Library Board - Regular Meeting

Library board to order. Roll call,

please. Bowie? Coleman? Here. Johnson?

Kim? Here. Naker? Here. Ng? Here. And Chair Jost? Here. We have five present or four present. Five. Five present. Sorry.

No, going go ahead.

Five present, one absent, and one being a few minutes late here. The first item that we have on the agenda is the approval of minutes, minutes 25 dash 41, approving 09/10/2025 library board minutes.

Great. So does anyone have any questions about the library board minutes from September? All right. I'll take a motion from council president Nacre to approve the minutes. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed?

Five in favor, zero opposed. The minutes are adopted. The next item on the agenda is resolution public hearing twenty five-two twenty one, amending the 2025 financing and spending plans in the library agency special projects.

And I will send this over to Director Hartman to give us a brief update about this amendment.

Members of the library board?

The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library have additional funds to transfer to the library before the end of the year in support of transforming libraries and youth and family services programs. This resolution increases our special funds of spending authority to allow us to encumber and spend those funds.

That's great. Thank you, Director Hartman. And thank you to the Friends of the Library. Does anyone have any questions or any discussion on this item? With that, I'll take a motion from Council Vice President Kim to approve this resolution. All in favor say aye. Aye. All those opposed?

Five in favor, zero opposed. Motion has been adopted. Or the resolution has been amended. My apologies. The final item on the agenda is staff report twenty five-two thousand two hundred eleven, library materials update.

And I will turn it over to Josh Schaefer and Jessica Zilhart to give us a presentation about library materials. Welcome, thank you for being here.

Yeah, thank you Chair Gil's Board members. We are here to present about our library's materials and collections. Just an update on that, we did around the same time last year, but to let you know where we're at right now, particularly with regard to the budget proposal.

So,

the first part of this is just an overview of the proposal that will affect our library collections budget. There is a proposed reduction of $65,079 which represents about 6.3% of the library materials budget. In conversation, again, with the friends who so generously support our efforts all the time, they have agreed to help us by working on a special fundraising effort to raise $40,000 of that cut to offset that and make our actual reduction in the budget only about 2.4% of our current budget. We do know, and you'll hear more about the constraints that we have with our collections budget from Jessica, but that any reduction in that budget does impact the types and volumes of materials that we have available to our residents. So our collections budget is every piece of our budget from physical materials to e and audio books, CDs, vinyl, the whole gamut.

It also reduces our ability to purchase new materials and keep up our purchasing power. You know, the conversations that we've had in the past, we've looked at our base budget and then a series of different percentages that we would need to have to just maintain the level of purchasing power that we have at this point in time, to be able to increase the budget or be able to make some significant investments in it. This is just a quick overview of where we have been over the last couple of years. Our base budget for the library materials is essentially the same. 2025, you see that reduction that's proposed there.

The differences in the adopted budgets '24 and '25, thanks to the efforts of this council was in 2024, dollars 150,000 added. And then another 175, which represented that 15% rate that allowed us to maintain purchasing power as well as put some investments into things like specific collections, assessments, and investments focused on certain library locations. For 2025, we just wanted to give you a little breakdown of what our budget is made up of. When we're talking about the general fund, we have our levy revenue about $857,000 here. Every year, we apply for the competitive portion of the cultural star grant at $175,000, and that goes into our base budget for collections.

And then this year, '25, you'll see that fund balance allocation that was made by council. Here's our general fund total. We also add to our collections through fees, miscellaneous revenue, MELSA, the Metropolitan Library Services Association, who manages the formula dollars that are distributed to us, and then funds coming from the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library. So with the special fund and general fund, we have this $1,670,000, and then the city support total being 1,400,000.0. This is where I turn it over to Jessica, our materials management supervisor, to talk about what we've done with those funds.

Yes. Thank you, Josh.

Thank you, Library Board, for having me here today. I wanted to talk first about what we've been able to accomplish with the increase we saw in our budget last year. We were able to maintain our previous year's spending on digital materials, which doesn't sound that exciting, but I'll talk a little bit more about our challenges there. We've had additional funding for kids materials, particularly graphic novels, non fiction materials. Really excited to announce that we will have read along books available system wide by the end of the year.

So, those are like the picture books that have the built in audio player with them. That's a replacement for the bags that had the paper book and a CD player, as fewer and fewer people have CD players in their homes. So, these have been really well received, really excited to expand that early literacy offering to the whole city. We have continued our investment in purchasing replacements for high use items and outdated content. This is a little bit bread and butter library work, you know, if things are being used frequently, we wanna make sure they're in good working order.

