I'd like to call to order the Monroe County Public Library Board of Trustees meeting for March 26th, 2025. We would like to go around and introduce ourselves. And if you'd like to share what you're reading, you may start. So Whitney Eads, and I am reading We Refuse. Jamie Burkhart, I am currently between books, reading a lot of nonfiction things for training, but, and also trying to keep up with the news cycle. Greer Carson, I'm reading The View From Nowhere by Thomas Nagel. And my family and I are playing Sims 4 on the PS5. I'm Amy O'Shaughnessy, and I'm reading Detransition Baby. I'm Chris Hall, and I just finished Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller. And I'm waiting for my, for James, by personal effort to be, to come to me. I'm on hold. I'm Nancy Van Allen, and I'm reading Demon Copperhead. I just signed up for that one. Oh yeah. Okay, can I get a motion to approve the consent agenda items? Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. - Aye. Okay, and that Director's Month Report from Greer. Okay, as we mentioned last month, we are closely watching all developments related to Indiana Senate Bill 1, which aims to reduce property taxes for Indiana residents. SB 1 is currently in the Ways and Means Committee and is expected to pass the current Senate session sometime in April or early May, at which point we'll know what the likely impact of the bill will be on our annual operating budget. Based on current estimates, we anticipate something like a $700,000 reduction in annual operating revenue by the end of 2027. We've kept our staff up to date on this and have shared that whatever form the bill takes, we will very likely have to make some adjustments. It's still early in the budgeting season, so we're looking at a variety of options without having to make any commitments just yet. We'll provide updates as soon as we have a clearer picture of the impact of the bill and what it will have on library funding, and we'll bring our draft 2026 budget to you all in July, as we normally do. We had a strong February in terms of overall collection use. You'll notice in the report that the past five years since the pandemic have seen a steady increase in overall collection use for the month of February, specifically. Thanks to a generous digital equity grant from our partners at the city of Bloomington, we have added 15 new 5G 10th generation iPads to our library of things collection. Our iPad collection is very popular and comes with preset MCPL digital resources. These additional iPads should help to reduce the overall wait time for patrons. For example, the current holds queue for our iPads is 23. We recently shared news of our new digital periodicals platform press reader. Use of press reader increased significantly in February, thanks in part to marketing's additional promotional work. We have also seen an increase in use of our other new e-library resource, Lote for Kids, which provides bilingual stories for children and families. In February, 40% of the stories read on Lote for Kids were in English, while the remaining 60% were stories written in one of 14 other languages, which is part of the reason we introduced the resource, so that's great to see. Tax season is well underway, and our tax help services are as popular as always this year. We released another Hot Ones episode, this time featuring teen library assistant, Laura Wise, and it saw the most in-person attendance of any of the episodes so far. Special thank you to teen librarian, Tiana Pascoe, for creating and producing this program. February saw strong engagement with MCPL via social media with notable increases across Facebook and Instagram related to Black History Month, Library Lovers Month, the Adult Winter Reading Challenge, and the Friends of the Library's Marianna Armstrong exhibit, Matthew Cordell's Neighborhood. February was also our best month ever on TikTok with over 20,000 views of MCPL videos, with the top spot going to adult library assistant, Burl Cooper's video about free reading glasses at the library. On a related note, we just wrapped up our social media audit this week and are analyzing the results to see if we want to make any changes to our strategy for using social media to share library information and to engage with patrons. The analytics vary across platforms and some of them even change from year to year, so it's a little challenging to compare them, but we do know that YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook have the most reach for us and that the last three years show a steady increase in terms of MCPL social media engagement. We're proud to be a part of a new community partner program aimed at reducing instances of homelessness in Monroe County. Heading home of South Central Indiana and the Community Foundation of Bloomington in Monroe County, we're awarded a significant five-year grant from the Lilly Foundation to hire indirect diversion and prevention case managers at strategic locations throughout our community. MCPL will be one of those locations and will host a case manager onsite to work with individuals and families who may be on the path to homelessness. We're working with heading home administrators on the details for recruiting and supervising these case managers and how their work will fit within the library service and operational models. We're in the early stages, but we expect to have our diversion and prevention case manager onsite late summer or early fall. And finally, we released a statement in response to the March 14th executive order to dissolve the Institute of Museum and Library Services and its potential impact on public libraries and on MCPL specifically. We don't often issue statements to our community like this, and we take seriously our commitment to political neutrality as a publicly funded organization. However, this executive order does pose a financial and symbolic threat to libraries across the country and could potentially impact access to some of our most important digital resources, such as Inspire and our Overdrive Libby ebook collection. And so we felt it was appropriate to share our perspective on this and how it could impact MCPL. We talked through the reasoning for this statement with our staff and that our hope is the message raises some awareness of the matter among MCPL patrons and Monroe County residents at large. And I'll have a little bit more to say about this later in the meeting under new business. Any questions about the director's report? I apologize in advance for how much I'm gonna talk tonight 'cause there are a lot of updates and most of it's me, so. Used, I think that's great. Yeah. Okay. All right, old business. Ready? Yeah. Ready? Sure. Okay. So the first item under old business is a review of our annual report. So the annual report is conducted by the Indiana State Library and it's required of all Indiana libraries. We prepare this report every January for the previous operational and fiscal year and submit the finished report to the state library by March 1st. The data collected helps the state library understand how Indiana libraries are performing, what the trends are in library use and service, and where opportunities for growth and improvement may emerge. After reviewing all individual library reports, the state library then shares a summary report for the collective Indiana library community, which gives individual libraries like us a snapshot of overall library use across the state and some valuable context for our own data. This year's report for MCPL is included in the packet. I have omitted a few pages which happen to list contact information for you all, but otherwise I left the report intact. It is quite lengthy and a lot of it doesn't change from year to year like building square footage and address and typical hours of operation. But I wanted to point out some highlights from the 2024 report. First is question number 02-003, the number of registered users. For 2024, that was 55,446 by the year's end. That's an increase of 3,529 patrons from 2023 to '24. Question 03-002 is total assessed valuation for the library district. For last year, that was $11,135,908,698. This is the stuff that Gary talks about when we go through the budget every year. That's an increase in Monroe County's assessed valuation of $1.1 billion from '23 to '24. At the same time, the operating tax rate for MCPL went down from 0.0763 in '23 to 0.0712 in '24, which means that the percentage of an individual's taxes that goes directly to funding the library actually went down. Senate Bill 1 aside, this is good news in terms of the relative value of MCPL to a Monroe County resident and the overall financial health of our library. Question number 7-10, total number of all paid staff was 174, which is about where we are as of today. Actually, I think we're at 173 as of today. Looking at 2023's report, we added five employees from '23 to 2024. Question 08-001, number of interlibrary loans your library has provided to other libraries was 3,212. Last year's reported total was 5,548. And what's behind that change is we traditionally count our reciprocal ebook lending partnership with Johnson County Public Library through the Cloud Library app as part of that interlibrary loan statistic. We, of course, dropped Cloud Library last year, so those interlibrary loans went away in terms of our reporting for this year. Question number 08-056, the total number of live in-person or virtual library programs was 2,306. So I wanna take a second and emphasize what that number means. That means that MCPL offered over 2,300 live library programs in 2024. Every one of those programs has one or more library staff members behind its conception, design, and execution. And every one of those programs is designed with a particular audience and subject matter in mind. So that is significant. Total attendance at live programs, which is question 08-057, was 33,729 patrons. That's also a number we're very proud of. In 2023, a total of 27,004 patrons attended 1,533 library programs. So there are increases in both of those numbers. Total annual visits to the library is question 08-063. For last year, it was 571,438. 