Library Board - Regular Meeting

Now we're going to record. All right. I call this meeting to order. And I'm just taking some attendance classes. That leaves you false fear. Eve marks. Here. Library Director Jennifer Whitting? Present. And our liaison, Mayor Steve Wright, today. And the Griffith will be providing our friends and foundation reports. Was unable to attend. Kathy was unable to attend. Any changes to be objective? All right, on to mute for a hold of minutes. From our March meeting. Oh, what's March? It's the first. Is there a motion to approve? I don't know. And a second. Minutes are approved. And community engagement. Does anyone have any community engagement reports in the last month? I bragged you up a little bit. Somebody was saying about how the Dalles library was the most wonderful library they'd ever been to for children. I said, oh, you got to see ours. I was down at the Cambut Street Center and they were saying how cool it was that we partnered with the Seaside Historical Society for Just three months. I think the origin. They have another talk. Thank you. All right. Well, then on to the assistant margin report which is That's your email or person that you have?

There's something on the agenda. A little bit later, we will circle back to a little bit this report sort of as an example, but just want to go through some highlights that you shared We are getting some pretty decent attendants that are Programs. What was added and not included because it was this was printed before the Saturday program if you had 12 attend the Climate Change for Coastal Gardeners. On saturday so that was the best turnout for that. 13 at Johnny Guitar, and that's coming up. So we're getting some good numbers for Of course, coming up, we have working night tomorrow night and another book talk on Saturday. And again, we're doing twice a month for gorge and hiding. And then um Additionally, calling it adult programming, but it's under additional programs are the the book discussions so one book one seaside coming up. So our first one will be next tuesday The eight here in this room at 11 and then Again, Saturday at 1 p.m. In the middle there, I think Wednesday night is when Beach Books is having their group discussion And then, of course, on the 17th In this one it'll be at Seaside Brewing, similar to a history and ops presentation. Might need to chat with you about. Mental notes or recorded notes. Yeah, figuring out what that would look like. And yeah, the teams are, again, super fun, the ones we have coming up. Sidewalk poetry is one of my favorites. So April is poetry Month.

So last year, the last year cooperated and it looks like it might do the same this year so we had poetry all up and down the sidewalk along Broadway here. It's really inspirational. Like original poetry or some original and some No, I'm just sort of written copy. Books, fine, poems, if you've never heard of this, it's where you take books and stuff. So showing your spine so you can create short combs by just the titles that are showing. I'm, of course, looking for sandwiches and Shakespeare. So I just have to test. And you will see toward the end of the month, the team book club. So again, the teens choose the books that they read. They submit suggestions Mary will go through and ensure that they're appropriate and all sorts of things. Then come back and say, here are the selections and they all voted for hunchback of paper date so Notre Dame, which is a very thick book and very tiny type. So we'll see how that goes. It's helpful. They voted for knowing how big it is. Correct. So again, if you show up 10 a.m. On a Saturday. They are food motivated so we do provide snacks like I would need a lot more than a decent bagel and you know cup of hot cocoa to get me. Outside of a college level course. And just circling back to the one book one seaside there's flood throughout the books. We had one book returned.

That someone had read and brought back. So we have another one that's available for But we have a bunch of folks seemingly interested in the program. We'll see how it goes. See what it looks like. I'm sorry. All right. And I'm here with you to the different financial report yes um i was just looking over the minutes and he did give you a good background where we're at. We've been meeting and working on policies One of them that we were working on last month was financial policies so that we have a a good feel of how we're going to use our funds. At this point, we have about $7,000 in a checking account, about $10,000 in the friend's savings account and that those are kind of kept as the active monies, the monies that will pay for some of these programs, things like that. And the foundation had accrued about $33,000. And we'll be putting moving that money into the US Bank CDs this Friday. And getting that in there. The plan is about endowment fund, the money from the foundation will not be used unless we really, really, really, really think about it and talk about it. And it's not something that's going to be just Used every year for programming. We're looking at this being something that can be built up so that we can then use the interest from it for projects and have that available in the future. I think that's going to be a good thing. You've got some dates on here. We've got the meeting with the We're hosting the chamber on May 7th. And then in July, we'll be having the The meeting that we're inviting all the members to.