If things are out of date, we wanna make sure they're replaced so we have accurate information for our patrons. But during years where we have budget challenges, it's hard for us to maintain those activities the way we normally would. And then, we've been able to further develop the community informed collections pilot that we started last year at Rice Street at the Rondo Library this year. So, that project is in process right now. Rondo staff have been gathering feedback from their community members their community conversation series, which allows them to engage with patrons in a few different ways about the collections, they're also running a survey.

And then, we've begun spending based on the feedback we've heard, which has really run the gamut from more action movies, Great Courses DVDs, Bluey Books, Twilight Saga, biographies, really a wide range of interest that we've heard. When I was here last year, I talked a little bit about the Rice Street Library pilot project, engagement from the community about what's in their collection, and that was still in process when we were working on it then. As a result of that project, we did add around 1,200 items to that collection in response to community feedback, and with the extra funding that we received for collections. That includes an Arabic language collection and a substantially refreshed Spanish language collection for kids at that location, in addition to making purchases based on what we heard from community. Wanted to mention, I had a chance to meet with a project team that worked on that project and one thing that was really great to hear from staff, thought was this project allowed them to make connections with community and talking about collections and what they were looking for and what they need.

It opened the door to build a relationship with community, and to be able to say, what do you need? And, also, here it is. We we were able to actually respond, which doesn't always happen when we hear what people need. I alluded to our challenges around digital materials a little bit earlier. I wanted to talk broadly about what our trends around digital materials are looking like.

So, when I say digital materials, I'm talking about our e book and e audio book collections primarily. So, as you can see, in 2015, really, the majority of our circulation was coming from physical materials. Patrons coming into our doors, checking out an item, bringing it home. About 14% of the circulation then was from digital materials, so it was, you know, a fairly ancillary part of what we were doing. And then 2020 was an inflection point for us and for most libraries, I think, as patrons weren't able to come into our buildings in the way they normally did, so we saw that shift closer to a sixtyforty split.

So, 61% of our circulation was from physical materials that year, and 40 39% was from physical or from digital, excuse me. And then, our year to date this year is exactly that same breakdown. So, I think we're kind of we're stabilizing around that level of circulation from physical versus digital, you know, plus or minus a few percent each year.

And I have a question. Do you think it's really interesting to me that those proportions are still the same from 2020. Do you anticipate or I don't know what other libraries are saying that maybe they will start to transition, maybe not back to pre COVID, but just in the other direction, that folks will get more print materials or

Yeah.

I don't I

don't really have a sense. I will say, you know, a big difference from 2020 and 2035 is just the overall number is much higher. 2020 was, you know, understandably not a big circulation year for us. So Oh, okay. We're seeing more overall checkouts of materials, but, you know, I think to me, my sense is that our digital borrowers are continuing on in that collection. Okay.

Council Vice President Kim.

I have a follow-up question. What percentage of the digital materials are ones that you think are like where we loan or lease content to then have in circulation? And I'm sorry if like the question sounds a little uninformed, but last year I kind of remembered there was like a demand for materials and if we didn't acquire it ourselves, we would maybe like loan or lease or buy or rent ourselves so that we could put it in circulation. How much of that do you think is driving sort of this sort of like new consistent digital demand versus physical physical books? Like, is there a percent that's meaningful in that or not really at all?

I'm not sure. I could talk a little bit more about just how our ebook environment works and maybe that will help inform the question and then if you want to ask it again.

Yeah. And feel free to not have to answer it in this

moment. Okay.

I realize it's not the most important question to ask but am sort of interested as new material comes out and so our ability to purchase and refresh our physical book stock and also like meeting the demands of like the things that folks that come into libraries and they're looking for books and we don't have it, right? But that it's drawing people into the library as an interest. So I just sort of wonder that's sort of the thread of my thinking. So, feel free to not answer it now. But, I'm just sort of interested because I remember that there was a question last year's budget is that line item for the library's ability to get like printed material that's sort of like outside of our normal circulation, but more on demand and what's popular was diminishing.

So, I'm just sort of that's Okay. Those are where those points are connecting. Okay. Thank you for giving me space to land my question.

Yes. I think I understand the question. I'm not sure I have meaningful information, but we can follow-up.

Yeah. That's okay. Thank you.

Leads in very well to a conversation if there's no

Got another question. Okay. Councilmember Johnson.

Okay.

