#4 Reports A. Activities Report
Hedberg Public Library
Activity Report
August 2010
Adult Services
Linda Belknap, Adult Programming Associate, submitted her letter of resignation to the Business
Office this month. She has chosen September 14, 2010 as her retirement date. A reception in
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honor of her 20 years of service to HPL will be held on September 9 from 3 -5 p.m. in the
Program Room.
Ren é Bue, Bilingual Outreach Coordinator, has been arranging joint projects with the Benjamin
Franklin Library in Mexico City. She met the director of the library while on vacation there this
month. Other libraries in Mexico City will be traveling to Wisconsin and stopping here for
meetings and tours. This is a coup for us as a public library in Wisconsin and we are looking
forward to a unique, ground-breaking, and wonderful relationship with the Mexico City libraries.
Ren é will meet some of the directors again when she travels to Guadalajara, Mexico in
November for the Internation Book Fair which is held there annually. She will attend the fair as
a guest of the American Library Association, a very special honor.
The Hedberg at Home Materials Delivery Program added two new patrons this month.
Participation in the program is steady. The large print, DVD, and audio book collections are
most popular.
Three authors presented programs at HPL this month. Dennis Weidemann, Jerry Rasmussen,
and Ray Paul spoke to audiences of various sizes about their works. Jerry Rasmussen also
entertained his audience by performing various folk songs he had written about Janesville. The
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women’s self defense class, the S. A. F. E. Program, on August 17 was overbooked. The class
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limit is 16; over 35 people signed up for it. The class will be offered again on October 5 to
meet the needs of those who weren’t able to participate this month. More sessions will be
booked if the need arises. Two Janesville Police officers present the program.
Jean Yeomans, Adult Services Coordinator, and Carol Kuntzelmann, Technical Services and
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Collection Manager, attended a workshop at the Waterford Public Library on August 10. They
learned tips and ideas about leading book discussion groups.
Jean, Carolyn Messer, Susan Braden, Kate Hull, Diana McDonald, Jennifer Twardzik, and Carol
Kuntzelman met to finalize plans for the October and November program series called “Life
Online: Navigating the Digital World”. The series was created to familiarize the public with the
various social media technologies and book-related tools on the computer and Internet.
Central Services
The Circulation activity report which provides data about the circulation of HPL’s materials
regardless of where it was checked out shows a significant increase this month compared to last
August in the following areas: adult DVD feature, TV and non-fiction and youth DVD fiction,
fiction books and read along kit fiction on CD. The number of YA video games circulation for
both August 2009 and 2010 was exactly the same, 164.
The number of library card registrations from August 2009 declined with youth registration
down 25% and adult by 6%.
Of the total monthly checkouts at HPL, an average of 64.7% occurred at the four RFID self-
check stations. Patrons inducted 45,816 items this month.
A 2% increase was seen in the number of reserves filled. Print still outrank AV in reserves
checked out by HPL patrons.
Compared to August 2009 the number of “on shelf” reserves requested show a 30% increase this
month. Circulation staff prints a daily “pull” report and found 84% of materials sought.
Total checkouts by ALS libraries this August was down 948 from last August. Of the total ALS
checkouts this month HPL represented 55.7% of the total. Hedberg continues to borrow more
materials from the county public libraries than lend.
Collection Development
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On August 10, Collection Manager Carol Kuntzelman and Adult Services Coordinator Jean
Yeomans attended a workshop on the subject of leading a book discussion. Presenter was Gary
Warren Niebuhr, who has much experience in organizing book clubs, selecting titles, and
conducting discussions. His special interest is mystery book clubs, and Jean and Carol picked up
a lot of useful tips on themes, authors, and provocative questions; ones they can employ as they
kick off their new mystery book discussion series in September. The theme is mysteries with
foreign locations, and they start off with one set in England, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the
Pie, 70 year-old author Alan Bradley’s first mystery. It’s been a huge success, proving you’re
never too old.
Human Resources/Accounting
The Book Cart Drill Team, Hedberg on the Highway, finalized costume and cart decoration
decisions in preparation for their trophy-winning participation in the Labor Day Parade. Team
participants include Virginia Darrah, Emrick Gunderson, Patricia Hetzel, Beth Webb and her
sister Pam, Elizabeth Hough, Diana McDonald, Susan Braden, Sharon Alfano, Burdette Richter
and Renee Miller. The team put in many volunteer hours including practice, costume creation
and cart decoration.
Reference Services
Total Patron Questions: Aug 2010 Aug 2009
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Patron questions asked at Reference Desk – 3174 2817
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Patron questions asked at Service Desk – 2790 2928
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Asked at Youth Services 2040 2483
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Asked at Bilingual Desk (when staffed) 4 6
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Asked at Teen Central (when staffed) 84
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Asked via email 37
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Total patron questions 8129 8469
Reportable Reference Questions:
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Asked at the Reference Desk 1451 1441
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Asked at Service Desk 413 271
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Asked at Youth Services 748 710
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Asked at Bilingual Desk (when staffed) 2
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Asked at Teen Central (when staffed) 7
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Asked via email 17
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Total for all service points 2638 2488
Statistics from InterLibrary Loan:
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Items requested from other libraries for Hedberg patrons – 434
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Items received from other libraries for Hedberg patrons – 386
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Requests received from other libraries to borrow Hedberg materials – 412
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Items lent to other libraries from the Hedberg collection – 310
Reference Librarian Sue Braden is the 2010 winner of Wisconsin Library Association’s Muriel
Fuller Award. The award is given annually to a library professional or paraprofessional in
recognition of outstanding accomplishments which have significantly improved and benefited
library services. This is the second award Sue has received this year. Earlier in 2010 she
collected the Governor’s Award for Archival Innovation for the completed GM oral history
podcasts and transcripts. The Muriel Fuller award recognizes the full breadth of Sue’s duties:
staffing the reference desk, answering email reference questions, teaching computer classes,
selecting books, and taking a leading role in collecting and preserving local Janesville history.