2023 actually saw 583,964. So we saw a decrease of 12,526 visits over the previous year. Question 09-007, total physical items in the collection. That's books, movies, music, games, and things, basically the physical materials we circulate. That total was 437,293 items. 2023 holdings for all physical materials was 469,143. So that's a reduction in the size of our overall physical collection by 31,850 items. Circulation of those physical items for last year was 1,336,947. The previous year's total circ was 1,468,407. So that's a decrease in physical item circulation from '23 to '24 of 131,460. Now total circulation of electronic materials for '24 was 667,924, and in 2023 it was 617,147. So that's an increase of 50,777 circulations of electronic materials. These are trends that are made pretty visible in our monthly circulation statistics at the top of the director's report, and we obviously see a consistent yet still somewhat gradual shift from physical to digital use of library materials. Finally, the annual report does offer one opportunity for qualitative reporting with question 15004, which asks, what is something your library did in the past year that you're proud of? This is always a difficult one for us to answer because there's so much we have to choose from. But for 2024, we think the obvious point of pride for MCPL was our handling of the HVAC failure and flood at the Southwest branch at the start of the year, and specifically the way our staff handled the crisis itself with an all hands on deck attitude, the way staff came together to support one another through adjusted workspaces, schedules, program plans, and community outreach efforts, how our community demonstrated its love and support for this library throughout the entire closure. This was perhaps our greatest success story from last year, and it's one that could have been anything but successful, but it ultimately proved to be something we're very proud of. So that's kind of a summary of the annual report. Again, the entire report is in the packet. When we get the state library's collective report on public libraries in Indiana, we can share that with you as well and provide that context for how we do compared to some of our peers. Can I answer any questions at all about the annual report? (audience laughing) A lot of amazing things. I do have a question. Just because I'm surprised by the significant increase in live programming, knowing we had an additional branch, don't think that makes up. Have you been able to break that down to what areas of live programming, what library areas have grown? So there is a breakdown for specific types of programming by audience that we could look at. So I can give you that answer later, but that breakdown is also in the report. I don't think it answers the question all by itself. I think some of it is the Southwest branch and the programming that Southwest did even while we were closed, when they were working downtown and out in the community. There's another piece that is kind of a big part of the annual report, and that is from year to year, the state library will change the way they're counting certain metrics. And sometimes that means if we report programming around 13 to 1500 a year, and the next year it's 2300, eh, it may be the way they're asking the questions. So between those two, I think we can answer your question. And I'll look into that first part and have what the breakdown is, yeah. Great, thank you. Anyone? Compare our library system to others in the state. Do you have any certain ones that you typically, like as in numbers and number of programs that we compare very closely to? Yeah, yeah, so this is a great question. We have a set of what we call peer libraries, and there are about 12 of them that we look at in terms of size of the library, size of the staff, operating budget, population served is kind of the biggest indicator. And it's places like Evansville-Vandenberg, Johnson County, St. Joe, Allen County, whole list of others. And yeah, we kind of frequently compare ourselves to those, talk to those libraries and get a sense for what they're gonna do. Sometimes we visit them. So we have this sort of, I wanna say click, but it's a little niche of peer libraries in the state that we look at. We are very similar. We, I think I can say we do a little bit more in terms of programming than a lot of our peers do. But also some of the structure of some of those libraries is different. They'll have more branches than we do, for example. So the staffing and the hours is quite different. The nature of the programs that they do is a little bit different. Populations are different. The interests are different. Yeah. Thanks. I wanted to ask about the figure of the items that were loaned to other libraries versus received from other libraries. That was one piece that, in addition to the huge community service piece of this that's so impressive, that kind of stood out to me. Can you provide some context for, it's almost like a tenfold, the items loaned versus the items received. Can you say more about that? You mean specifically why do we lend more through ILL than we borrow? Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I have a great and definitive answer to that and I would talk to our circulation services and collection development managers to get that. But by and large, we are seen as a library that other libraries can borrow from and we encourage that. We want to be known as that. So we try to process ILL as quickly as possible. We also look at our collection as something that can be utilized and valued by other members of the state rather than just Monroe County. Monroe County residents are our principal users, of course, but we see ILL as an important part of being in the library community. And so we facilitate that as much as possible. That was a big part of why we did the cloud library reciprocal lending with Johnson County up until last year. A lot of it could come down to what are the nature of the requests that our patrons have? Are we able to satisfy those requests by purchasing items for our collection quickly rather than doing an ILL because we do a lot of patron requests satisfying with those online requests and our collection development department does a great job of saying, you know what, that's something we ought to just buy and get to this person as quickly as possible. So that's probably a factor too. But I think for a more definitive answer, let me talk to Stephanie Meyer and Lisa Ciebelian, get it back to you. - Okay, thanks. Yeah, that's a good observation. I'd just like to make a statement that I think the idea of public libraries, I think have always been embedded in the idea of reciprocity. And so I think that we are ahead of the curve on that. Thank you. Any other questions or comments before we move on? Okay. Can I get a motion to approve, to hear the IMLS executive order and letter to representatives? Oh, yep, I already did. - One of the things, sorry. Yeah. - Under old business. Got it, sorry. You just don't want to hear all those updates. No. (all laughing) Policy update, code of conduct. No, we're talking about strategic plan updates under old business. This is, we are halfway through our current strategic plan. So I wanted to provide some updates on where we are with some of those action items. The current plan was developed by a team of staff and board members back in 2023, and it involved community input on library services, operations, community presence, opportunities for expansion and enhancement of services and operations. The state library does require that all Indiana libraries have an active strategic plan, which spans either three or five years. Our current three-year plan spans 2024 to 26. An abbreviated version of the plan is in the packet. I also brought some printed ones for you all. It serves as both a commitment on the part of MCPL to review and explore areas for improved service and as a guide for how to make those improvements over a three-year period. So again, as we approach kind of the midpoint of the current strategic plan, we want to share some updates on the progress we've made toward those commitments and what we have left to do before the start of the next plan. Just going alphabetically by department and administration, we've worked with the State Library and State Librarian, Jacob Speer, on developing proposed language changes to the Indiana code specific to the definition of libraries and library services. We're involved in very careful and calculated forms of library advocacy in response to recent state and federal initiatives, which challenge library funding and/or access. And we've completed our review and proposed updates to the current behavior policy, and we'll begin our incident report system and procedures review next week with the expectation of making updates to these processes by August. In adult services, they've expanded program offerings for adult patrons by adding things like the Lego Club, the Fiber Arts Club, and Board Game Night, and occasionally Board Game Swaps, and various special events such as our Tea and Popsicle socials. This department has also added the Short Attention Span Book Club, the highly successful Winter Reading Program, and is partnering with Constellation Stage and Screen for their production of Misery, all in an effort to provide robust readers' advisory for patrons. Building Services and Security led our review of the behavior policy we're proposing for adoption