Thanks. Do you do you watch the trends by location? Like I'm I'm actually kind of more so of a curiosity question word of like the library sites that we have like Yeah. Where we're seeing I guess some of the more like more use of physical or more use of digital. Like, do you guys track that by library?

We we do. And, again, that's something I'm happy to dig into a little bit more if you're interested in specifics. I don't have numbers I'm super confident about right off hand. Sure. We do take a look at, you know, overall trends and, you know, which libraries are seeing more checkouts. It's not extremely easy with our digital collections to see exactly where they're checking out. We can find it. And often, what we find is they travel together a lot of the time with the exception of Library Go where we do have some usage in the digital collection. But a lot of times, you know, our high use libraries on physical are also high use libraries. Their patrons are also using our digital collections.

Okay. Yeah. No. It's more it's sheer curiosity but more so like, I'm intrigued in the discussion and seeing the numbers. But also just wondering like in my neighborhood like, is that the case or is it more digital or physical? Appreciate it. Yeah.

Oh, I don't know who raised her hand first. Councilmember Coleman. Thanks, chair just. Thank you both.

Talking circulation, was wondering if just going back to the community informed collections process. Super curious to know a little bit more about that, thinking particularly in the context of the reopening of the Hamlin Midway Library which I guess is leading to two questions. One, and forgive me if you're getting here, so feel free to, yeah, we can definitely talk about this later as well, but I'm curious to know what's happening with that collection since I assume most of the collection from the previous iteration of the library is coming back, but obviously there's been a gap in time. So I assume that there are some updates that we would like or hope to make there. And then also really curious about the possibility of timing around the community informed collections process and if it would be possible to do some of that engagement with the future patrons of the new Hamlin Midway Library before that opens in 2026.

Yeah. I I can't speak to the second one. I think I I certainly would be interested in in pursuing conversation with with community members. There is some funding set aside for rebuilding the collection at Hamlin. My team and I have started making plans.

You know, we when we closed that building, we went through the collection and kind of made determinations about what items to put in storage for the library reopening with a timeline that turned out not to be accurate to when the library reopens. So I think there's definitely, there will be work to be done rebuilding what that collection looks like, you know, thinking about non fiction books that have a lot of timeliness to them and we're like, okay, will this be good in 2024? And now, you know, would be asking a different question if I had a time machine.

Okay. Cool. Thank you.

Think Council Mervoy, did you have a question?

And then we'll go

to Council President Thank you, Chair Giles. Thank you so much. I have a question out of curiosity to learn more about the circulation process. Are there multiple platforms for a Patreon to book something or reserve a physical copy or a digital copy? Like I would imagine as a refresher, I think last year we learned a lot about there was an app I believe or maybe I'm making this up, I don't know but I swear it there was an app. Okay. If people, if patrons are able to order digital materials through app or they also have the opportunity to order them inside of the libraries if there's like multiple platforms?

Yep, there are. So, all of our physical collections are available through our website or through the library's app and then many of the digital materials can also be reserved through the library's website or app. Okay. But, they can also be reserved through our vendor's own platform. So, there there's two paths for folks who want digital materials.

Can I add in? Yeah. Most people get our digital materials through the Libby app. Mhmm. So, that's probably the number one thing I hear from people out in the community is, I love Libby. Libby is we purchase it and it's how you get connected to our digital materials. You put in your library card and then they are delivered to you via your phone or your iPad or your Kindle. And Jessica is actually going to explain how that works in her next slide. You're right on topic. Thank you.

I love the Libya app. And I will send it over to Council President Naeker.

Thanks, Terjeost. I'm interested to see the time horizon, the interval between each of those different bar graphs that it's five years and it's in particular interesting to see that 2020 and 2025 are the same. I know obviously within the pandemic was in between there and

that was probably

looked all kinds of different. But I'm wondering I would have sort of expected that the digital trend would continue to grow And seeing that it's exactly the same as five years ago, I guess I'm wondering and it's just a point in time but from what you know from the literature, from our peer cities, just from what you observe, do you feel like we're going to continue to trend towards digital more and more or is it possible that we've sort of hit a stabilization point and we might be here for a while? And I ask in part because I know the budget considerations that we're probably about to get to are Related. Relevant.

I am not sure. I think a big part of why our usage has stabilized is because the percentage of our budget that we're putting towards the digital collection has also stabilized. So I know some you know, urban libraries are putting 70% of their collections budgets towards their digital collection and they're probably seeing more usage. That's not not where we are right now. But I think I think we may right now have a little bit of capacity. We've hit our capacity to meet people's demands and interest in the digital collection based on how we're funding it. Interesting.

