Park and Recreation Commission - Regular Meeting

I call this meeting to order at 5.01. Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance to the Black. All right. Before we begin, I want to announce that public comment is open and please follow the prompt on the screen.

Public comment is now open for this item. Call 951-826-8688 and follow the prompts to access the meeting. To request to speak, press star 9. When called to speak, press star 6 to unmute. You can also join via Zoom. The meeting ID can be found on the agenda.

Jorge, do we have any public comments?

There are no public comments.

Thank you. All right, we are beginning with the consent calendar. All matters listed under the consent calendar are considered routine by the Library Board of Trustees and may be enacted by one motion in the form listed below. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless before the Library Board of Trustees votes on the motion to adopt, members of the Library Board of Trustees or staff request specific items to be removed from the consent calendar for separate action. Do I have a motion to move and second to approve the consent calendar? I second. All right. Trustee Elstrand moved and Trustee Smith seconded.

I'll do a roll call. Thank you. Trustee Rizouk? Yes. Trustee Elstrom? Yes. Trustee Acuna? Yes. Trustee Smith? Yes. Trustee Corrales? Yes. And Trustee Ivey? Yes. Motion carries.

All right. We are moving on to discussion and action calendar. We are on item seven, accept donations from the California State Library for the Empowering Access Grant Program.

Sure. Erin Christmas, your library director. So this year the Southern California Library Cooperative, acting on behalf of the California State Library, put out a grant opportunity where they offered us to select from, I think it was six or seven different items that we could add to our collections. based on their availability of funds and interest. The ones that made sense for our organization that also fit our mission are the ones we selected. We have received an accessible privacy booth. This is similar to the privacy booth that had already been installed at the Arlanza Library, so now we have two. There's single person study rooms where you can go and have a private conversation in the library. And it didn't require us to do any construction. So that's the most exciting part. We were able to add these privacy spaces without starting from scratch, which was great. We have three family workstations we've received. Two will go to the Orange Terrace Library and one to Arlington. These are where you have an adult spot where an adult could use a computer or it's a desk for an adult to sit in. And next to them is a space that's contained for a little one. I'm sure the little one can't stay there all day long, but You probably will give whichever grown up is with the little one a couple of minutes at least to get some emails checked or to do something else in the library. So we find those to be really useful. In addition, we've added two light tables. These are tables in the kids section where there's light and the kiddos get to play on them and see reflections on those. I mean, excuse me, shadows and that sort of thing on them. One is at the Orange Terrace Library and one is at Marcy Library. Those are incredibly popular. We were doing the reporting back to the State Library a couple weeks ago, and I got to be the one to fill in the data for it. And the praise and excitement from the families, both at Orange Terrace and at Marcy related to these, was out of this world. In addition, we received four sewing machines. These we're going to use mostly in our tool lending collection, so people will be able to borrow them, use them at home. But we can also have, I think one of them we're keeping as use on site, so we can transfer between libraries and we can do in-house programming with it. We love opportunities like this from the California State Library. They literally give us a menu and we get to put check boxes on the ones we're interested in and then they just send them to us and then we install them. There's nothing better. There's nothing better. We highly encourage the state to keep doing that. There were two we did not select that I know for sure that I want to bring up. One was a bike bookmobile where you bike with the library staff would bike with the books connected to them. We don't have a biking policy for library staff, and that seemed to be not something we could implement right away. It was going to take quite a bit of implementation work to make that happen, so we skipped that one. The other one was a cooking workstation, a pop-up cooking workstation to use at libraries. And again, because of the environmental health challenges with that, we decided we did not want to go down that path, at least at this time, because we felt, again, that we wouldn't be able to utilize the equipment in a timely manner. And whatever we accepted, we wanted to make sure we could utilize. So happy to answer any questions and to take public comment.

I just wanted to say those light tables very good. I bought one for my house as well for my kids, so good choice.

Public comment is open. Please follow the prompt on the screen.

Public comment is now open for this item. Call 951-826-8688 and follow the prompts to access the meeting. To request to speak, press star 9. When called to speak, press star 6 to unmute. You can also join via Zoom. The meeting ID can be found on the agenda.