under new business tonight, and they will lead our forthcoming review of our incident report system. This department also completes innumerable weekly facilities projects aimed at making our three library locations as safe and comfortable for patrons as possible, which is strategic goal number three, an important recent example being the updates that they made to our CCTV server and exterior cameras here at the Downtown Library last fall, and the near daily mechanical oversight and support of our HVAC and related systems across all three buildings. Communications and Marketing is working towards goals one and two by conducting ADA compliance software checks to ensure that our content is as accessible as possible, making sure we use gender inclusive language, especially when describing caregivers and children's programs, and they continue to manage our eResource of the Month promotional campaigns to help spotlight resources that develop patron literacy and continued learning. CATS is working toward outfitting Studio B with podcasting equipment. We have new hardware ordered, which will allow us to provide more robust streaming of city, county, and MCPL channel content, and the public channel will be added to our streaming services once this new equipment arrives and is installed. We've been adding CATS archived programs to the CATS website and the CATS YouTube channel, and we'll continue that work going forward. And we'll be adding closed captions to new content on CATS site within a few weeks. Children's Services has introduced new programs like the Home School Art Club and Junior Explorers to provide children with opportunities for socialization and engagement in creative crafts, and to learn about nature and nature-based themes in reference to South Central Indiana. Both programs are part of their effort to support student learning about essential life skills through STEAM and maker-based activities. They've developed online reading programs such as the Fat Bear Challenge and I Did a Read Challenge to help readers use Beanstack online, and they're partnering with IU Flagship to offer a four-session program aimed at educating patrons about Russian, Chinese, and Arabic languages. And they're partnering with Parks and Rec, the Peek Squeery, I'm not saying that right, and the African American Dance Company to develop diverse and engaging programs. Peek Squeakery, thank you, that is correct. Circulation Services has significantly increased the number of shelf-based face-out displays which they manage as part of their workflow. This is one of the best ways we can help draw patrons' attention to the otherwise hidden items and collections that we have. And they've made some important changes to the way we do end cap displays and how they assign collection maintenance oversight to individual circulation leads. Collection Development has worked with Cirque Services to establish procedures for the selection of new library of things items and to update how those items are cataloged and shelved to allow for sustainable growth. Our digitization plan has been updated and we're continuing to look at how to prioritize local history projects going forward. The recent Musical Family Tree partnership being a prime example of this. In refining their weeding procedures, they found that our legacy collection reporting system is actually more useful than Collection HQ for generating weeding lists. And they're working on the integration of numerous collections where appropriate, including holiday materials, juvenile reference, and parent-teacher resources, and are moving the Spanish language collection closer to El Centro's current office location. And they've established a manga-influenced comic collection for all audience levels, as well as introducing our popular Blu-ray collection. Our Ellitsville branch has completed their first action item by adding the new digital creativity station and providing on-demand technology help for patrons. They've also completed their review of the branch collections and expectations for collaboration and partnership with collection development. Administration and building services is working with this team to finalize plans for improvements to the Ellitsville public service desks, the hold shelves, and the staff workspaces, which we expect to complete later this year. Information technology has been instrumental in helping us launch the Vega Discover catalog late last year, and they execute the Polaris upgrades needed to make sure our new catalog interface does what it should. They've also been heavily involved in implementing and supporting Communico, our new room and asset reservation software. IT also leads our staff intranet oversight team and coordinates the necessary updates for happier pages and channels, which are critical to the library's internal communications. Outreach services is deep into the spec and bid preparation work for our new Bookmobile, and we have engaged specialty vehicle services once again to help us with vehicle specs and requests for bids. They're working with property managers for existing Bookmobile stops to learn how we can better promote our mobile library services, and that feedback has led to new outreach marketing materials from our C&M department. Vital has worked with collection development to create a new cataloging system for the Vital fiction collection, which should help new readers find content that more closely matches their developing reading skills, and the recataloging work itself is now in progress. They successfully implemented Literacy Nimbus, the new Vital data management system just over a year ago, and we've noted significant improvements in the accuracy and efficacy of our communication and record keeping. And they've put our Digital Equity Planning Committee together, which has completed internal and peer library surveys to better understand current digital literacy needs and opportunities for new programs and resources, as well as best practices for tech help with library patrons. Program coordination has successfully implemented and trained staff on Communico, and worked with our friends group on planning last November's Power of Words event, and the recent Armstrong exhibit of author and illustrator Matthew Cordell's children's book illustrations, which just wrapped up in 1B and 1C. Our Southwest branch has added monthly challenges to the All Ages Collaborative space, including the MLK celebration and the creation of a community quilt from Paper Art Squares, which is now on display in the Southwest branch exhibit hall, and they have plans for adding more All Ages space activities. They've done a ton of work in codifying steps and expectations for reserving and using our teaching kitchen, including a space reservation waiver, an option for individuals or groups reserving the kitchen to actually meet with a librarian in advance of their reservation so that they can test out the equipment, familiarize themselves with appliances and the presentation tools and the overall space. Southwest has also started a teen advisory board where teens meet on a regular basis to offer feedback and suggestions on programs and space use, and we did install an additional sidewalk leading to the entrance of the Southwest Branch Library, which is, of course, now inaccessible due to the Gordon Pike construction project. I'll hold off on sharing strategic updates from teen services, as I know Sam Ott will want to talk about some of these during his department update here in a bit. And finally, from our volunteerism internships and service learning work, our internship program has been reviewed and restructured, and our IU advocate for community engagement has expanded service learning with IU School of Education Students Involvement with tutoring and children services and teen services. We're looking to complete the volunteer database work by the end of 2026. Some of the remaining action items we aim to complete this year and next include further updates to our compensation philosophy and compensation model as an extension of the 2022 compensation study and adjustment work we did, update the directional and collection signage throughout the downtown library, complete the Studio B conversion in CATS, and implement the possible relocation of digital creativity studios. Circulation services will be revamping the shelving for our zine collection to increase visibility and access of that collection. Continue to learn more about collection HQ selection tools and how they can streamline some of our selection work in collection development. We will release requests for bids for our new bookmobile and accept a winning bid within the coming months. Explore a community-based approach to commissioning a public artwork for the Southwest branch outdoor spaces, something we've talked about for quite a while. Want to further expand our teen and Southwest programming and outreach efforts to connect with more teens and provide opportunities for teen leadership. And we need to complete the work on our new volunteer database management system. So our next strategic plan will go into effect beginning in 2027, and the work on that plan will start early next year. And it may involve an actual consultant and a commitment to a five-year plan this time around. We haven't done a five-year plan in some time. Usually those, the strategic plan committee involves staff representation as well as at least one board member. So we'll plan to continue that tradition. Happy to answer any questions about these or about the strategic plan. I'm impressed. I like that question, that's a good one. Yeah. Good question, there's a lot happening. It's a lot, we front-ended a lot of work for the strategic plan. So I'm really impressed with the department's activity. Any other questions or comments before we move