Yeah. I think council president, that's a great question because if we put more money into the digital side, would more people then use it? Because that that would lead to shorter wait times, I'm assuming, for folks. And maybe more people might use it, maybe that would shift. Mhmm. Yep. Council Member Johnson.

Yeah. I think just as a follow-up. And I think I remember as well just the the digital materials often have like a time frame in which they're active in our catalog. Like we basically have a certain allotted amount of times we purchase it for that time to have it available. And I think that, you know, in relation to the price and the costs and investing more if we'll utilize it, I think it'll also come from what we want our catalog to look like and like what we have what we want to purchase and at what point as the interest of digital materials gets more increases more.

And so I think just in general, that's something that I I feel like the trends of it all and like just kind of thinking and really understanding what we should be investing in stems from that of like how much of our digital rolls off every year or how much we have to renew our common digital materials that are sought after and maybe those that maybe we aren't seeing that happen. So we can try something else or get some more access since they are like pretty much renewed on a rolling basis in a little bit different way than if we have like a physical hard copy book. We'll just keep it in our systems forever. Or hopefully, you know, it's like, hopefully people return them and then we keep them forever. But like with the digital pieces, know they have an expiration date.

So just really intrigued by it and I think it's really cool to see just what trends we're seeing in that regard and then just how we're keeping up with the city demand.

And Vice President Kim also has a question. Thank you, Sherry.

Leigh Ann, feel free to just random like follow-up with me or not. But I have a question about that circulation question because it is sort of like the libraries have such a unique challenge but opportunity to just be like a resource for anything that folks are walking into in terms of like knowledge and learning and like having access to a book or like a digital thing. But I also kind of wonder then like in our physical like for our physical books which is I'll just say is my bias, there's nothing better in my mind than cracking open a new book. I take deep breaths when I walk into bookstores. But how much do we purge old material then to kind of keep the stock and demand like for lack of a better word today, but like relevant to like emerging both needs but also interests of St.

Paul residents. So do we do book purges to kind of keep the stock that we have sort of like fresh? And because again, you have just such a unique challenge but opportunity to meet sort of the growing need of what our conscious and interests are as like St. Paul residents. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, we do what we describe as collection maintenance activities. So, a lot of that is outlined by our collection development policy. We take a look at, you know, if something is damaged or broken, we would remove it from the collection. If it's out of date or if we've gotten a new version of it. If it's something that is no longer being used, so it was something that was very trendy ominous, no longer trendy. We would remove it from the collection to maintain the relevance of the collection and to account for the fact we have physically constrained buildings. So we can't we can't keep everything realistically in our space. So we do. I don't have a, you know, percentage, you know. Ideally, we're we're kind of at equilibrium. Right? Stuff going out is the same as stuff coming in, but that's not always the case.

Yeah. It's just sort of interesting to note then, like, the trend like, I think the thing that we're all kind of grappling around is like the trend of sort of that stagnation point and realizing that like we're only going to get as much demand as what we can offer for that digital space and then similarly for sort of our physical books, right?

We're

only like if I look at that number in my head then I'm assuming that the books on the shelf are the most like relevant and the ones that we can get for this moment in time and we're trying to like lose stock but that interest level remains sort of the same in terms of the amount of circulation that we have. So, it's more of just like a general outside like wondering out loud, but it's just sort of interesting to see the numbers in that way and hearing the budget implications and if we create demand or interest in products that we could see an increase, but just our ability to be able to meet and fill those demands might be limited. So I appreciate it.

I just Counselor Spread, I just thought of a really nerdy engineering thing this made me think of because you said equilibrium. So like there's a if you guys I won't do this often, but there's a difference Or often enough. There's two types of equilibrium. There's static equilibrium and dynamic equilibrium. And I think what I'm hearing is you're concerned about a static equilibrium where you would stay in equilibrium, things would be balanced, but they would stay the same. Don't move. A dynamic equilibrium, things could evolve or change, but still be in equilibrium and balance. So it seems like that's what we're looking for as we're moving forward is being able to adjust to the times, but still have the right balance that we need in our collections department.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

I was like, someone else is here

because you're like, that she was this morning. When when also when I'm so sorry. But also this morning when councilwoman Dros was talking about how at your job you implemented the system that we just implemented, but you noted that it was ten years ago. I, like, died. So anyways, this is where

having an engineer is getting 15 years old.

Yes. Who knows? It it all blends together. I promise I won't do that too

often. No. But exactly that point, actually. Yes. Exactly that point. Thank you. You're welcome.

