- to call to order the Monroe County Public Library Board of Trustees meeting for March 25th, 2026. Can
- I get a motion to approve the consent agenda? Oh, sorry. Oh, right, I forgot we moved public comment
- to the front. Do we have anybody online? Do we have anybody here?
- Thank you so much. May I get motion to approve the consent agenda? Second. It includes the minutes from
- February 18th, monthly financial report, monthly bills for payment, personnel report, and the board
- meeting calendar. All in favor of approval say aye. Aye. Those opposed say nay. Motion approved. And
- next we're going to hear from the director's monthly report from Greer.
- Okay so the positive trends in overall circulation continued in February. This includes the highest
- use of our digital collections for the month of February since 2021. So that means looking at every
- February going back year after year. That's of course when daily limits for hoopla and canopy in particular
- were increased in response to the pandemic. And it also included the highest overall collection use
- for the month of February
- since before the pandemic. So that's overall collection use. I know the big success story for us has
- not surprisingly been our digital collection use, but overall collection use is also as strong as it's
- been since the pandemic. So those are great, great trends. We launched a new seed library at the Southwest
- branch last month. The seed library started here at our downtown library and I believe 2019.
- And it's steadily developed into one of the most popular non-traditional collections that we offer.
- We have received numerous requests from Southwest patrons over the last year or so to have a seed library
- at our new branch. So we're excited to get this one off the ground. We remain open to the possibility
- of doing one at Ellisville as well, but there's not as much call for that. So we'll just wait and be
- responsive as far as that one's concerned. Katz has taken a big step.
- This last month, we began sending archival local meeting tapes to our digitization vendor. That's Memnon
- here in town. They will be digitizing the first batch of approximately 1,000 tapes. The entire project
- for digitization entails over 7,800 individual tapes dating back to the mid-'80s and will take about
- two years to complete. Now, these are just for community meeting
- recordings going back to about 1985. So these are all the government and local community meetings that
- we have archived. It does not include all the locally produced content like shows and documentaries
- and everything else. We do have a plan for digitizing those as well, but we're going to get through
- the local meeting coverage archives first, and then we'll take a look at that. The locally produced
- content dates back to the late 70s.
- And it's probably close to the same number of actual tapes to digitize. So it'll be a similar cost and
- we'll kind of take the same amount of time. So it's a big deal for us, big deal for CATS. The Indiana
- State Library Annual Report is finally back online.
- and with a due date of May 4th. Our team did get an early start last month in compiling numbers and
- answers to what the report would eventually ask. As I had shared, I think there was a question of how
- much can we prep now before having the report. A lot of things change in the report from year to year.
- And this year, it's a whole new vendor, a whole new website. The report looks totally different. But
- of course, some of our basic stats are always going to be asked. And so we've compiled all those and
- we've gotten a good start.
- on the report, we'll have it done well before May 4th, which means we'll be able to share the summary
- of that with you all probably at the June meeting. And then finally, the big spring book sale is almost
- here. Our friends at the library will once again host a huge book sale in this very room beginning April
- 16th and running through that weekend. It's a wonderful opportunity for the community, particularly
- for those who are interested in identifying one or two really worthy
- keepsakes in book form and coming here and getting a great, great price for it. Related to that, the
- IDS did an article somewhat recently about local bookstores and included the Friends Bookstore in there
- as one of the best in town. So that's worth taking a look at.
- But the big book sale takes place April 16th through that weekend. You can check our website for details
- in terms of start time and price and everything else, but we're excited to have that happen next month.
- It is also the reason our April meeting will take place next door in the auditorium instead of in this
- room. Happy to answer any questions about the director's report. Can you remind me after
- Katz is having the tapes digitized. What is happening to the physical tapes? That's a good question,
- and I don't have a full answer, but I'm happy to get that from Martin and Adam. We've talked about that
- many times in planning this project, and I can't recall if we decided we're going to keep all of them
- for now, or if we're going to ask Memnon to help us decide what is worth keeping and what isn't. And
- some of that might have to do with condition, but I will get an answer. OK. I also just wondered what
- if any of those materials could be recycled or if they had a recycling program. And we used to do that
- with the government meetings from the late 70s up to about 85 as we would just keep them for a few years
- and then get rid of them. And we stopped doing that about the mid 80s, hence the large archive that
- we have. But that's a good question. Yeah. Thank you. Does anyone else have any questions?