on to new business? Okay, can I get a motion to approve the IMLS executive order and letter to representatives? So moved. Okay, so as I said earlier, there was an executive order on Friday, March 14th to defund and dissolve the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The IMLS is the only federal agency charged with policy, funding, and professional development work for museums and libraries across the country. So it's a very important institution. We benefit from the IMLS in terms of funding for Indiana's Inspire suite of databases, as well as our Overdrive/Libby ebook collection, a number of professional development opportunities. And as I said earlier, I think it's not just a financial concern, it's a symbolic concern in terms of support for libraries and literacy across the country. The American Library Association and the Indiana Library Federation, both of which have advocacy wings and do a lot of advocacy and lobbying work, are certainly leading the charge in responding to this executive order. We met with ILF advocacy groups last Wednesday for all libraries involved to get a sense for what we can and should do and maybe what we shouldn't do. And we had an all-staff meeting about it and explained to staff that we felt it was appropriate to make a statement on behalf of the library so that there was a degree of community awareness here in Monroe County. But that beyond that, there isn't anything that we're going to do or say as an organization that individual library users, including employees, in the capacity of individual library users, are welcome to sign petitions and write letters to representatives and so on, but not in the capacity of an employee. So we're pretty clear and consistent on that. One of the recommendations the ILF advocacy group had was to talk to your board about agreeing on a letter to send to state representatives and our federal representatives in the Senate and have the board approve it, and then the library director and board president basically sign it. So what I sent to you all an email, and there's a print copy of it in front of you here, is the letter that the ILF itself drew up and suggested that we send. The plan would be for Jamie and I to sign this, and then we would send these off to our state and federal representatives very soon, and it's something that I know a lot of libraries are doing with their board as well. So that's what this is. Happy to talk about it more or answer questions. Can you speak to the idea of a coordinated effect from just not our state, but Illinois, Ohio, are other states reacting to this as well? Do you know, can you get a feed on that? I know that other states and state library consortia are reacting to this in a similar way. The consistent thing I've observed is that everybody's following the ALA first and foremost and leaning on them to lead the way and suggest the language that's used. I know the ILF is leaning on ALA advocacy for the language used. The other consistent message that we've gotten from some of these library community conversations is just remember your place, you're publicly funded, we're not getting involved in a political conversation. The reason it's appropriate to do anything at all is because this measure has a direct financial and service impact on libraries. And so that's as far as we go. So that's kind of the standard that I've seen right now is that libraries are adopting a letter to send to representatives and then that's it, yeah. So I just wanna state for those who are not seeing it, although it's available. We can certainly read it. It's not in the packet, but we can certainly read it, yeah. Well, just to reiterate what you said, really we're just talking about how it's impacting services that we provide and materials that our patrons can use. Yes. And I noticed the third paragraph does address the rural and underserved areas. Yes. And I think they're gonna be the hardest to hit if that is my take on that statement there. Yes, I agree. They rely typically more on federal grants that go through the IMLS, so yeah. I was kind of interested in the list of three, two of them are pretty, not vague in a bad way, but less specific services or whatever that we, without the IMLS, we would suffer. But the middle one, job training programs will disappear. I thought that was an interesting, a little more specific. What is that about? Yeah, the IMLS funds professional development for museum and library professionals as well through federal grants. So that's what that's speaking to. And again, to Kathy's point, a lot of smaller libraries that don't have significant budgets, don't have a foundation with donations and so on, they really lean on those grants to do professional development for their staff. So if the IMLS goes away, then a lot of those libraries won't have those professional development dollars. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? All in favor of approving this, say aye. Aye. Those that oppose, say nay. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Do I have a motion to approve the policy update code of conduct that Greer is going to speak to us more about? So moved. Okay, I'm gonna give a brief introduction and then turn it over to Brian Liebacher and Josh Wolf. So we are looking to update our patron behavior policy. In the packet, I've included the current version of this policy, which is called Public Library Behavioral Rules, right. We're changing the name and a few other things in terms of the way the document is structured and some of the language that we're using and a couple of important age-related and space-specific points that are in the current version of the policy. This is all centered around strategic goal number three and specifically making sure that our buildings are as welcoming and safe and secure as possible for all patrons. And this policy is critical because we really lean on this whenever we have to interface with a patron over a behavior issue and if there's any kind of contest over whether or not it's okay for them to do what they're doing, we can always cite this policy and say this specifically says you cannot do this or this is what this means in general terms and that's why we have to hold you accountable. So the policy is very important. We have not updated this policy since 2019. I think the last time we did that update in 2019, the focus was on whether or not we were gonna allow a degree of sleeping in the library. That was kind of the focus. But now we're in a different place in terms of patron behaviors, particularly here at the downtown library and Josh, Brian and I and a number of folks involved in this review took that charge very seriously. And so we put together a review team that Brian led and Brian's gonna kind of talk about that process and what the team did in terms of research and what they originally proposed and then Josh will kind of take us to where we've come since that proposal back in December. Okay, thank you, Greer. My name's Brian Leibacher. the Building Services and Security Director, and I had the privilege of working with this committee. This committee consisted of five members, including myself, and then there were six other advisors as well from library staff. The four members other than myself were Burrell Cooper, who was just here, he just ducked out a minute ago, from Adult Services, Becky Kraft from Adult Services, Jen Hoffman from Adult-- I'm sorry, from Outreach Services, and then Krista Souter from Children's Services. The committee goals were primarily to update this policy as well as to simplify the language, thereby making it easier for library patrons to remember. It's important to note that one of our kind of-- some of our guiding principles in this-- back in 2024, at the beginning of 2024, we had an Adult Services social work intern, and that social work intern provided some notes to kind of help us keep some reference points along the way as we began to consider changes to the existing policy. As we set out to accomplish our goals, we started by first reviewing the current policy and simplifying its existing languages. From there, then, we started to meet with individuals from the different buildings within MCPL and individuals within those different departments to find out what was important to them as we started to think about a new policy. So as we talked to those folks from those different departments, we began to incorporate their ideas into our working draft. We then reached out to our peer libraries, which I was gonna go into a little bit of detail about what our peer libraries were, but Greer did an excellent job earlier this evening. So we reached out to some peer libraries within Indiana as well as outside of Indiana that are comparable-sized to MCPL. And we began to talk with them about their policy and what worked for them, what didn't work for them, what they liked about their existing policies, and what they didn't. So we took all of that information and we began to put that into a draft policy. And we did that over the course of about nine weeks. We met five times in all of our buildings over the course of those nine weeks through August, through October. And then we took the draft version to the group of advisors that I mentioned earlier. And then we took that to our leadership team in November for review. So at this point, speaking about review, I want to bring up Josh Wolfe, who's going to talk a little bit more about that review process. Thank you. I'm going to try to do this without messing up Sam's laptop. Just to reiterate also what Brian said, the team was great. They worked tirelessly with a really aggressive deadline. And I'm here to talk specifically about there were a couple of pretty substantive changes that really led to us thinking we were ready to go in December and then kind of