Do we have any public comments?

There's no public comment.

Do we have any additional comments from trustees?

No.

All right, moving on to discussion and action calendar, we are on item eight, accept donations for the Literacy Spaces Project.

Sure. Again, it's Erin Christmas, library director. project focused on providing some additional resources to our adult and family literacy programs, some supplies they may not have otherwise been able to purchase with their standard grant dollars every year. The State Library, through the California Library Literacy Services Program, allowed different libraries across the state to purchase some supplies. Most of these items are currently housed at our Arlington Library. We recently, when we moved out of the Eastside Library, we moved literacy to be housed out of Arlington, and so timing-wise it worked out very well for us, because it allowed us to put some additional resources in at Arlington that we didn't have there originally, because that was not the space intended for the literacy program. In addition to receiving these items, we also had Two experts in literacy from across the state come and do an evaluation of our program. It was all part of the state library's literacy services this year. They came out, they did a review of our program, and based on that review, we're going to actually be increasing the number of staff hours we give to library employees in Riverside towards that program. to help keeping it growing. We realize that we're probably at capacity now with the staff we have, but we would like to see more tutor and learner matches going on where we're getting more people through the program. So we've increased the capacity within our system for that. So we're very excited for both this funding opportunity for the supplies and equipment, but as well as the opportunity to have someone come and do an assessment of what we're doing well, especially coming out of COVID. COVID really decimated state literacy programs across the state. because people could not get together to tutor. And so it's been a real slow rebuild of that program. So this was a great opportunity. The total amount of items they were able to provide was a little over $11,000. And as you can see on the list here on page 30 of your packet, it includes like a storage cabinet, book trucks, some task chairs, marker boards and easels, some pack-and-go whiteboard easels, things that makes it easier for our tutors and learners to work together. They added new marketing display items, all of that really to make sure we're getting those marketed items out into the community, making sure we're getting things in the people's hands who need them. So we're really excited about that. And this item also will be going to city council on August 25th. Happy to answer any questions about it.

All right. Public comment is open. Please follow the prompt on the screen.

Public comment is now open for this item. Call 951-826-8688 and follow the prompts to access the meeting. To request to speak, press star nine. When called to speak, press star six to unmute. You can also join via Zoom. The meeting ID can be found on the agenda.

Do we have any public comments?

There's no public comment.

Thank you. All right, do we have any other comments from the trustees, questions? All right, moving on to discussion and action calendar item nine. Receive and file an update on the Every Story Counts statewide library survey.

