I'd like to call to order the Monroe County Public Library Board of Trustees meeting for April 16,
 2025.
 Can I get a motion to approve the consent agenda?
 All in favor say aye.
 And now we're going to hear from Greer in the director's monthly report.
 Okay, some highlights. March saw record use of two of our e-library platforms. We saw our highest
 ever monthly use report for Overdrive, which is Libby, with over 51,000 total checkouts in March.
 A little over 2,500 of those checkouts were made via Sora, and that's the app that area schools use
 to access e-books and e-content by grade level rather than having access to the entire MCPL Overdrive
 catalog.
 Hoopla also saw record use in March with over 12,000 total checkouts, and we continue to see strong
 use of the new Flex collection that we launched back in August.
 We held a mock Caldecott event last month, which found children's and collection development staff
 collaborating to determine which of the past decade's worth of Caldecott winners was the ultimate
 standout.
 The winner was "Big" by Vashti Harrison. The activity was a fun way to highlight award-winning
 books and to have children's staff engage with our Children's Collection Development Librarian in
 discussions about the merits of picture books in youth literature in general.
 We have our Southwest Seed Library up and running thanks to the great work of Southwest Librarian
 Becky Craft.
 We had a line at the door the day we launched this collection, and many Southwest patrons who've
 taken seed packets are now participating in a Make Your Own Salsa project.
 We're holding our fourth annual Youth Art Month contest and received over 200 entries from patrons
 across all branches and outreach service points.
 The theme is "Color Our World," which anticipates this year's summer reading program theme, soon to
 launch next month.
 Eight winners will be chosen to have their artwork turned into a library bookmark, which will be
 one of many summer reading prizes.
 Our CATS website now offers captioning for all of our government meeting recordings.
 This project has been in the works for some time, and it's important from both the compliance and
 an accessibility standpoint.
 We added three new bookmobile stops in March. That's one for Beeline Heights Apartments, one for
 Garden Hill Mobile Home Park, and one for Marlin Elementary School.
 Outreach Services Manager Chris Jackson reports that it usually takes anywhere from six to 12
 months for a new stop to generate regular patronage, but we're already seeing activity in a couple
 of those stops.
 And as expected, Senate Bill 1 did pass the Indiana State Senate and was signed by Governor Braun
 yesterday.
 The impact of the property tax relief bill on MCPL's operating budget is less severe than what was
 originally proposed and what we subsequently have been working on in planning for our 2026 and 2027
 budgets.
 However, we're still talking about a reduction of approximately $350,000 in our annual revenue
 growth.
 This means we'll still need to make some operational adjustments and we'll bring those proposed
 adjustments to you all in June or July as part of our draft fiscal year 26 budget.
 Right now we're considering which potential adjustments will save us the most money while having
 the least negative impact on patrons.
 Happy to answer any questions about the Director's report.
 Can you explain in the final version of SB 1 that did pass what the do you have any more sort of
 takeaways that you'd like to share that are relevant for the board?
 Not that it's relevant to MCPL specifically in our budget.
 I am just sort of following the news and understanding the final version of the bill.
 There are a lot of municipalities that are going to be considering increasing local income tax to
 make up for the revenue shortage.
 So there's still going to be some potentially significant impacts on social services in other
 communities and our own.
 But as we were really worried about the significant shortage in revenue growth for MCPL's budget
 going forward is a bit of a relief to see it's a manageable amount of money.
 But that still is going to require some adjustment.
 So when we bring those forward to you all, we'll talk through why we're going to make those
 recommendations, how much money we expect it to save for us.
 And again, ultimately why we would choose that, because our goal is always to minimize impact on
 patrons above all else.
 And thankfully we have news of this and enough time to adjust what we're going to do for next year's
 fiscal budget.
 Absolutely. Yeah, we're still at sort of like the early stages of our budget season.
 So we have ample time to make plans and bring forward some proposals for you all in July.
 Anyone else have any questions, comments?
 Okay. Well, we are in a rare position where we do not have old business or new business to discuss
 tonight. So we're going to move on to presentations and we have Josh Wolf to present for public
 services and programming.
 Thank you.
 Yeah, my name is Josh Wolf. I'm the director of public services.
 I just want to talk to you a little bit about how public services and programming have evolved and
 led us to where we are, just as an introduction.
 I've been a librarian since 1999, which I realize sounds like a Prince song.
 I've been in the library since 1999.