looking at it again, talking to more people and thinking, wait a minute, we really want to get this right. Let's take some time to review this. In their original proposal, which they submitted to us in November, there was language reserving the children's areas of the library strictly for children and caregivers. Adults wishing to access the collection would need permission from library staff. Pretty similar to the way the teen spaces are run. Although for the teen spaces, that was always a service decision based on focus groups that we had with teens before we opened them. That version of the draft also raised the minimum age of children who are unaccompanied from seven, which it's been probably since I was seven, and it was the '70s, and anybody could go anywhere at any time, to 12. And that was based, as Brian sort of referenced, on what we were hearing from a lot of our peer libraries. At one point, we considered leaving that language in the policy. It felt like a hard stop to us to restrict the children's area that much. There are so many different kinds of people who use the children's department, groups of college students studying, tutors for English as a new language who use the materials in there. We didn't want people to have to have a pass to come into that area. So we considered, actually, because our enforcement is always behavioral-based and situational, leaving the language in the draft to give ourselves something to point to if there was a dispute or any kind of dispute over the enforcement. But there were problems with perceptions of that, perceptions of selective enforcement that gave us pause. So we had more discussions with more staff in more places, different departments. And we realized that if we adopt that language that we don't intend to enforce all the time, it was going to cause pretty much no end of confusion, no matter what kind of training we developed. And additionally, it would confuse our patrons, who would look at our website, see these rules, and think that they're going to be enforced, when in fact, that was not our intention. We have tween areas in the children's department for ages 7 to 12. And they're encouraged to go in there unaccompanied. We have programs for them where they're encouraged to go in unaccompanied. So we decided to not do that. So then we began talking about, what is the correct age? And again, we had heard many libraries make it 12. It's a very sort of modern thinking on that. But here in Bloomington, and among our staff, and our patrons, the answer to that seemed to be quite subjective. Obviously, it's very difficult to picture a situation where a six-year-old would be able to navigate the public library unaccompanied. But fixing the age to a specific place seemed like we're boxing ourselves in. We could be engendering even more confusion and arguments. So rather than doing that, we've changed the language and taken out age entirely, and made it specifically about ability of the patrons and giving ourselves the sort of situational ability to use judgment and decisions. We did leave in that some areas of the library are designed for specific uses and for specific audiences. And this applies to level up, silent reading room, Indiana room. But we specifically mentioned children's and teen services. Some areas of the library are designed for specific use. Not using those spaces for the intended purposes may be asked to use another area of the library. Spaces intended for children or teens are designed specifically for those age groups and their caregivers. So we're still going to react if there's a problem. And we're developing training right now to speak to that. In fact, if the board does pass this today, we probably will set our implementation for some time in May because we need to work on that. And then for the underage limit, we wrote, unattended children and/or vulnerable individuals, including adults, must demonstrate responsible use of library spaces and resources. It's not about being old enough to get drafted or anything like that. We don't act in local parentess. And we're anticipating having really good talking points for parents or caregivers who ask. So this is a torturous explanation. But it has been-- after the team worked really hard to meet the deadline and we were set to go in December, we thought it deserved a little bit. And it's probably the biggest break from what we've had before. And if you guys have questions for either me or Brian, I'm happy to answer them. Probably I can appreciate the time to share because as I looked through that, I thought, could we just go ahead so that the parents when they-- and I appreciate that all children can be-- demonstrate responsibility. But I didn't know whether we should still put a kind of age frame on there just so that you could say, well, unaccompanied, in this time period, really you should be with your child. So that's why I was thinking, well, maybe 1 through 12, whatever, just so that they know that those children can be talked to more directly because the parents still are really responsible for their child at those ages as well. I understand what you're-- so I appreciate that. Those are the kind of conversations we've been elbow deep in since December. And frequently, as you know, that's what caregivers will ask. What is the age? We want to know what the age is. We know developmentally, children progress at all different speeds. So those are the conversations we're really looking forward to having more often. Because you can say other things at that time, like this is not the Boys and Girls Club. If you don't have eyes on your child, well, they know how to find you. If they walk out of this children's department, we may not be watching them. So those are conversations we seek frequently. Because, yeah, I work with 12-year-olds who can't navigate the library as well, of course. But yeah. Thank you for all your time that you put into it, but that's the only thing that I was thinking as well. I have a quick question about the language on that additional rules, that third point, unattended children and vulnerable individuals. Why are we restricting that to those populations versus patrons? Why are all patrons not needing to demonstrate responsible use of library spaces and resources? That is a very good question. And that is something-- you're the first person to ask that. Why are all patrons who come in must demonstrate-- Yeah. And maybe we could say, like, patrons, including, you know. But I feel like that's just a rule for everybody. At the top of the list. What? Certainly amend that to say, all patrons, including children and vulnerable individuals. And bump that up to the top is like the standard expectation. That is the standard expectation. I like it. Yeah. [INAUDIBLE] Address patrons and not using the spaces for their intended purposes, which is basically the same thing. Maybe, maybe not, demonstrate responsible use. I think that's where we were talking about, like, ages and spaces. I think it's important to basically almost be redundant. And because you've got it in two spots, which addresses the idea that, yeah, you've got to be responsible, too. Good point, Jamie. However, just throwing out possibilities. When there is a specific bullet point for children and vulnerable individuals, that does-- I understand that, too, because we're addressing each issue. But-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] It went from a specific age limit to basically responsible use, particularly for children and vulnerable individuals. I could see either way. I mean, after you spent hours and hours on this-- It's OK. It's OK. We can do this for another six months. That's OK. I could see either way being fine. But that does create a separate bullet point. If there are issues, there's a separate bullet point for unattended children. I don't know which is better. I think the perception-- I like the code of conduct change for the title. I like a lot of things about-- I mean, the current one was great. But I do like the wording on some of the updated policy. I've noticed the wording was more-- I don't know if you say positive or what, but I don't know. That's one way to distinguish the children to have a separate bullet point. But it does make sense. Where would you-- where would you say you would combine it? Like still using that language, but you're also adding to everyone else. Yeah, something like all patrons, including unattended children and/or vulnerable individuals. And then that could be the first bullet point, because it's the most universal expectation. Do we need a motion? Yeah, can we have a motion to-- do we motion to approve, to amend that sentence? Can I-- Second. Any other questions or comments? I would like to just hope, and I'm sure this will happen, is that just like you go into the hospital, that you have the patient's responsibilities, whatever. These will be posted in every department. At the front door, the back door, parking lot, on your flyer on the door. I appreciate your thoughtful consideration of this and the work that the whole team put into it. It's very well done. Prohibited behaviors and just start with having positive behavior? I mean, do we need to-- Yeah, we thought about that for sure. And I don't know, I'd be interested in kicking this around a little bit more. But like, what is the sort of psychological impact of the average reader? When you're going through a behavior policy, what's going to stick with you? Is it the do not do these things so that we're clear? Or is it welcome to the library, these are the things you can do? And for a behavior policy, I think we tended to land on like, you need to see right away what's not OK. And even within that subset, these are the things we see the most. So no to this, which is all that stuff in that lengthy first bullet