Report To The Board of Sherman Free Library
October, 2024
Prepared by Kris Jarrett, Director
Social Numbers Snapshot:
Facebook Reach, Last 28 days:
Post Engagement: 987 (The number of reactions, comments, shares and clicks on our posts.)
Total Followers: 494
New Page Likes: 4
New Page Followers: 11
Instagram Followers to Date: 77
This fall I am running a series of posts on Facebook and IG working our way through the "Blomstran Witherbee & Sherman Album", a very interesting collection with some of the very few photographs (to my knowledge) showing W&S’s land holdings in Cuba. I expect this to be a series of ten posts.
Events & Programming:
Evening at the Library: “Aviation in the Adirondacks” On Thursday, September 19th, at 5 pm as we welcomed Aurora Pfaff, author of the new book "Aviation in the Adirondacks" from Arcadia Publishing. We had around a dozen guests for the evening and a few more watched live on Facebook. A copy of the book has been added to our collection.
Basket Raffle & Book Sale: Final Total: $2,520, Thanks everyone!
Halloween at the Library: Stop by in costume on Thursday, October 31st, between 5-7 for Trick-or-Treating, candy, and crafts for the kids.
Evenings at the Library: Upcoming! Jason Barney, author of “Hidden History of Lake Champlain”, date: TBD.
Chess Club will resume in the fall, though the boards are here and anyone is welcome to come in and play. We have recently received a generous donation of chess books and DVDs to add to our collection.
Finance:
I have been inputting our 2024 actuals into the budget spreadsheet as we prepare to draft our 2025 budget. Melissa and I will work on this over the following months and present a draft for approval at our January meeting. I expect 2025 to look very much like 2024 with some spending carried forward. Board, please let me know if you wish to make any staff pay raises for 2024.
I have found no reason that we should not be able to earmark our surplus in the 2024 budget to a capital improvement fund. It may be prudent to establish a new bank account for this to keep things separate.
QuickBooks, after a lot of work by Melissa, is up and running and current. I plan to spend some time with it this winter to learn what we can use within the software.
Staffing & Personnel:
Redacted for staff privacy
Trustees:
Please remember that sexual harassment training, ethics forms, and trustee training deadlines are approaching.
A Board Basic training will be held by CEF on November 21, 6-7 pm. The topic will be intellectual Freedom (including book bans and reconsideration of materials). This will be a Zoom meeting and registration will be required. This will count as 1 hour of the required 2 hours/year of training. A registration link will be coming soon.
You can find other training videos here: https://cefls.org/stafftrustees/continuing-education-2/cefls-webinar-archive/
all of which count as training time after you complete a Self Declaration Form.
Miscellanea:
Letters have been sent to both the School District and the Town of Moriah to formally request funding for 2025.
We will need to keep an eye on the end of life plan from Microsoft for Windows 10. As it stands today, 10 will no longer be supported (and thus prone to infection and misuse) after October 14, 2025. Our current computers will not be able to update to Windows 11. I suspect that Microsoft will extend this deadline, but it’s something we need to watch.
Outside work disclosure: I have recently accepted a position on the volunteer board of
Friends of Crown Point State Historic Site, a 501(c)(3) which supports the efforts of the State of New York to preserve and interpret the internationally important history and archaeology of the Crown Point Peninsula.
Saturday hours; opening four hours is a hard sell to anyone on a weekend. I propose that we use some of our new budget to extend Saturday hours from 10am- 4 pm. This would give us ~100 extra service hours each year (we are right on the edge of not being open enough to meet state standards) and make the day much more enticing for staff and hopefully useful to the community. Some of these afternoons could be ‘family time’ at the library with story time, games, crafts, if we have the staff to do those things.