- And next up we're going to hear about the strategic planning committee and what participation for that
- process. So about every three years we work on a new strategic plan and the current strategic plan is
- in its final year so that means we're going to form our strategic planning committee this year.
- to start work on the plan that will probably be another three year plan beginning in 2027. So it's just
- a heads up to you all that we always like to have at least one board representative on our committee.
- It's a committee that will probably meet once a month online.
- to talk about everything from what we identify internally as our priorities and goals, but also planning
- for community discussions, surveys, staff discussions and surveys, working with our foundation and friends
- group for input, all the steps that we want to take in order to get as much comprehensive input as possible
- before we commit to a new set of strategic goals.
- So that work is going to start pretty quickly. I'm going to send invitations out to team members next
- week. So just think about if that's something you might want to participate in. And if I can answer
- any questions about it, I'm happy to do so. And I'll probably reach out via email and say, all right,
- this individual is
- volunteered from the board. They're going to be on the committee along with the following other folks.
- And if you look at the current plan, which is in the packet and, of course, on our website, one of the
- first few pages lists who the board of trustees is at the time and then who's on the strategic planning
- committee. So you can get a sense that it's a pretty small team. So it's not completely representative
- of every department in the library or anything like that. But a small working team obviously can do
- things that a larger team can't.
- And this is our formal commitment to strategic goals for a three-year period. So we're going to keep
- it a relatively small team. We're going to work pretty quickly. And then the end result of the work
- will be to bring a draft version of the plan to you all in November, discuss it, refine it, and then
- commit to it in December. And then I send it off to the state library right after the December meeting.
- And that goes into effect in January. Yeah. And it's usually a lot of fun, I have to say.
- Strategic planning doesn't sound like fun, but we have really good committees and great expertise and
- experience on the committee always. And so we feel like we're confident we know what we're doing. We
- know what our goals are for designing the plan. And it's typically fun. It's not arduous.
- I have appreciated as a board member the director's reports being organized under your strategic priorities.
- It just makes the library's work feel really intentional. It feels like from hearing from staff that
- the strategic goals came together not as an edict from above, but it is a collective process. So as
- someone who's hearing the reports every month, it's been nice to just have that kind of organizational
- structure.
- Absolutely. And I don't see changing that. I do think there's some things we might want to consider
- changing in terms of the format of the director's report and maybe the packet in general. If we want
- to sort of condense it and get it down to specific metrics along with the anecdotal info that we share,
- there's some things we might want to look at there. But I think ultimately framing the monthly report
- in terms of the actual strategic plan just makes very good sense.
- Any other questions or comments for Pierre? Okay. Is there a motion to approve the surplus equipment
- and items? I move to approve them. Okay, we're gonna hear from Gary Ledler. So we have had a request
- to surplus some computer tables in the level up area. They wanna replace those.
- And we also have a refrigerator and freezer at Southwest that they wanna replace. And so we're gonna
- surplus that equipment. Any questions? Great. All in favor of approving the surplus items and equipment
- list, say aye. Aye. Those opposed say nay. Ayes have it, motion approved.
- Next up, we're going to hear the update on Indiana law and public library budget impact. So this is
- just kind of an informational piece. I know some of you have probably followed this, but there have
- been a number of bills in the Indiana State House specific to libraries and library budgets. Two, we've
- been watching very closely. One started out as Senate Bill 4 or Senate Bill 8 and became Senate Bill
- 4 and so on. And the other is 283.
- Senate Bill 4 was passed and is now Public Law 102. And what it does is it forces a public library to
- seek approval from its fiscal body, so for us that would be a county council, for anything more than
- 49% of the maximum levy growth quotient every year. And that's important because the growth quotient
- determines how much we can grow our budget from year to year. We literally bake it into our budgeting
- process, so it's almost like a given when it comes to the math.
- This new law means we need to go to county council to ask for 50 percent or more of that growth quotient.
- It's unique to public libraries. Other taxable units do not have the same threshold. I think it's more
- like 80 percent. So in the packet I included kind of a critical summary provided by the Indian Library
- Federation.