We should have the membership forms out by your next meeting, so all of you can join. We are really working on making it a membership organization. The Franks have been they kind of lost kind of track of it for a while. I think with COVID and everything else. And so even some people who had joined never got put in the list. And so we're working really hard to make sure that we reach out to everyone that ever was a member of the Seaside Brand, the library And getting them into Chinese New Friends and foundational organization. So I think it's a good marriage. I think it's a good merge. And this is good for both organizations and they're both going to come out stronger with this. And I don't know if you could see or received, these are the magnets that we made with our new logo. Christy Waits is on the committee and she is a graphic designer. And so she did some really nice magnets and we have stickers and we have we've got a button on your menu there. So we'll be getting some of those out at the chamber event and um maybe they can look for sale. I don't know. We ought to have some things. But of course, Tita's all got to have a merch. So I'm not sure what other kind of merchandise that she's going to want to have. She's all about the merch. I think it's a good start. You've got to build your audience before you And so, yeah, so I think, but I do think it's a good thing and we'll be able to We need the members.

Because from what I have gathered, the revenue from the bookstore is maybe about half of what the annual request is from the library for support and programs. So the hope is that membership dues We'll definitely cover that other half and then Help us build up. So if they have something big one year that we can add an extra thousand to. To that, but it's about $10,000 that the library is looking at to the Friends Foundation to support mostly programming. And so we want to be able to continue with that. That's one of the reasons why we need to make sure we get meters. So how many numbers that make. You know, the rates are going to be like 25 no $25 for individuals, $40 for families. 75 for nonprofits. Maybe $100 for business. And of course, the unpopular $1,000 lifetime membership. Which is always nice to have, especially to kind of kickstart you. Into something. And so I can't, we were changing and revising a little bit last time, so I don't Don't take me on my word on that one, but… What I figured when I was kind of playing around with the numbers is you probably need to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 members. And the last time they counted the membership, it was about any effort, really. It was like 250 members. So… You know, it's fairly successful to have that membership so We'll really be pushing for that and encouraging people and staff to go.

Maintenance of pins to be able to do that fairly. And then you can see, of course, the newsletter is coming back in some form. Yes, we talked about the fact that We're looking at doing the newsletter not as something that has to be done every quarter or every half year or whatever, but we'll do An occasional newsletter when we need to have it out for certain times, like we'll do it when we're going to be renewing people and this is going to be a calendar year membership year so that we do in December, January. Children may only then and then maybe we'll do a mailing later on in the community to promote summer reading and And that kind of thing. And then also anyone who for the first membership Hey, so I wish in october of the year. They'll actually have their membership year start in January. So they'll have a full year And, you know, working through some of those details, you think, oh, those details Yeah, you do, because then they come up. And so he is really good at policies. That's not her forte. So she's keeping us… Keeping us going with the policy. So I think that's about it. What you've already reported. But do think about coming on. They said. At 8 a.m. All right. Thank you for the update. And Jennifer, your library director reports. Yeah, this one is a little bit short and sweet. Okay. Opportunities. So I did want to just highlight, I was doing some numbers recently that the staffing that we have, we have seven and 10 staff FTE for the library And it's been pretty steady. For quite some time. Those are nine individual folks filling those seven and a half hours.

Ftv hours. And I tallied it up because we had a couple of folks having anniversaries. We have over 80 years of service. To the seaside telefiring with those nine folks, which I think is pretty impressive. And some of them, I have to point out. I don't say names, but one individual has been here 22 years. Everyone guesses as to who that one is. And just behind him. Connie, who's been here in a number of different roles in almost 17 years. And Susan publicly sought at the desk. Just now she's almost about 13 years. So we have some longevity in a variety of different roles. I think that speaks to… the city in which we live and the community in which we live. I'm very proud of our staff. You do an amazing job and change is hard. You know, lots of things are changing at City Hall. Actually, Josh and I just met today with Zach about the new credit card payment system. Which is going to require a lot of candy and baked goods and patients and we shall see. I did suggest to Zach, I said, maybe we should just do away with charging for library cards and then we wouldn't have to take credit cards or anything Are you saying that it's only payment by credit card? No, you can still take cash and check. And interpretive dance. Credit card. The majority of what we bring in on credit cards usually um usually usually my requirements for the year.