point. Or I think even Chris Robinson, who Brian had referenced earlier, said your goal is to fit your behavior policy on an index card, if you can. You can't do that because there's too much you got to include, but think of it in those terms and condense it in terms of the language and the length as much as possible and hit the really important points, which kind of drove a lot of the way we messed around with the bullet points in some of the language. Yeah. The only thing that I possibly could think about adding would be somewhere that this is at the discretion of the library employee or library decision. So I do believe we have some language to that effect. Maybe I missed it. If the library staff determine-- Yes. Yes. Yeah. [INTERPOSING VOICES] Yeah. In the first section, refusing to follow the directions of library staff. Do we want to be more explicit and say the library reserves the right to interpret this policy with regard to specific behaviors, so on and so forth? That's what I was getting at. OK. So you didn't have that challenge. OK. I'm not sure we want to use the word "interpret." Another word. We're wordsmithing here, but-- I just feel like that's just a safe thing. I hear you. And we love wordsmithing. So we don't really want to stop at this. We were even kind of sad bringing this to the board tonight. We've had so much fun. But we're just trying to make sure that you don't have to do it again anytime soon. Well, that's actually true. We don't want to do this again anytime soon. Sorry. Well, so here's-- Oh, go ahead. But they actually do weaken the policy to say this is at the discretion of a librarian. It almost feels subjective. Because if you're saying these are not tolerated, you can't have a weapon on the property. Intoxication is not allowed. To then put in the sort of like qualifier, like this is at the discretion of the librarian, makes it seem like-- well, maybe they would be tolerated if that one person-- Well, but we have like furniture misuse. Like that's subjective to the patron. Is it in there? It is. Misuse of library furniture, equipment, or facilities. Yeah, and I'm just using my experience as a former educator and as a parent and as someone who has seen behaviors also in public. I'm just trying to think the kind of issues that come up and the arguments that you may have. Refusing to follow the directions of library staff, is a violation of the code of conduct. I kind of like that bullet. I mean, I like how it's worded, unless you just want to get a little wordier and maybe some-- I don't know, some synonyms in there instead of just directions, or refusing to follow the directions and-- Or you could just easily say, refusing to follow the code of conduct, because it's delineated here, right? Yeah. Well, sometimes the library staff have to explain how behaviors are outside of the code of conduct, even though they'll say, show me where it's written. That's what I-- that's why I was thinking you had that line. Yeah, and that's how we end up with those exhaustive links. That is how you end up there. I know the circle. What about directives, like refusing to follow directives and directions of the library staff? Like, you're-- I don't know. This is up to you guys. You let us know. I feel comfortable adding the-- all patrons should do the right thing at the library. Yeah, we're OK with that. So what I have-- because approving the policy tonight pending changes means we have to articulate those now, and they're in the minutes. So what I have is, first, amend the policy language regarding children vulnerable individuals to include all patrons, including children and/or an individual, so on and so forth, and move that to the top of the second section. Yes. If we want to consider additional changes to this and we're getting into wordsmithing, then we're probably doing this in April. Because I don't think we can go back and forth on wordsmithing outside of the meeting and approve a policy that's got language we didn't discuss. I'm going to ask those on the committee and who've worked so hard. Would you benefit from additional language, or do you feel comfortable with how it is now? I'm going to defer to my colleague. Ask the buck. I would say that we would probably all love some kind of magic loophole or something that would simplify a lot of this down even more. I will say that as far as wordsmithing goes, we spend a lot of time not only amongst our committee, but then with the advisors and then as well as the leadership team discussing that. And again, while I think, again, as Josh said, we could spend another six months on this. And we might get it really fine-tuned, but I think as it stands right now, we were comfortable bringing it to the board tonight. It looks really good. It looks like you've put a lot of time into it. Let's take a vote. So we're voting on this pending the change to that one bullet point and its location within the policy. Okay. Lorraine, do you want me to read it again? Just for the minutes? Okay. We're talking about approving this policy pending a change to the bullet point, which reads all children and or vulnerable individuals. And we are going to add all patrons, including children and or vulnerable individuals. Did you say unattended children? It currently reads unattended children. I'm sorry, thank you. However, it's currently written. I'm looking at two different documents. And then we're going to move that bullet point. Three. Thank you. Bullet point three, we'll move to the top of the section, additional rules to ensure the comfort and safety of all patrons. What's happening? How do you feel about that? I don't know if I missed a comment or anything. How do you feel about that change, the two of you, after going through-- I feel great about it. We were really focused specifically on that children's issue as it related to specific ages. Jamie, you make a great point. This is a universal expectation. And it does not, I don't think it dilutes the children's part too much because it still specifically calls it out in there. Okay. All right. All in favor. Could I ask a question? Yeah, please. Are we voting now on this addition? Yes. Okay, 'cause I'll have, I have one more question about the whole thing in a minute. Please, go ahead and ask. Okay, well, what is Indiana code 354711.1? I looked it up and could not see. Is that, I'll just ask you, what is that? That refers to current Indiana gun laws as far as the rights to carry in public, yes. So someone with a license to carry or I don't know. That means that-- You do not need a license yet, but yeah, yeah, you can. Oh yes, okay, I'm not at-- The right to open carry, yes. So when it says accept as permitted, okay, that's what I was wondering. Anybody can carry a gun. Into a public library. With the exception of these board meetings. Okay. - Yep. That's kind of what I wondered if it meant, but I just wanted to check, thank you. Yeah, but voters can carry in, but poll workers can't. So stupid. - So interesting. Sorry, I digress. Okay. Okay. - Silly. Good question. - I know. Yeah, well, thank you, I tried to look it up and couldn't figure it out, so. Yeah, yeah, you can carry in a vote. But poll workers can't. So you're voting on the policy as written with the exception of the change to that one bullet point in its location. Okay. Okay, all in favor say aye. Aye. - Aye. Thank you so much. Thank you. Next, we're gonna hear from Sam Ott from Teen Services. Okay. Hello, everybody. Hi. - Hello. As they said, I'm Sam. I run the Teen Services Department downtown. And I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about what we did last year and some of what we've done up to this point in 2025. But first, I wanna make sure that you can see, these are the staff that I supervise. They do like 90% of the wonderful work that we're able to provide to the public. And I just wanna make sure you can see them and see their names, because without them, I would just be standing here being like, I would like to do stuff, but I have nobody to do it. So they're the real heroes, and I'm really grateful that I can work with all of them. So these are some of the highlights from last year. One of the big ones is that we are no longer the ground floor. We are the downtown teen space, which has been planned long in the works, mainly to just make it more clear to the public what we do and to be consistent across the whole system. It's also been very confusing when patrons come downtown and we say, "Go to the ground floor," and they're like, "Well, I am at the ground floor. What does that mean?" So that's really helped. We were with our communications and marketing department on that, and it was just really nice to be able to print all that off and make that change official on all of our marketing materials. We also, this is one of our strategic goals. We have new and expanded collections in the space. We were able to work with our YA selector, Martha Odier, and then also our facilities team to install new shelving in the space for our new teen non-viction collection, and then also expand our shelving for graphic novels, manga, and manga-influenced comics as well. We've also added extra shelving in the space for display of materials, which has been great to really enhance that, and I'm really excited to look the end of this year to our circulation numbers and see how they differ from last year because of all the additional face-out and the change in those materials. We've also continued our physical space upgrades with additional seating, the shelving for the displays, and also working with our facilities team to completely reshape our design and craft studio so that we have a much larger space for the kids to utilize all the resources we have but also do programs. It's also meant that now, previously the countertop we had was a static