- There's plenty of stuff out there about this. The worry a lot of public libraries rightly have is that
- you're putting the budgeting process in the hands of elected officials and thereby potentially making
- it a very political issue, whereas traditionally the library board, like with us, has been autonomous
- when it comes to reviewing and approving the annual budget. We have reached out to county council to
- talk about can we put our heads together and make sure we're all on the same page and following the
- law and all of that and we're going
- schedule a meeting with them very, very soon. So they're aware that this is going to fall on their shoulders
- to that degree. But it's just an update for you all. It does not mean we're not bringing our budget
- to the board. We're not going to change anything about the way we prepare, review, approve, and hold
- public hearings for our budget every year with you all. But it's an extra step we're going to take in
- working directly with county council. So that did get passed, and that will be our new reality for annual
- budgeting.
- Gary, did I leave anything out that's worth? No, I think you covered it well. OK. I do have questions.
- Yeah. With this new law and these new procedures to be followed, can there ever be restrictions put
- on what money is allowed by county council as far as spending at the library? Oh, like on a line item
- level? Mm-hmm.
- Theoretically, yes. The other bill we're watching, I think Senate Bill 283, that one is about
- that specifically. It is the entire review process of the library's budget falls in the hands of the
- fiscal body rather than its board. So that would find us going to county council and saying, this is
- why we spend this much on wages and benefits versus
- programming versus utilities and contracted services, and then that discussion would happen there in
- a much more political sphere than it does here. That bill has not seen any traction since late January.
- This one is just about, if your maximum levy growth quotient is like for us 4%, and you want to claim
- 2% or more, you're going to have to go to county council and ask
- Does anyone else have any questions? Okay. Next up we have a department update from teen services and CMO.
- OK. It's all there. Perfect. Hello everyone. I'm Sam. I run the teen services department here downtown.
- I'm just going to share some updates on what we've been working on over the last year. But first I want
- to make sure you can see my staff. Two of my staff weren't here when I took this photo so I included
- their staff photos there instead. But without them none of the work would be possible. They do such
- phenomenal stuff for the community the teens and everybody else that I want to make sure you know that
- they're the ones to do many of the events.
- So fewer highlights than last year because last year we did so many furniture upgrades shelving upgrades
- and things like that but we did have one big.
- space edition that I wanted to make sure I highlighted, which is this arcade cabinet. We had the shell
- donated by an IU professor who had had it for years sitting in his garage and just couldn't figure out
- what to do with it. And I was able to partner with our IT department and our marketing department to
- redo the whole thing and our facilities department, who he was able to get a whole bunch of specialized
- wood and cut all of it to be exactly the size, which was great. Without Tom, this would not have been possible.
- But the wrap that you see on that and the team space arcade, that was designed by our marketing department.
- So it was all done in house, which was great. And the cabinet has a hundred games on it that the kids
- can scroll through and it's all free, which is great as well. And we started doing arcade cabinet tournaments
- once a month with the kids and the winners get gift cards and little trophies that are printed with
- their names on it and stuff like that. But it's been really cool to be able to provide older retro games
- for them to play. A lot of them complain that the controls are laggy or don't work right. And I'm like,
- no, that's,
- This is accurate. It's not like a modern system. But that's been really fun. We have expanded our collections
- again. Manga has proven to be just incredibly popular with our teens. And we were able to work with
- Martha Odier up on the third floor to condense our graphic novels down and add a whole extra bay of
- manga. And that's already full. And we already could try to add more. And we've even condensed our collection
- so that we provide just the first
- five or 10 volumes of a lot of series, so we can provide more different series options and have less
- depth, but then that also encourages the kids to go up to the second floor, where the whole manga collection
- is, so hopefully they can make that connection, because a lot of them have no idea that there's more
- up there. And I think, Grier, do we have 8,000 manga? Something like that in the collection? Yeah, there's
- a lot. There's way more than we have down there. Again, space upgrades for the arcade cabinet.
- Greer worked with me to get new seats for the video game area because the seats had been there for 10
- years and we're very much showing a lot of love is probably the best way to say that. After school snacks
- have still proven to be very popular and we've been able to work with Lorraine because she runs the
- Sam's Club membership there so we've been able to get a bunch of stuff shipped in. I probably spend
- a quarter of my monthly budget on snacks because they're so popular every day and it's just amazing
- to be able to provide that but it's something we're committed to and been really happy to see the kids
- utilize every day. We refill all of them like three times in an afternoon because it's just so popular.
