April 2023
Library Report
To Town Council
Preston Hot Springs Town-County Library
1. Services to the Public: Library hours for April are Tuesday and Wednesday 11-5, Thursday and Friday Noon-5, and Saturday Noon-4. The library will close at 3pm Friday, April 7th to have the carpets cleaned. The library will be open for curbside service only, on Saturday April 8th, to let the carpets dry. Inter Library Loan is available. Wireless is available in the parking lot 24/7. We have T-Mobile hot spots to check out. We also have a T-Mobile hot spot available to use at Six Shooter. We have MontanaLibrary2Go available through our library cards. We have scheduled programming for winter and spring. Facebook story time and in-house story time is at 4pm on Thursdays. The Thursday April 6, 2023 in-house story is Every Night is Pizza Night Here by Lopez-Alt, J. Kenji. The Thursday April 20, 2023 in house story will be Don’t Wake Up the Tiger by Britta Teckentrup. Books, dates, and times for story time and the book discussion group will be posted on the bulletin board in the entryway at the library or you can find the dates and times on our website. The book discussion group will be meeting Thursday April 20, 2023 to discuss The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig 3pm. The Stitch N Bitch group will take a break for the month of April. Saturday April 15, starting at 1pm there will be an Origami card workshop by Keiko, 10 participant limit, we have 6 signed up so far, observers are welcome. Saturdays we will host a paper crafts, games and puzzles day, starting at 1pm.
4. Collections: The town council had some questions at the last meeting that had to do with the collection. 1. What are book covering supplies? All books except for non-fiction are covered with a clear plastic covering. Hardcovers are wrapped in a poly sheeting and paperbacks are covered with a poly laminate covering. Also included in book wrapping supplies are barcode labels, clear poly label protectors, and spine labels with similar protectors. We offer from 25-45 books new to our collection made up of new and donated books every month. 25 in the fall months before we receive tax dollars and up to 45 in the spring months when there tend to be more dollars available for book purchases. 2. Why does it take so long to get the books on the shelf? The process goes like this: books are chosen. Books are inspected for sales labels and are cleaned with alcohol swabs. Date due slips and date put into service are added to the first page inside the cover. A barcode label with a label protector is added to the front cover. The book is cataloged on our web-based circulation system LibraryWorld, as the books are cataloged a spine label list is manually generated. Spine labels are put on spines of books and covered with a label protector, and a New Book List is manually generated. We then cover all books except those going to the non-fiction section the exception being if the paper used in the book cover doesn’t hold a label well, we will cover a non-fiction book. All other books are covered. New books are in the new book section for 3 months. We pull the books from the outgoing month and reuse as many of the new stickers as we can. The books on the shelves in the new book section have a “New” sticker on them. We generally use a week at the end of the month to do processing, and it does take a week and involves all staff members. A week for us is 26 hours. We occasionally do use volunteers to wrap books if they have an aptitude for wrapping. Wrapping requires precision. We never use volunteers for cataloging, mistakes in cataloging cost us too much time down the line. We have found it isn’t worth it. Many patrons seem to enjoy a more controlled release of books like the Montana Book Award books.
3. Technology: We are back up to 5 patron computers.
4. General Administrative Business: The library board of trustees feels that it isn’t necessary for a member to be present at the town council meeting to give the report all of the time, considering that the town council members are given a copy of the report.
5. Are there any questions or concerns that Town Council members would like to have shared with the Library Board of Trustees?
The Library Board of Trustees meeting is Wednesday April 12, 2023 at 5pm. Zoom link ID: 844 5583 0460.
REPORTS
PATRON STATISTICS November 2022 December 2022 January 2023 February 2023 March 2023
New Patrons: 2 3 3 6 2
Walk-ins: 218 276 255 265 262
Computer Users: 89 93 98 83 92
Wireless Users: 27 24 15 17 40
Children 50 25 34 34 27