Sure, so this came up with the Board of Library Trustees several months ago, I think back in January or February. Chair Steinbrueck had a question related to this survey and wanted to know a little bit more about it, and so I promised to bring it back once we had results, and here we are. So the California State Library earlier this year did a survey across the state with, I think it was 99 different libraries, They asked four questions of library users all across the state, and each library jurisdiction that participated was able to receive our localized feedback, which was really exciting for us. The first question they asked is, tell us about your experience at the library. Specifically, did you feel welcome? connect with other people, trust the information for the library, plan to come back or other. And what's wonderful is we saw over 92% of the individuals using the Riverside Public Library said that they felt welcome. And over 81% said they plan to come back, which is right in line with the statewide averages that came out, which was 93% felt welcome and 80% felt they would come back. So we're right in line. It also shows the level of Positive feelings people get with the library when over 92% of the population that uses us and the answer this survey felt like they would they felt welcome Which is really our goal to make sure all of our residents and users feel welcome next we asked people to tell us how they use the library and Specifically, is it to borrow items, get information, attend programs and events, learn something or try something new, be creative, support my health and well-being, prepare for a job or career, use the library space, spend time with people, access services, do personal paperwork and routine tasks, daily and essential needs, and other? And similar to what libraries saw across the state, again, we saw very high usage, 90% of the people came to borrow something. Back to that, so when we hear that people aren't borrowing things from the library, we know that is not true, both knowing that almost 900,000 items were checked out last year from our libraries, both in person and online, but also from the survey result where 90% of the people came to borrow something. The next largest was to use the library space for whatever purpose, and that was at 56%, and it was 55% to attend programs. On here you can see the graphic on page 33, and this shows you the breakdown for individuals. Next, the fourth question was an age demographic question. As you can see, almost 100% of the people who took the survey were 18 or over. It was a very, very small percentage, probably less than a percent, that were teens and children. But it gave us a pretty good picture of who was using our spaces. And then the final question was to tell us about their story and we heard a number of different Thoughts about the library we had somebody I've given you some of the comments we did receive some feedback From users and remember this was again in January. So this is right when we had done the switch from Baker and Taylor bringing us our new adult books or new books They went out of business, and we were in the process of getting a new vendor on board, so it was taking us a little longer to get popular new books. So we had a couple people comment on physical books lagging, that we had a lot online. It was taking longer to get the physical books, and I would completely agree with them. At that time, that was completely true. We have since corrected that, but it took a little while to get that going when the number one vendor in the game goes out of business. And then the other feedback we've really received, we had a number of people comment they would like the Be a Reading Kid, which is our BART program, which is where kiddos read to dogs in the library. They would like to see that program back. And so we are working towards all of those things. And amongst all of that, we received tons of positive comments as well about how people just love the Riverside Public Library. really enjoy our spaces. One of the ones I shared in here is that they wanted to make sure we don't go completely digital. And I can reassure this person who said that, that we are not planning to go fully digital. We invest a lot into our physical spaces as well and into our physical books. And then it's wonderful to hear how many people have used the library to connect with other people in the community as new residents to the city or just looking for those opportunities in community. With this, we also received two flyers that we're going to share throughout the community, the California Library Love Story by the Numbers, which gives some of the state library numbers, as well as some local commentary about the Riverside Public Library usage. And the quote we put on here is, the Riverside Libraries are a lifeline for our community, because we thought that really captured what it is we're trying to do. Happy to answer any questions. sure it was a survey monkey that people could take online or if you wanted to take a physical survey we had paper copies that staff would help you that you would fill out and staff could input for you

And I simply had a comment. It's very simple, but in all of the sites, when the staff calls out welcome, when you walk through the front door, I mean, it's a very, it actually is a very simple gesture, but it's huge to that response to number one in that question. Number one, absolutely huge that you're being acknowledged. And that if you do have a question, you've already been acknowledged. So it just makes it easier to ask the question. So I certainly appreciate that.

Thank you. I had the opportunity to work the Marketplace desk, the circulation desk for us old fashioned that have worked in libraries a long time, last Tuesday evening at Main Library for a couple hours. And it was amazing the positive response just by welcoming people into the building that you get. Having that brief welcome, glad you're here, really opens people up to come use the library.

I see that there are 190 responses. Fantastic. Is this able to be broken down, like how many people filled out the survey from each location?

No, we did not. These were the only four questions we asked. So we do not have that type of demographic information.

Does each library site do a survey, I guess, quarterly, just understanding the population they serve so they can continue to provide the programming that they are or possibly introduce new programming?

Sure. So each library location, under the work of the branch supervisors at those sites, put out surveys, do questions with the public that are using their programs. They do a lot of programmatic surveys. They don't necessarily do one as comp. They do it differently comprehensive, I guess I would say. They're really trying to target who's using the space. what programs they're interested in not. During summer reading, during the entire nine weeks of summer reading, everybody is surveyed as part of our obligations with the state library. So we receive a lot of that data then. In addition, we ask for feedback on almost all of the adult programs now. We have a portion that provides an opportunity to give feedback. as well as with our kids' programs. So people are consistently being asked for that feedback because we feel that it's important that we're meeting the needs of the customers, not just what Erin Christmas thinks we should have at every library location, but what our residents who are using that library actually want to see. Fortunately, sometimes, and most of the time, they align, but not always. I had no idea how popular a bookmark-making class was at one of our libraries for adults until I read this survey here. They really liked making bookmarks in January.