So, and I just wanted to do a couple of reports about the partnerships and community engagement so i I met with representatives from El Centro Northwest. Recently, they're situated here in Seedside just behind Maria's flowers And they have a really strong presence in Cannon Beach and here that have been Astoria. And they have a meeting, a monthly meeting. I think it's called a birthday. And it's a Tuesday night. And of course, we close at 7. But we were able to kind of negotiate that It's come here at 6 and I would just stay here. We can close the library and continue the meeting. And I'm excited because I'm able to present the materials that we purchased. A water park to the group. So this group of Spanish speaking individuals, I don't know how many people are coming or what the makeup of the group is, but I'm excited to to Adam. We've already started talking about doing a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration in collaboration with them. Late September or late October. And then I spoke about the one book one seaside. Community read event And yeah, this is a pilot. I'm excited to see how it goes. I hope from it will be maybe a subset of folks who are interested in being involved on a committee, maybe choosing the book in the future, putting some more Putting more structure to the program itself which I would love to do but a lot of other hats and I think it would be great for that to be part of something else in other folks could be dissipated.

I was interviewed for two different pivots. One was the ILS funding article Suzanne got her picture featured for the article, which was fine. Because I didn't know that that was happening and that was a little awkward. But yeah, we were both interviewed for that article. That the ILS funding. Go away and that's on the agenda to talk about a little bit. And also for being posted on Facebook about looking for folks to help with the how-to clinics So . I'm trying to like Jasmine reached out to interview me about that and was able to talk about a lot of the other programs that we're offering. So it's always nice to be able to be in the paper. Or fun things. So that's pretty much normal. All right. And the Amish Business, the library website redesign. That go away. Oh, okay. Thank you, Zoom. Maybe share screen. Yes, it is now redesigned. Oh, wait, my mouse is a little ham. Maybe share screen. Absolutely no idea how to do that. It's a time. Okay. This is our new site that we launched and we launched It is right here. We're asking for feedback. We want to know.

And if you highlight over here and you click on that, it'll slow down And then it'll pop open box if you have it connected. To your email. So it lands on our calendar page There's a couple of different things I want to point out here. This one is saved as pin board. You can also see it as a monthly. Which is kind of unnecessary. Calendar format And the agenda is just the laundry list of all of them. So depending on how you like to view the information. It shows up a couple different ways. And again, the easy access things up here, you can quickly search the catalog You can just click into the catalog that'll pop up a new window or log into your account. We'll do the same. And this, does anyone know what that little icon stands for? That's right. We thought, well, if you know, you know. So folks can easily access Living Right from that. Button there. So we streamlined it a little bit we have these these three basics up top. About us. And again, you can see the we're slowly building in the pages, so not all of the pages that we had before have been reinstated. The library board, for example, will actually take you right to the city page and talks about the library board. That way we have one place to keep things updated. We're working on the mission, changing that, just contact us is just going to be contact form art at the library is getting built out too we're slowly adding information about the various art exhibits we've had

As you can see in areas where it's under construction, it will tell you this area is under construction And let's see what else I can share. The kids and teens will take you to another landing page Youth services. So it has a little bit of a different feel if you still feel like you're city seaside library page. Again, we're continuing to to build out these pieces here. Oh, yeah. The footers of every page look like this. On each one it is. We wanted to streamline it a little bit. Take some things out, maybe highlight some other pieces that we're missing. And then under services. That's sort of where we have all the rest of this stuff. So programs for adults, how to register for a library card. If you want to request material Let's see. Let me do this dropdown. Isn't that great when it works? Generally i would be able to say, so I'm not sure why that's… Yeah, I think you're click something. It's still easy. Good. Oh, here we go. For some reason, it's like right over that part so Request material. I don't know if you've tried to request material recently, but that button had been broken. On our old website, that was one of the reasons why we were doing it. I've never heard of it so I wonder what it was. Well, follow up with that. Is there any such a library of things?