 That's been in my head all day since I thought of that.
 You're all going to be cursing me tomorrow when that song is stuck in your head.
 We did have public computers and internet when I started, but yes, a lot has changed.
 I won't regale you with a list of those things because it'll make me feel very old.
 Obvious things have gone away, records, cassettes, tapes, circulating artwork that you can hang on
 your wall for three weeks.
 My speaking notes are now in 17-point font because that's what I need to see them.
 But apart from this race through formats, we continue to evolve library services, library
 programming at a pretty rapid clip.
 I would have never predicted back then that we would hold book clubs in bars and coffee shops,
 that we would have nature walks off-site deep into the woods with our patrons, and not just adults,
 but children as well,
 toy swaps during the holidays, after hours when the libraries closed dances and festivals for all
 ages.
 These are obvious, they're very visible changes that you can see by looking at our marketing.
 But we've also, a little bit less visibly, divided public services initiatives into more discreet
 ages
 so that we can better sort of focus down on our patrons at different stages of life and through
 their development.
 Children's services and its programming efforts were somewhat monolithic when I started out,
 but now we really, we focus our resources and our staffing on prenatal patrons and, well, the
 caregivers.
 But they make music on their bellies, babies, toddlers, preschool, these are all divided, preschool
 through K tweens, teen services.
 Sam, the teen service manager spoke at length last month, so I won't go into much detail about that.
 But it's instructive, as I was thinking about this, that 10 years ago last March, we didn't have a
 teen services department at all.
 And it was always kind of slapped on very clumsily in many cases, although the people who did it
 were quite talented.
 And going back to Dana, who was Librarian of the Year at the time, it was hard, though, and it was
 sort of a constant battle to do.
 Now, we wouldn't consider any kind of restructuring of services or any new spaces without giving
 our teen patrons the same attention and care and focus that we give every other age.
 And, you know, it wasn't always the case.
 Even adult services now specializes in new adults, workforce development, the arts, seniors. We try
 to look at every stage.
 Across these departments, we're looking at how to provide services for our patrons from before they're
 born all the way until the last stages of their life.
 The net has grown very wide for us.
 We've also begun to partner across departments. So we really try to look at what programs can work
 for children and teens together, what programs can work for teens and adults together.
 How can we have an intergenerational focus that will once more sort of help move our patrons
 through the services that we want to provide.
 And now that we're a three-branch system and we're still learning how to do that, we really are
 partnering more and more across locations.
 Really, I think of this as a four-branch system because our outreach services are really robust in
 the bookmobile, the assisted living facilities with the van service, the jail service.
 It's, I think, more appropriate to think of it as kind of a four-branch system.
 So that's mostly where I come in. I coordinate with all the public services managers to help ensure
 that system-wide procedures, programs, services, that they're going to work everywhere.
 Although we strive for a certain level of consistency across because we are one system, these
 places evolve to serve patron groups that are diverse and sometimes unique to the neighborhoods
 around them or the people who can come there.
 It's a really exciting job, and I know it's natural to feel like things speed up faster and faster
 and change speeds faster and faster, but I think it's just always been kind of quick. It's like we
 got on a train a long time ago, and it's sort of moving at the same pace.
 I was a programming librarian for 15 years. I still do a tiny bit of it, and I had a pretty big ego,
 actually. I'll just be honest about what I did.
 But what they're doing now and the kind of ideas the programmers are coming up with is humbling.
 Things we never would have thought of back in the day. The floor is lava. The seed library that you
 were talking about.
 Having teams run their own role playing games. That is really hard to ask a team to hold a group of
 peers together in a cooperative enterprise that's basically storytelling in an improvisational way.
 They're doing that. It's impressive. The CHOP challenge. These things that fill up as soon as they
 go live.
 We've always said that we like to surprise and delight, and this group now continually surprises me
 and delights.
 And I'm sharing today with Dana Duffy, our program coordinator, who I will now introduce to come up
 and talk a little bit about some of our newer sort of cross-audience and cross-departmental
 outreach initiatives that we're doing.
 Thanks.
 Hello. I am Dana Duffy. I am the program coordinator here, so I play a support role for public
 services.
 But I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what we do that one of the aspects of my job is to
 coordinate the staff to go out and do outreach events.
 So we have an outreach department, so it's a little bit confusing. This is not part of the outreach
 department. This is going out and doing community outreach, so we go to different events around
 Monroe County.