Alright. I think all your questions did an amazing job previewing the rest of what I was going to talk about. So we can maybe breeze right through this. So how we purchase our digital content is through licensing from the publisher, and it is through that third party. So the vendor is OverDrive. Their app is called Libby. So when you hear folks talk about Libby, that's what they're talking about, the third party platform where we purchase publishers' licenses. Prices that we pay are often much higher than the consumer prices. So an e audiobook that might be available through a consumer platform for $20, my cost library is 80 to $120. And then, you all noted, licenses do expire after a set amount of time or a number of checkouts.

So, if we are going to maintain the item in the collection, we need to make a purchasing decision to keep it in the collection. Just an example of what this looks like with the real life book. Kristin Hannah's The Women, which was really popular last year for a print copy, for a physical book. We get discounts from our vendors, so we pay $16.80 for a copy, where the the retail price for that is $30. But then on the e the e book side, libraries could expect to be $60 for one copy versus $14.99 for a consumer e book copy, and then $59.99 for a library e audio book versus, you know, around $20 for consumer e audio book, which is challenging at one item level.

But then when we're having to buy multiple copies in order to meet demand, compounds the challenges we have in our budget capacity to meet that demand. We've seen significant price increases over the last several years. At least one publisher is having double digit price increases year over year. It seems as though publishers view library sales as lost individual sales and set their prices accordingly. So, they're thinking that a library checkout is a sale they didn't get.

So, they're charging libraries extra to offset that. And then, because we're in the realm of digital rights management with license versus the first sale doctrine, libraries have limited rights. So, first sale doctrine is the idea that you or the library, when you purchase a physical material, you own that book, you own that CD, and you get to decide how to lend it, who to lend it to, how long to keep it. And, that's just not the case in the digital environment. The terms are set entirely by the publishers.

But despite the challenges, we are committed to maintaining a digital collection, in addition to the fact that it's popular and is making up a large portion of our circulation every year. Ebooks have accessibility features built into the text and audiobook content for low vision or blind users, and they're available for patrons who can't come into our buildings easily for a variety of reasons. E audiobook content currently makes up about half of our circulation in the digital collection, and because physical media is becoming less viable, fewer CD players in homes, fewer CD players in cars, fewer titles coming out on physical media, e audio content is downloadable e audio is the most viable way to deliver that content and it is it is the area of our collection where we've seen the most growth over the past several years. And finally, our patrons have a genuine format preference for digital content. It's it's convenient.

It's great to be able to have a couple of books in your bag for if you get stuck and you can can read a book and you don't have to worry about making it to the library before it closes. And we do wanna try to meet our patrons where they're at and what they're looking for for us from for content and format. So obviously, alluding already to the challenges we have around maintaining our collection in the face of increasing prices and the challenges of digital content. If we are to have a budget reduction, we will see wait times for all materials increase. That's all audiences and all formats.

Digital content will likely see the biggest impacts, given our pricing challenges there, and the fact that we already have higher wait times in that collection. Of our collection will be less robust, so this is, you know, speaking to the relevance of the collection. Fewer new titles, you know, less breadth of offerings, fewer mid list authors, fewer debut authors, worn out items, out of the day content doesn't get replaced as often as it should or would desirably be replaced. We may to discontinue services or formats entirely. You know, we offer some databases to support students and curricular work, and we may not be able to continue those.

We'd have reduced or very limited capacity for special collections projects that allow us to innovate or pilot new ideas. So, that's the read alongs that are so popular started out as a pilot project. Rice Street in Rondo Community Informed Collection are examples of things we would have a harder time doing with less budget. And, yeah, less able to respond to the changing community needs and information environment. So that idea around, like, how do we bring people into the library and kinda have, you know, an appeal factor to the library collection is much harder to do if we don't have adequate budget to meet how needs are evolving and how format needs are evolving.

And the budget reductions have cumulative impacts. So collections that aren't invested in become less relevant to the community, and that community is not seeking them out as often. Maintaining a relevant and up to date collection is easier than overcoming the challenges of a collection that has not been invested in. And you know, we're really grateful for the recent additional investments we've had in collections that have helped move us back toward building back our collection budget after years of challenging budgets for us.

Great. Looks like we have some questions. I think Okay. Now, again, don't know oh, go to Council Member Bowie.