The State of Wisconsin is now subscribing to Learning Express as a part of the Badgerlink
project, which will save HPL $4470 for subscription costs. Now that it is part of BadgerLink,
Learning Express is available to all Wisconsin residents from home.
The Inter Library Loan was “closed” for one week while Theresa Biele was on vacation. While
the department is “closed” we do not accept requests from other libraries to borrow HPL
materials. During this time Inter Library Loan Assistant Anita Day still processed incoming
materials for Hedberg patrons, so the closure did not directly affect Hedberg patrons.
Question of the month:
A patron has recently read the Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell and the Horatio Hornblower
series by C. S. Forester. The patron wanted to know what other authors wrote books like that.
The librarian checked the Novelist database for books by Bernard Cornwell, and discovered
Novelist staff had posted a “Read Alike” article for this author. The article discusses the appeal
of Bernard Cornwell’s works, and recommends Patrick O’Brien, Simon Scarrow, David Ball,
and Allan Mallinson as authors with similar appeal.
Technical Services
Technical services staff marked the successful completion of the RFID retrospective conversion
project with the tagging of the children’s read-along audio-visual collection. The tagging of
approximately 250,000 items over the past ten months is a huge accomplishment, thanks to the
effort of HPL staff who participated in the project.
One of the benefits of the RFID tagging is that TS staff now can respond to those patrons who
over the years have asked that bar codes not conceal content information found on the covers of
both print and non-print materials (particularly those of audio book cases.) In the past, for the
purpose of consistency in checkout, all bar codes were placed in the upper right hand corner of
items. This meant that, on occasion, useful information was covered by the bar code. Now that
items are checked out on the RFID tag, we can move the location of the bar code when
necessary, and patrons can get complete information about that music CD or MP3 they are
considering checking out.
Youth Services
Children’s Services
The summer in-house programming season ended the first week of August with our final
summer storytimes and the Make a Splash: Read! Finale (reported last month). In that one week
of programming, we saw 600 participants, including a small group taking a behind-the-scenes
tour of the library.
Children’s staff also went out to two community day care centers for storytime programs. The
Boys & Girls Club, the YWCA, the YMCA, as well as other groups continued to bring children
to the library, bumping our monthly walk-in numbers to 300 children and 55 adults.
Young Adult Services
The teen volunteer program for 2009-2010 concluded with a reception for teens and their
parents. Sixty middle and high school students volunteered in Youth Services during the year for
a total of 727.5 hours. Projects included TAB (Teen Advisory Board) officers, Teen Mystery
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Night, Mosi’s Birthday Party, the League of Women Voters 90 Anniversary Event, Learning
Through Play, Saturday Story Shorts, and Awesome Activities. In addition, teens assisted over
1,800 children enrolled in the Summer Library Program by checking in their reading cards and
distributing prizes.
A major picture book relabeling project was completed largely through the efforts of our teen
volunteers. Each of the 14,040 pictures books were cleaned and relabeled to help patrons and
staff better identify the books on the shelves.
Other Youth Services News:
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Laurie Bartz prepared the final evaluation for Angela Meadows, our 2010 summer WFIC
(Wisconsin Foundation for Independent Colleges) intern.
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Laurie Bartz attended a College Goal Sunday Task Force meeting.
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Julie Westby, Laurie Bartz, and Sharon Grover met again with Kari Klebba of Wildwood
Theatres to firm up plans for the fall reading program – Box Office Books, sponsored in
conjunction with Wildwood Theatres.
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Sharon Grover attended a 2 ½ day symposium on 21 Century Skills with librarians and
teachers from the School District of Janesville. Not only was it very instructive, it also
proved to be a wonderful opportunity for opening doors for greater collaboration with our
local public schools.
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Julie Westby, Laurie Bartz, and Sharon Grover attended a workshop on Google Docs and
Google Sites, presented especially for us by Renee Disch, school library media specialist
at Jefferson Elementary School.
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Sharon Grover met with Dr. Allison Kaplan, from the UW-Madison School of Library
and Information Studies, to discuss developing an evidence-based evaluation instrument
to rate the effectiveness of early literacy components in public library storytimes. Dr.
Kaplan was written into the HPL grant, “Early Literacy Achievement: A Community-
Based Partnership,” as a consultant for this project.
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Sharon Grover participated in a telephone conference for “Sync: YA Listening,” an
online audiobook project developed by AudioFile Magazine to encourage teen listening
to current and classic literature this summer. Sharon served as the public library
consultant to this project.
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Julie Westby, Laurie Bartz, Sharon Grover, and Bryan McCormick interviewed two
clerks interested in the new Children’s Assistant position in Youth Services. Philip
Schomber was hired for the position, which allows YS programming staff to have more
off-desk time, thereby increasing our ability to do community outreach as well as to
develop some new programs inside the library.