Librarian's Report for July 2007

No summer doldrums here. When you look at the statistics for July the Library has been a busy place. Mission: Possible, MGPL’s 2007 Summer Library Challenge for Adults and Teens was a great success and certainly contributed to all the activity.

Many thanks to all of the staff who helped plan, implement and guide the 2007 Summer Library Challenge. A total of 246 people participated, including 24 staff members. Best of all, the satisfaction level has been very high with this program.

The winners of the four grand prizes are:

Caryn Sedloff
Alan Weinstein
Rachel Naumann
Annabel Jajou
The Summer Library Challenge is an expansion on last year’s reading challenge; the concept for the challenge is that patrons may choose from all of the Library’s materials (books, audiobooks, CDs, DVDs) as well as programs.

One stat really stood out and deserves an explanation. The number of database searches experienced a 655% growth over June. Usually the summer months see only 2,000 to 3,000 searches. July had over 19,000! Reference Librarian Colleen Ringel looked into it and found that the numbers are correct.

According to Gale, the database vendor, searches in the GVRL (Gale Virtual Reference Library) are based on articles retrieved. In the monthly report, the titles with the most articles retrieved (double digit) were:

Arts & Humanities Through the Eras 32
Business Plans Handbook, Vol 1 97
Business Plans Handbook, Vol 2 91
Contemporary American Religion 274
Encyclopedia Judaica 13,542
Encyclopedia of Major Marketing Campaigns 12
New Catholic Encyclopedia 16

MGPL is partnering with the Morton Grove Community Relations Commission and North Shore Jewish Congregation to present a series of films and discussion titled “Unity in Our Diversity”. Nancy Brothers has met with the commission and has provided invaluable help with film and speaker suggestions, scheduling and advice on complying with license requirements for public showings. The Library is pleased and honored to be assisting with this community wide event.

Colleen and Natalya set up a new reference blog, Did You Know?, for the reference staff to publish on the Webrary for the public in August.

The Reference team is also working on a draft policy for the two public DVD players. This will be presented to the Policy Committee in time for consideration at the September Board meeting.

The New Business portion of the agenda is fairly long tonight. August and September are when a number of our standing insurance policies are due for renewal. Then there are the issues that are just part of doing business. While there is a lot to cover I trust the Board will continue its discussion on the process of resolving the library building issue as well as entertain the idea of summer Sunday hours for next year.

A fourth committee report has been added – Fund Development and Planning.