Is that information that trustees could just have, just for, again, curiosity's sake? Maybe not all of us get a chance to make it out to all the sites, but just like, oh, what a wonderful snapshot for each.

Sure. Happy to get that information to you. And I'll work with my team to find a way to get it to you in a digestible format.

Since we're talking about statistics, I was just curious, obviously not through this study, but is there more richer data on who's using the libraries and at what branches? And do you gather any of that information from your users?

Sure. So the information we gather is basic demographic information that individuals are comfortable giving to us. Okay. We don't ask for, so we have some gender information. We have addresses and zip codes, which can give us some information. But we do not ask about housing status, race, you know any of those types of things we have age we could do an age assessment of who what the ages are during the public library survey that's done every fall on our annual reason so libraries are like baseball we keep a lot of statistics we keep stats on everything the books we buy the number of books we buy the amount of money we spend on it the ages were buying books for who the age of the users, et cetera, et cetera. And we do have some of that information on age of users. And we can, when we do the public library survey, which will be in November, it's due October, November each year, we can bring next year, when we bring back the data that shows you how many people checked out books the year prior and all the library 101 statistics, We can definitely do a deep dive into the ages of the library, the basic age categories of our users. And we can also do a dive into how many kids' books versus adult books are checked out and how many teen books are checked. We can make that slide show a little more creative and cover some of that deeper demographic information you might be looking for. OK, thank you. I have a question.

I know you guys do a lot of programming during activities and stuff during the summer, especially with this heat. I'm sure you have a bigger attendance this year. as far as which ones are more popular amongst, especially, like, little ones. Because I did have a friend that told me she went. What's funny is we have a Parks and Rec person that we know, and she went and complained to her. And then she's like, what are you complaining? She's like, I have nothing to do with the library. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's me. But she kind of just mentioned a couple things that had happened at one of the things. That she went to and she was like, I would probably never go again. And I was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. So I guess if we do have programs that are popular amongst our families, are we scheduling them in a bigger scale? I know Arlington is pretty huge. Sure.

So we had some concerns this summer, and I'm wondering if this is what it's related to.

If not, we can definitely talk offline.

I would love to know what happened and look into that a little deeper. But in terms of programs... So this year we saw an overwhelming number of people attend a critter animal show at the Marcy Library specifically. They had about 400 people show up. Marcy has not in the past ever had 400 people show up. That was an unexpectedly large number. No one anticipated 400 people. So that was... not as pleasant as it could have been, especially if you weren't able to stay for the show. Because we really did hit capacity in that building. I'm hoping the fire marshal is not watching right now as we're talking about this. But I'm sure we were very close to the number. So we are doing a deep dive this year for those very popular programs. I'm thinking your animal programs, especially anytime you can touch a snake or a lizard, those programs. We're going to have to do those somewhere offsite so we can just meet the number of people that want to come see snakes and lizards. I hide in my office on those days. So we are looking at that because we did run into those problems this year. We saw almost a 50% increase, I mean 100% increase in our participation in summer reading this year. We went from like 2,500 people signed up last year to over 4,100 people signed up this year for summer reading. We're really excited that we were this popular, but we did not anticipate it coming into the summer, so we had some growing pains, and we are working through those with identifying these offsite locations. so staff is going to be working with our schools as well as our parks and rec facilities what we do at the orange terrace library is we do our big paid performers in the gym there or in their um what is that the ballroom i think is what it's called the ballroom up there a much larger space we do something similar at other locations, so we're just looking at ways we can do that. And we'll be looking in that midtown area where Marcy is located to find a place to do those programs, because we did see such large growth there. We have a similar challenge at Main Library. Our community room doesn't hold everybody, so we do a lot of our programming outside. But when it's 110 degrees every day for very long periods of time, it makes it a little more difficult to do those outside. So we just ran into some challenges this year with capacity, but we are working on that.

That's a good problem to have.

It is, and we're very happy to have that problem. I mean, we'll do a report next month on summer reading, and I'm very excited to share with you just the great success we had this year.

All right, public comment is open. Please follow the prompt on the screen.