Can Thank go you, Chair Jones. I have a question around the digital publishing regulations. Are you familiar, like, who actually regulates our digital pub or not our, but digital publishing rights as a whole? And then if like what is the extent our city attorneys can examine, you know, if it is like an association or some state statue, authority to explore, you know, looking at those changes because I could only imagine, you know, how that can actually make artwork really hard with making sure those products are available at a reasonable cost. Yeah.

We'll start out with a caveat that I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that mostly the the regulations that govern e digital content licenses are copyright law. So what what also you know, and probably some other, like, consumer trade agencies. I know states have tried to pass legislation to get fair e content pricing for libraries and those have not yet been successful in part due to provisions in copyright law. Thank you.

That's from Kasimovich Coleman.

Thank you. One other quick question on the divide between physical materials and digital materials. Do you all have any demographic data? I'm thinking specifically when you were mentioning just the accessibility of all of our digital materials that that might skew towards an older audience. Maybe younger families are more likely to come in person and check out a physical book, but I have no idea if

those

assumptions are in any way accurate.

I I don't know. We don't record that information in, like, our our metadata about patrons. So the the best we could look at is library go as a proxy for, like, younger users

Mhmm.

But really no data on

adult users. Thank you. Yep. Director Hartman?

Oh, sorry.

Yeah. Just one thought on the demographics question there. Library Go is a big user. So, Library Go is our partnership with the St. Paul Public Schools where all St. Paul Public School students automatically have an electronic library card that's the same as their school ID. They use a lot of digital content too. So, just I think the story around digital content is much more complex than we might assume. We're seeing like young people, the whole point of Library Go was so folks could access ebooks and databases on their school issued iPads. So, I think that's making up a portion of it.

We're also seeing people that aren't reading off a Kindle, but they're reading off their phone, right? So, I think a much more diverse and always user group is using our digital content. And just like Jessica says, we don't collect demographics on folks that have library cards, so we don't know that. But it's a really good question that we can keep thinking about, like how to distill more of our trends on our data by areas of the city, for example, could be interesting. And one just follow-up to what Jessica said, when you're a digital user, you don't name your library.

Right? So digital content doesn't get tracked in the same way that physical content does. So if you check something out from Arlington Hills, it's Arlington Hill. Like, we know it comes from Arlington Hills. Digital content doesn't work that way because you don't have your own library that it's coming from. It's coming from the cloud library, if that helps. It's slightly different data sets.

So no blockchain data on it.

Council President Lee.

Thanks, Georgios. I really appreciate the presentation. And I think the good news is that this library board passed a resolution committing to not letting purchasing power decline in collections. So I think all of the points are well taken about the impact of that and I think everyone around this table shares a commitment to keeping those dollars up. I wanted to just ask how other library systems are dealing with the move to digital and the increasing costs. I think in the past we've sort of talked about it as like, yeah, this is really unfair and it's hard and you know, but we just sort of have to deal with it. I'm curious if there are any innovative ideas being tried in other places to accommodate the demand for digital but also the fact that it's extremely, extremely expensive?

Libraries are trying different approaches. I don't know how many of them are having success with different approaches. So you can try a lot of different purchasing strategies in order to maximize your dollar. There have been attempts in the past to get kind of DRM free collections for patrons, and the challenge there is the big publishers that are publishing the blockbusters with marketing budgets that patrons are going to hear about are not going to let the library have a digital rights management free version of their ebook. So it tended to be content that was less exciting for patrons to check out and then it didn't get used.

But I think it's something that libraries are tracking on and libraries are frustrated by and I think most libraries are struggling with how to meet demand in the challenging environment. I can talk about MELSA. Yeah. So we our collection, we are part of the a larger twin cities consortium that is administered by MELSA, the Metropolitan Library Services Agency, our regional library system. And so, members Representatives from member libraries, we are constantly trying to refine our strategies and our policies in order to maximize how our patrons experience the collection in a way that, you know, is contained within our budget capacity.

So we recently changed how purchasing is happening on the consortia level to try to get more access to titles versus like fast access to really popular titles. We work with each other on purchasing strategies and how to manage policy and how we can try to you know, effectively work with the budgets that we have.

Great. Do we have any other questions? Well, I want to thank you both for your presentation today. And I really also just appreciated the discussion from our colleagues. As Council President Nacre said, that we especially hearing the impact of our collections and especially the financial impact if we're not continuing on with maintaining that.

It's really important to this board that we do what we can, not just for next year. And I really, again, appreciate the Friends of the Library for their help for next year to be able to make sure we can still provide what our residents need, but also thinking into years ahead and what that might look like, for our for our collections. So, thank you again. And, with nothing else to come before us, we are adjourned.