Oh, like a listing of them? Yeah. No, I mean, they're just in our catalog, but we, yeah, so if we search the library catalog Based by… I'll just include just seaside here. Science centers, here's the telescope. The DVD player, which I haven't checked out before. Yeah, check down the microscope once. Metal protector Yeah. Those are our library of things. So that's if you just have library Yes. So one of the reasons we did update the website was the structure that the previous website was built upon was no longer supported. So when we wanted to make changes, it was challenging. So Alex, our… are kind of our tech tech guy. Researched how to make websites on Wix, which is pretty easy to navigate system. He's been working behind the scenes building this. He and I would meet in here with the whiteboard and kind of draw the architecture and think about what we wanted, where we wanted it, how we wanted it to flow This is… The end result of it. And, you know, right here, we absolutely want people to let us know what they're thinking you know if it's something we can fix or makes sense that we'll try to update it. But even just having multiple eyes on it, we've been able to

Make some little tweaks along the way saying this is hard to read or this is scripted. Why is this place and not this place so this place Yes, you guys can come with it. And we will continue to build out these pages here. So the movies at the library kind of neat, you can see all of the different, I'm not sure if it shows the ones that we've done in the past. Just pulls directly from, I think the idea is that similar to the art at the library, it'll have sort of a this is the reason why we do this. And here are some pastors. Examples and then information about upcoming events. And of course, the 3D printing remember we worked on the policy printing And that is now Live. Welcome. So this is basically the policy well worked on. Just keep it here. And he has received a few requests for printing there was one little item that was getting picked up. It was a two-parter and it's maybe four or five dollars worth of filament. So fill in the basic information here and generates the request for Alex. Teachers. So I would definitely welcome any suggestions you have. You're exploring or if you hear folks talking about it. You know, the grocery line, library website. What do they do?

Yeah, all about the lady stuff. All right, that is… That is finally our library website redesign, which has been under construction. Okay, then type new business and the MLS discussion. Yeah, so I sent out some information about it. I actually got an email, I think it was yesterday morning, that all of the IMLS staff, which maybe there's only Is it 70 or 80. Were put on administrative leave. And um And there's been a lot of information coming from our state organization, our state library organization, keeping us informed of what they're hearing because it's really through the through the state that we would be receiving grants. Coming from ILS through these block funds, essentially. And as we talked about in the historian article While we have applied for time wellness grants over the years It's basically what God's rock started. So libraries reading outreach Classic. The reason we're able to give I urge cars to every child. So for pieces like that. It'll be unfortunate if that goes away. I think for the most part class of county in general is in general funded by a variety of different sources, so we're not so heavily reliant on the grant funding that many other small and rural libraries are.

Are there any statewide services that are funded by IMLS? I think there used to be some of the online databases and such that we're accessible to all libraries were purchased with INMS funds. Yes, it has no history with the state. A number of the consultants and staff at the State Library Fund. Through IMLS. I would say about 25% from one of the emails I received from the state library state librarian, 25% of their funding is from ILS. So that's a big chunk i mean it's So there could be staff reductions from the state library could be and also any of those resources that are statewide Databases and things. Gone as well. So even though, you know, I was a librarian Even though we haven't done any grants recently, we're still affected by that because of the larger And I would also imagine kind of a trickle-down Affected that. So if libraries in smaller communities are having to shut their doors or or sees purchasing content for their communities community is being affected but you know it's possible that we might see an influx of their neighboring communities that are In eastern Oregon, I think their entire library loan system. Those are tiny, tiny. They're gigantic. This is a gigantic library compared to a lot of those libraries. And I think that big goal will be totally. So the reason I put it on here really is just to to have this conversation. And I think before a couple of weeks ago, many folks wouldn't have known what IMLS stood for.