height, but now it uses four tables that can be adjusted up and down, so it's a lot more accessible as well, which has been great. One of the other big things was that last year we won the 2024 Wall Grant, which meant that we were able to purchase three new gaming PCs and then a new Vive VR headset, and I was able to work with our IT department head, Ned Baugh, and we were able to upgrade all of our existing computers as well to gaming PCs, and they were built in-house by Dakota Erickson, one of the IT staff, which is great, so that means that we were able to provide these resources for the kids, but also we can much more easily do maintenance and upgrade the computer, so it's not gonna be something where we consistently have to replace all of this hardware. We can just go in and swap out one or two pieces and also fix things when they break as well, which is gonna be really nice. And the teens spend a lot of time playing things like Minecraft, Roblox, sharing YouTube videos with one another, but it's just been great to see that enhanced collaboration, but also provide these additional resources, because gaming PCs are expensive, and a lot like all the other video game resources or technology we provide, this is something that we're happy we can just let them use when they might not have access to this otherwise. After School Snacks, I talked to all of you about this a little bit last year. We've really expanded that program. I was able to get additional funding in our budget both through, I think it's, is it CyO2Cy, Josh, that funds that? Yeah, through that grant, and then some additional Friends of the Library funds we've been able to use both downtown at Southwest and Ellisville to provide additional food. The kids love it. We now, we provide more food, but fewer options because we figured out what they like and what we can buy bulk of from places like Sam's Club. We limit it to one per person, but they really enjoy having that available. And it's also really, I think, helped curve some of the behavior issues in the space 'cause kids aren't as hungry. Summer Reading last year saw one of our highest participations since we opened. It was our third highest. I think we had, how many did I write down? Whoop. 553 teens, and we're hoping to expand that again next year. But one of the things that really helped is we got additional funds in our budget and instead of offering three grand prizes for the whole system, each branch offered their own individual set of grand prizes. So we had nine total. And this year we're gonna do that again, but Bookmobile is offering their own team services grand prize as well. So we're really excited to see how that goes. As Greer mentioned, Hot Ones is a particularly popular program and it's gone very, very well. You should watch it on the MCPL YouTube channel if you have not. It's great, you can see Greer and Josh suffer as well if they did the program. Sorry Greer, you've been outed. The Snack Shelf has also been very successful. One of the new staff we hired last year, Allie Fletcher, was a former chef in Boston in a previous career and so she started leading some food programs for the kids on how they can make just elevated versions of the stuff they're already making. Like this is how you make better ramen or better grilled cheese or something like that. And all of those programs had full registration and attendance and we specifically over purchased the ingredients for that so then the other kids who don't register can then come in or be fed later in the space. We've also just overall enhanced the amount of food we offer all of our programs pretty significantly. The local Pizza X just is probably sick of us at this point. The Needle Felting Club has been a really fun evolution because we used to just provide that as a resource the kids could grab but there was enough interest in it that one of our staff started leading specific programs on it and over the summer there's been so much interest. There's gonna be a three day camp where they have to design a dragon but you have to have previous needle felting experience. So we'll see how all that goes. Our role playing games as ever are super popular. We're running six to eight sessions of those every month along with some team led programs which I'll talk about a little bit later. If I offered two every day I think they would all be full. They serve six to eight kids in almost every session. They used to serve up to 15 but we had to split that out 'cause it's just unmanageable for one person to run a game for 15 people for two hours. And then our after hours events have changed a little bit this year. The teens had for a while been really enjoying our larger scale dances a few times a year but over time our use patterns have shifted. So while we still had decent attendance we wanted to respond to that. So now we're offering smaller like monthly or bi-monthly after hours programs. So like laser tag, nerf battles, after hours movies and things like that. And so we serve 20 to 30 kids in those events and that's been going really well. Last month was a nerf battle. We're still finding nerf darts all over the team space. And this next month we're doing one called Siege of the Castle where we're collecting cardboard. And for the first hour the kids will build a cardboard fortress and then they will lay siege to each other with little foam balls to see which one can hold up the best to it. And we'll provide pizza during that as well because food is the key. Community partnerships. This is another one of our big strategic goals. We've continued our school visits every month. We visit about one school every week and then we have different youth serving agencies come into the space where we work with them throughout the year. In Ellitsville our team librarian Decker has also been working really closely with RBBSC on regular visits. And I think this month when they attended they did a Pokemon button making program and served over 50 kids during that event which is really cool to see. And they've had great response to those types of events. New outreach initiatives. This just started two weeks ago actually after three years of work with Wendy, the special education coordinator at MCCSE. We are now hosting again special education visits to the downtown teen space and the Southwest teen space where those classrooms have coordinated with MCCSE transportation and they are bussed into the space so they can utilize the space with their school provided aides and teachers in a lower sensory environment where it's also just them so they can get familiar with the space, get to know staff and feel more comfortable with the goal of them eventually feeling confident enough to transition into service on their own. Some of them might not be able to do that so it really provides that service and it also lets us provide so many more resources than we could on a visit. So they come twice a month right now and then they also go twice a month. The Jackson Creek students go to our Southwest location with Kate Long, which has been great. And then last year we were finally able to start another project in Teen Services where we've been consistently going to the Bloomington High School North Senior Internship Fair to respond to kids as they present. Well, we actually hosted our own intern and it's been a long-term library patron as well who I've worked with I think since they were 10 and Josh has worked with them for years and they're a senior now, which makes me feel very old. But it was great to host them there and then we've been spending a lot of time trying to get into youth-focused events. We did a Youth Mental Health Matters focus at Bloomington High School North. Next week, I'm going to the Menorah County Transition Fair with Daniel Price, a Southwest Library Assistant at South and then Tiana Pesco and Allie Fletcher are going to the Health of Palooza also at South. So we're really trying to get out and meet our patrons where they are. But the big thing that I'm excited about is this team-led RPG program where our kids really love role-playing games and a lot of them have been coming to us saying that they don't have a space to run games, they don't feel confident enough, they've been having issues. And Claire Spence and Laura Wise decided that, hey, why don't we be that meeting point for them? So they developed documentation and a process for all of this. And teens can come to staff and say, I wanna run this game at this time with this many people, these are the kids I wanna work on it with. And then they have to meet with the staff regularly to show like, I've designed the game, I've actually thought about this, things are gonna go okay. And then they can run the game here in the library with the library staff member sitting there to help like run details or manage behavior instances that pop up. But they have then that support to run their first games. And that's been hugely popular. And we have several private events that are not like advertised on the calendar, but kids spread around to everybody else so that they know they can come. And those are very popular events. And many kids have run their first game. I think we have six to 18 DMs right now that are working with us throughout our program cycle to find time to run those events. This has also been very cool for us because we realized that this is pretty unique to MCPL and we didn't see any other libraries doing this. So Claire and Laura actually presented at two conferences last year on this, at GenCon and then MC3 in town. And then they went this year and presented at ILFU Services Conference. And then Claire is paneling at an IUPUI conference on play later next month on this initiative as well, which has been great to see. And just seeing team ownership of these events and their excitement about it. And