendees. Four groups (totaling 106 children and adults) came to the library for stories and tours. Camille Rammer, Shannon Murphy-Tollefsrud, and Sharon Grover met with Elizabeth Hough and Rebecca Haefner to plan for a “Books for Babies” project with seed money donated by the Friends of the Library. The plan is to distribute a packet from the library via pediatricians at the first well-baby check-up that will include information on the importance of reading to babies to promote early literacy, a list of books to share with babies, a library card application, a growth chart, and a coupon to come to the library for a free board book. The group discussed ways of raising additional funds for this project and Shannon made a presentation to The Exchange Club, which then donated $50. The group plans to meet again in March with René Bue, Bilingual Outreach Coordinator, to talk about other avenues for funding as well as how to include Latino parents in the project. Young Adult Services Seventeen students attended the Final Exam Cram held in the Program Room during Janesville high schools' exam week. Peer tutors were available during the Cram through the efforts of Sara Heis, Parker High School English teacher and VIC peer tutoring advisor. Teen Advisory Board membership remains strong as plans for the remainder of the school year and summer continue. In addition, teens have shown a steady interest in volunteering at the library both in the summer and during the school year. An expanded school-year volunteer program has been established by Karin Timmermann, Shannon Murphy-Tollefsrud and Laurie Bartz with the first training session held in January. Teens will be helping with Saturday Story Shorts, Family Fun Nights, Library Explorers, Gaming Nights and other special projects. TAB and teen volunteering are both examples of ways the library can provide teens with useful roles in the community and encourage students to serve others, as well as offering teens caring adult mentors outside of family and school (see Search Institute’s 40 Developmental Assets®). Sharon Grover attended the ALA Midwinter Meeting where she participated in training sessions for ALA award committee chairs. The training was very thorough and will be helpful in supervisory work at the library as well as work as chair of the 2010 Odyssey Award for Excellence in Audiobook Production for Children and Young Adults. While at the Midwinter Meeting, Sharon also met with one of the planned speakers for the Adolescent Literacy and Audiobooks workshop that will be funded by an LSTA grant. She also met with the Marketing Director from Random House/Listening Library to discuss getting a narrator for this event. Unfortunately, DPI has since informed all LSTA grantees that the funds are currently held up in Congress and everyone must wait to see how – and if – funds are allocated.