I've learned about it for many, many years. Maybe in New Zealand. It's a bit of reduced it. I think IMLSC mostly does libraries with libraries museum and maybe some of the larger museums, but they don't do as much. Organistorm society in central Yeah. The big ones. Everybody's talking about it's like on my Facebook feed, it's all these newspapers and other organizations are talking about it's like wow Too bad. But I think, you know, again, you know. To stopping in the grocery store. Oh, I can really speak somewhat knowledgeably about it. By the status quo. Not just our library system, but we're So does the funding for Library's Rockstein from IMLS or just the funding to start it up? Yeah, it was a startup equivalent. And that was announced to a grant to start that up. The funding for that now comes from a variety of places. We have a grant from a way and then also classic county each year. What puts us into their budget for a chunk of that to make that available to you. Awesome. To her to say countywide group of people that have gotten together recently. They put some paper as well. Just talking about what federal funding is at risk or money that comes the state from the Fed. Remember, this would be an honor.

To come so far us. $120 million or so. Possible funding issues. Seaside itself. As far as I can tell, not really affected at all. Sustainable programs. No? The only grant that I think the possibility we had them electric charging stations over at the visitor center. That was a state grant, but it was funded by the Fed. But as far as we know, they keep telling us that we've got the money So far for this year, we did apply for that team internship grant through the same. We were awarded that and we had received the check. So that it's in the grain. So we're covered for this summer. In addition, we have received the Ready to Read grant, which I did learn Initially, we had thought that ready to read, which helps us do the summer reading book for seaside, like all of the libraries, including NAPA and Juul, which through the rock program That actually comes out of the state's general fund. If that might be diminished, if a quarter of their budget goes away because of funding. But it's not directly correlated. It does come out of your channel. And reports from library staff refresh. Yes. So when I was putting together the package last week.

Realizing, you know, Josh I think Josh inherited this format from Jonathan or whoever came before him as the assistant director But long before my time of a report. But I guess the question is to you all, what is it that you would find most useful in a report either from me or from josh or from others in the library. That's also most important reporting. You know. Well, and the calendar last month, how many people participated Yeah, so that'll be coming up. Would you like to see anything farther into the future or is that coming up I want to say something really big coming down the line. Yeah, you had one of those murder mystery nights yeah okay For not lost that month yeah six months. Okay, and then report on statistics because i think what has been What I notice is that we generally just have statistics from the adult programs for the previous month. So we're showing statistics for all of them Anything else? He oversees volunteers. If it's cataloging or other other aspects of what he I was in charge of it. Well, those kind of statistics yeah It'd be nice to know like when they volunteer hours. That's always good.

Okay. Part of Christine's names and words. Yes. I think I finally did too. I always forget. Yeah, we'll need to get our volunteers. Hooked into that too. And then for my report, I think I initially started thinking in terms of big buckets like the buildings, staffing community engagement It'd be nice to have some statistics on your report too, like library usage And when you flash those numbers for your annual report. Yeah, absolutely. And I looked at that so um March, the first day of the month is when I get all the previous months data. So the timing of it is a little unfortunate. That's okay. We're good with a month out. And then I just, I reported. Last month, last time, so we'll Next time. I'll definitely give you some But that was on my radar too. I thought, well, next time. Of course it's anything else. Anything else that you would tell you about? Useful or useful. And somebody's walking. Because your meetings here in the library, you can kind of hold. Want to put it later in the month. That is true. We've actually talked about changing up the time And part of it is with part of it is with with using this Zoom space because we share it with the city of seaside.

Later on this particular day, we went up against community. So we could look at it on January 1. Someone to consider. I'll share that with quick. Next month we'll come back to this. And no public today for any public comment. I'm going to throw something out. That's something may have seen it already. I'm Cheryl Adams Jack, your former member. Made it to Maryland today. 6,000 miles on that trip. And so she is now in her new home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. That's great. Didn't break down or anything. 10 states or something. I mean, it was the name of this southern group. Yeah, it was quite the When I say adventure. It's a minor comments. Okay. All right. Well, hold on i gotta figure out The next day is… Looks like our next meeting will be NASICS and torque end.