 And I just wanted to talk a little bit about some of our efforts and what we do for that.
 They usually involve multiple organizations in town, but they're really concentrated pretty heavily
 with IU because IU does so many community events.
 So we do find that we do a lot of work with IU, and generally what we do is when we go out to these
 events, we bring a table, and we have a branded tablecloth that we have.
 And we bring brochures, we bring library cards, sometimes we bring some books or some leftover
 summer reading program prizes that people like to take with them.
 But the thing that by and large they love the most are the stickers. They love our stickers. Our
 marketing department does this great job with these stickers.
 And one sticker that we have that whenever we go to an event at IU that all of the students want,
 it's a sticker that has like a little fist in the air, and it says, "What is more punk than a
 public library?"
 So they all love that sticker. So we always have to make sure that we have a supply of those
 whenever somebody is going to go out and do one of these outreach events.
 It's really simple to do. We take our laptops, and we tell people that they can go to our website
 on their phone, and they can apply for a library card right on their phone.
 And then we find that information on our laptop, and we make sure that they're a Monroe County
 citizen, that they filled it out all right.
 And then we hand them a library card that they are good to go, that they can use. And the whole
 interaction takes about three minutes.
 So it's really a successful event. People don't get frustrated. I think it really kind of shows
 that we know what we're doing, and we really, really want you to have a library card.
 Some of our biggest events, like I said, at IU, the biggest one there that we do is First Thursdays.
 So we always do First Thursdays. We have a booth.
 And this year we're going to, well, we always collaborate with them, with Grand Faloon. But this
 year with Grand Faloon, they're going to have all of these little mini golf courses that they're
 going to build around town.
 And the library is going to have one of these little mini golf courses. And so it's just one hole.
 But we'll have it right out there on the plaza.
 And ours is Ice Nine from the book Cat's Cradle. And so they set up the little mini golf course
 right next to us during First Thursday.
 So we had a lot of students come over for that. We estimate we probably talk to about 200 people. A
 lot of times people just want to come over and tell us that they love the library.
 But we signed up, and usually we sign up, around 50 people for library cards when we go to First
 Thursday. So that's a really good and successful event for us.
 We also participated in the first Bloomington Book Festival. That was at Morgensterns. And it was
 great. We were outside. It was in November and the weather was beautiful. So we were very happy
 about that.
 We had people who did sign up for library cards, but we also shared that booth with the Friends.
 And the Friends were able to tell people about what the Friends of the Public Library do.
 And they were able to let people know how they could become involved with the Friends. So that was
 kind of a nice collaboration that we did with the Friends.
 We also just kind of a list of some of the other things that we've done. We went to the IU Asian
 Fest this year for the first time. That was fun.
 The Graduate Resource Fest. We went to the Bloomington High School North Healthapalooza. That was
 our teen librarians went to that.
 Fairview Elementary Open House. The Monroe County Transition Fair. And that provides resources for
 caregivers and parents who are working with children on the autism spectrum.
 And one of our children's librarians went to a piece of Latin America at Switchyard Park.
 We've been to the Lotus Art in the park, and then also the Bloomington Volunteer Fair.
 And so some of these events are specifically linked to particular ages.
 So when the children's librarians went to the Lotus Art event, they brought some crafts with them
 and so that they could work with children and do crafts.
 And of course, with the Bloomington Volunteer Fair, Bethany Turrentine from Vital, she went to try
 to recruit people to become volunteers for Vital.
 So we always have a really good time whenever we go to these events, and we get really good
 feedback from the community when we're at the event.
 So it's kind of just like a feel-good thing for the staff to do.
 Thank you. Unless you have any questions.
 That is a difficult one, but do you know what percentage of county citizens have a library card?
 I have seen it before, but your initiatives of signing people up are just great.
 Do you take kind of like suggestions, maybe like if someone knows of an event coming up, like with
 Monroe County Schools or anything?
 What's the best way to, is it just email type of a situation and let somebody know that?
 Generally it's easiest if you email the office.
 Yeah, through patron comments. Yeah, because those get forwarded to me and then I can kind of
 decide who it is that would be the best person to go.
 Sometimes it's me, so that's fun. Alright, thank you.
 Any other questions or comments?
 Anyone online?
 Okay, great. Motion to adjourn.
 Motion to adjourn.
 Motion to adjourn.
 Motion to adjourn.