so you hear me talk about teams all the time, but I actually, I'm gonna show you a short video. Last fall, three of the teams who do this, we spoke to them and they developed presentations on what the library means to them and why they wanted to run these games here. And they presented on that at the 2024 annual Friends of the Library meeting. Greer really helped get this initiative going, but that was recorded. So Kat's recorded all that. I'm gonna play one of the videos for you guys so you can see one of the teams talk about it. I got this team's permission. His name is Sprout. He actually works here as a materials handler and has been using the library consistently five or six days a week since he turned 12. So it's been great to see this evolution in so many ways and fingers crossed, the sound works. This is my presentation. (audience laughs) Hi, I'm Sprout. I use he/him pronouns and I've been participating in the Ground Floor's RPGs since May of 2020 when I joined the virtual D&D program led by Laura. I was anxious at first, but it didn't take me long to end up hanging out on the Discord most days for the entire time it was open just talking to the staff. It provided a space for me to explore D&D and also connect with the staff and with other teens. I've been interested in RPGs since I was in second grade and was in my very first campaign led by my dad. The library, the people, and the RPGs all mean so much to me and I'm so happy I get to be a part of such a wonderful community. Another thing that holds a spot in my heart are comics, especially ones that showed little me it was okay to express myself, such as Lumberjanes. A few years ago there was a game of Blood on the Clock Tower happening, a mafia-type murder mystery game, but I wasn't going to be able to attend the entire thing. I was offered the option of helping out as a storyteller and realized how much I enjoyed that aspect of it and started thinking of ideas of my own. I eventually approached Laura with the idea for an RPG drawing from a few different gaming systems taking place in the world of Lumberjanes. Our planning was and still is full of chaotic creativity, but eventually we managed to put together character sheets and launch our first session. Lumberjanes is a comic series about a group of diverse teens staying at a mythical summer camp. My sister recommended it to me around 2015 and it quickly became my favorite because of its authentic cast of characters and a message of being curious, caring, and fierce. When I realized I wanted to run an RPG at the library, my mind immediately went to Lumberjanes. A weird magical summer camp was the perfect setting even if Laura still hasn't actually read the books. (audience laughing) So far, the players have done some icebreakers, gotten robbed by a strange creature, hidden a wheel of cheese to win capture the flag, found some living statues, and escaped a Jumanji-like sci-fi board game. (laughing) Even though we've only had three sessions, the experience has been incredible. I love getting to share a world so dear to me with my peers, and exploring game mechanics and figuring out what makes an RPG engaging as we go has been a real learning experience. Every player has been so patient and created interesting and unique characters that fit into the world wonderfully, and designing a map and tokens for the capture the flag session was the most fun I've had planning for an RPG as a leader or as a player. This campaign has been so much fun. I've really enjoyed creating characters and building the world with Laura, and I'm so happy I have this chance. My Lumberjanes campaign is just a small part of the many different RPGs I have participated in, including Pathfinder, led by Claire, Rangers of Shadowdeep, led by Hunter, and the Sandwich Guild campaign that started my journey here four years ago led by Laura. The library and the staff have meant a lot to me over the years, and I'm so excited for more adventures in the chaos that awaits. I'm so happy I get to work here as an employee and experience it as a patron. Thank you. (audience applauds) So there are two other videos. They're just as wonderful, but I don't have 10 minutes to share all of those, but if you're interested, I can send those to Greer, and I'm sure that he can share those out, but they're also available on Cats as well. But I think that that pretty much sums up the best part of why we do what we do, and I couldn't say it any better than Sprout did. So that's it for me. So if you have any questions, I'd be more than happy to answer those. Yes. I have a few things. In reference to, you were talking about the grand prizes. Can you share what those are, what those look like? Yeah, so we have several grand prizes available, and they're pretty much the same across the system. The way it works is the teens can, every 10 points where they present, or where they read, they get a ticket, and then every five points after that, they get another one. So they can have five tickets in total. Those grand prizes downtown, they can pick to enter for either a Xbox X or a PS5. Then they can get a $50 gift card to the Game Preserve, and then another $50 card to the common room. And then the last one is a $100 gift card to Morgensterns. And then they're the same across the system after that, except that the branches offer a switch instead, just because of cost. And the teens are very excited about those, especially the video game systems. That was a good move. Yes. I'm the librarian at Edgewood High School, and I remember last spring, kids talking about it, and one girl said, and they're offering all prizes, the kids know, and they got the word out. So that was a good move. Well, I'm really glad to hear that. And I'm really grateful that I was able to work with Josh, and he was able to find extra funding and the Friends of the Library budget to make that happen, because we really wanted to make sure that we could meet that need, because we were seeing a bunch of kids that were just really sad that they put in their tickets and are just like, well, I guess it'll be one of three. But now they're gonna be one of 10 this year because of the Bookmobile as well, which is great. (faintly speaking) Yeah. They still get to pick a book? Yes, at the end of their, when they get to their first 10 points, they get a free book and their first ticket. And each, there's another change that happened last year was that each branch was able to select all of their own prize books. So we didn't do central selection and then ship it out to those locations. They got to tailor their prize books to their audience and their location as well. The teens that are in charge, and you showed their picture earlier. So I teach at Tri-North Middle School. Yes. And at the beginning of the year, pretty much we always start on a Wednesday with students. So they have Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, their first three days. And we spend a lot of time just kind of going over rules and expectations and what's available. What would really be cool, I think, is if they could put together maybe like a five, six, seven minute video of kind of like, we are your public library, and these are the things that we're doing. And we can show that in our classrooms. Yeah. You know, on like a projection type of situation. Just so, you know, and I know a lot of, you know, they talk and they know, but I think just seeing that in like kind of a quick introduction way on the first few days of school might really hit a lot more students. We've been on our list to work with our communications and marketing department to update our video because the current one we have is from 2017 or 2018. And so the teams are very different, the space and the staff and everything. So I will, Greer, are you taking, thank you so much. Yeah, that would be great. I will make sure to follow up and move that higher on our priority list to get that done this year. So hopefully we can maybe have it ready for the fall semester. Okay, that would be awesome. And then one other thing I wanted to bring up, and I'm not sure what's happening. Like I said, I'm at Tri-North. I don't know exactly what's happening at Jackson Creek and Bachelor with this, but I know Tri-North is really working on building up the e-sports space. And they have teacher volunteers and parent volunteers now, and it's just kind of starting. So again, I don't know if there's any kind of maybe connection that can happen with that group. I know that the teacher who's the sponsor for that at Bachelor has talked to Kate about that. And then at North, I know about, Smash is our most popular video game that the kids play on our Switch in the space all day. I don't know why I purchased anything else for that console, but probably half to three quarters of those kids are on the North e-sports league and they play at North and they come here and they play more and then they go home and they play online more. Okay, good to know. Yeah, so we have no real direct contact right now, but just by offering all of that, they're here all the time. And I'm sure I'll have to have more, I'll have to upgrade to the Switch 2 when that releases 'cause they're gonna release a new Smash and the kids will want that. But fighting games are the bread and butter of the space. And food. Yes, yes. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for this report and for your excellent work. No, thank you. Thank you. - Thank you guys. Thank you so much. Do we have public comment online? Anyone here? Public comment? Any last words from there? No, thank you all for your support. Paper of adjourning? Motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn? So moved. - So moved. Second. (all laughing) Or adjourned. ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance") ("Pomp and Circumstance")