Public comment is now open for this item. Call 951-826-8688 and follow the prompts to access the meeting. To request to speak, press star nine. When called to speak, press star six to unmute. You can also join via Zoom. The meeting ID can be found on the agenda.

Do we have any comments?

There are no public comments.

Great, thank you. All right, do we have any additional comments from the trustees? All right, moving on to the board and director's communication item, 10 brief reports on conferences, seminars, and meetings attended by board members. Are there any trustees that would like to provide a brief report?

Yeah, so I went to Central Library in LA for their 100th anniversary. First off, the building, beautiful. Oh my gosh, of course, it's old architecture, right? And the turnout was amazing. I don't think they expected that many people to show up. But they had a bunch of booths. They had live music. They had a puppet show. They had dog petting, of course, for the kids and a bunch of food trucks. It was very live. Beautiful. We definitely want to go back when there's less people to explore the architecture a little bit more. But the turnout was fantastic. So I just wanted to share that was beautiful and interesting. and I got a library card now I can connect to their kindle or the kindle light the digital library there so which is nice too so and anybody in California can get it I'm sure you know but yeah but um yeah yeah that's really cool I didn't know that until my husband said let's just get one I said okay and it opened up a lot more you know availability oh okay cool September

I've been trying to do that here for a couple of years. Well, maybe we'll go this year. It's so hard to execute because there's so much going on. Yeah. But, yeah, it's pretty crazy how much is going on now. Yeah. Just, like, trying to do it all and then, like, still trying to navigate where you're at. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

We went on the train. We made it a whole mission. So it was nice. It was really cool. I just wanted to share. It was beautiful. Beautiful, man.

Any additional reports? All right, moving on to item 11 for brief reports and conferences, seminars, and meetings attended by library director. Director Christmas, do you have a brief report?

Sure. So in your packet, there is the handy dandy monthly calendar of events. As you'll notice, August is a little light on events. We are recovering from our summer reading program. One of the things we instituted this year are some program pauses throughout the year to ensure we're providing Excellent programs year-round, but giving staff time to recover after the busiest seasons. So we take a break right before summer reading, right after summer reading, and then during the holiday season. But you will see some one-off programs at each of the various library locations over the next few weeks. And then starting the last week of the month, you see we are back to normal with all of our programs, toddler play, story times, you name it, it is back in session. In addition to that, we will be closed this Thursday. All of our library locations will be closed on Thursday, August 13th. We are doing staff development all day. We'll be meeting with the team over at the La Sierra Library. We'll be having La Sierra Senior Center. Thank you, Jessica. Got that. La Sierra Library, La Sierra Senior Center. No, we're grateful to our parks friends to let us borrow their facility for the day. But at that, we'll have Riverside Police Department doing some training with our staff on situational awareness or active shooter training, just making sure we have the most current information. We'll be doing further Enneagram work. We started that conversation in January, and staff really enjoyed looking at their Enneagram numbers. So now we're going to look at our wings. So we'll be more... into our Enneagram formation. We'll also have the HHS department come out and talk about the various housing and homeless resources we have in the city that library staff can tap into for our community. Our new interim city manager is going to come by and do a meet and greet with the team, which they're very excited about. And then we'll have our wonderful annual awards for employees of the year, as well as the annual years of service awards. It should be a fun, packed day, but we're really looking forward to it. I think there's also a Jeopardy game. There's going to be library Jeopardy where people will compete, which I'm sure library staff will do very well on all of our procedures and policies and that sort of thing. So they will get to sharpen their skills or to show off their skills, as the case may be. So looking forward to it. It should be a really fun day. And we appreciate the community for being comfortable with us closing for a day to do that. It's very important for our team. That's all I have. Thank you.

all right thank you all right moving on to item 12 are there any future board of library trustees consideration as requested by board members only items that fall within the powers and duties of the board of library trustees as set forth in the city charter and or riverside municipal code will be agendized for future discussion there are no items for consideration the next board of library trustees meeting is scheduled for Monday September 14th at 5 p.m. are there any further items to discuss all right no further items on the agenda this meeting is adjourned