- Staff fix book list you might have seen this I think in October of last year but Fern did an analysis
- of all of our book lists and found that if you type in YA followed by like National Native American
- Heritage Month or some of our other cultural lists we are the top
- one through three results in Google search for those lists. And some of our lists like YA novels and
- verse have actually had close to 6,000 hits in one year, which is great. So we're really excited that
- our lists are that popular and are reaching so many people. But it also shows that the curation that
- we do, we worked with Paula to figure out why. And she said one reason might be that because we consistently
- update them, like every year to two years, the secret Google metric realizes that it's actually being
- worked on and isn't just stagnant. But we're really excited that it's reaching so many people.
- And then Ali Fletcher, the new teen librarian, just put together a new life after high school list and
- pivoted away from being more of a like school and collegiate focus list to be just really focused on
- life skills like car maintenance, how you do budgeting, how you do cooking, can you sew your own clothes,
- stuff like that. So there's a lot more resources for the kids instead of just assuming that everybody
- is going to go on to do post-secondary education.
- And then last year, it was actually our most successful teen summer reading game ever at MCPL. We distributed
- 665 guides and we're hoping to break that record this year because it's dinosaurs and I mean,
- that's all. Yeah, it's dinosaurs. I pity the children's department. They are going to be so, so busy
- for the first two or three weeks over there because the guides are amazing. Marketing did a great job.
- I'm so excited for the Jurassic Park theme stuff that we're getting. It's going to be great.
- Programs, I normally don't include photos but these were too cute not to. We found that our kids over
- the last year really enjoy plushy making events and so they're very simple to do where you just cut
- out the design from felt and you hot glue around the edge and you stuff the material in, you hot glue
- around so it doesn't require any type of sewing skill. But we do one of those about every quarter and
- we've also started running them on some of our outreach visits as well because you don't need that much
- setup for it.
- Role-playing games continue to be incredibly popular. This year, we were able to partner with the Children's
- Department and Adult Services Department on helping hands, which is where we assembled dignity kits
- to give to Beacon in town. We made over 200 as part of that event, which was great, particularly because
- we were able to really expand the amount of stuff that was offered in every kit. So it also included
- thermal blankets, sanitary supplies, and everything else like that, which was great.
- Teen Social Club has been a really cool event that we were able to start in November of last year by
- partnering with two local historical costuming experts and YouTubers in town where they come in and
- actually lead events for the teens and talk to them about how they can grow their own skills. And it
- just happened because she reached out to donate something to us and then it ended up, I brought the
- sewing machine. Yeah, she's the person that donated the sewing machine last year that I trundled in.
- But it's been great to be able to work with them.
- And then circus week was a themed week of programming just around like circus events and other things.
- And Josh Wolf actually came and did like a juggling workshop and other things like that. And the teens
- really enjoyed those events. Community partnerships is something we're really trying to expand. We still
- go to MCCSE schools every month and then we participate in many of these larger scale fairs. But we've
- also seen our special education class visit program double since last year where now we also have the
- North classrooms coming twice a month and that's
- all three of their special education classes. So it's somewhere between 20 and 30 kids every visit plus
- eight to 10 adults, which has been great to see. So we host both Try North twice a month and North twice
- a month. And then in the fall of last year, we had a staff turnover and
- I worked with Greer and Josh to retool one of the teen library positions to focus specifically on school
- outreach and to serve youth serving organizations. And so she's really hit the ground running this semester
- and is trying to reach out to as many schools as possible and just had a meeting today with the Academy
- of Science and Entrepreneurship to help figure out how we can assist them with one of the projects they're
- working on where the students are looking at
- Immigration through Ellis Island and trying to turn that into a board game. I'm not sure how that is
- going to work, but we've had some really successful meetings and we've already reached out to several
- people internally to try to set that up. But we're really hoping that we can like get to the point where
- we're instead of doing like four visits every month we're doing closer to 10 to 12 every month, because
- there's so many places that we can work with.
- But it's been really cool to see the response from the community to that and how excited people are,
- especially considering how busy teachers are this time of year and how difficult it is to get into the
- schedule when you're already partway through the spring. So we're hoping to continue to see growth as
- we move into the fall. And that's all I have. What questions do you have for me? Awesome. Thank you.
- Thank you. Thanks for your report and for your work. Please send thanks to your team, too.
- I'll let them know. I appreciate it. Thank you.
- wish for a successful summer reading program again this year. Any other questions or concerns before
- we dismiss? All in favor of adjournment, say aye. Aye. Meeting adjourned.