This week at the library and end of year reflections

Sewing with the kids

We were closed Monday and are getting ready for Life-Size Candyland, so the only program this week was Bookaneers.

I used up all my interest in numbers putting them into my monthly and annual reports, but I will recap a few things here. I'm satisfied with our program numbers - because of changes in our report structure (they no longer ask for summer reading statistics) and other changes, I relaxed my rigid statistical gathering and felt more flexible. I don't think I will ever go back to more than a tiny handful of "big" programs a year - the attendance is just too unpredictable. We will stick to one big event in January (Life-Size Candyland or something similar), summer reading kick-off, and the teen haunted house. Everything else I've scaled way back. Performers I will only do in conjunction with our schools, when I have a guaranteed audience. It's absolutely reasonable for folks to charge a decent price for their labor, but I simply can't justify it when I might have only a handful of people come. I did several performers with our school's Parent Connections, which is not a guaranteed audience but usually a decent one, and summer performers the school very kindly let me have during summer school/before free lunch, which meant they were open to the public but also got the hundreds of kids in summer school attending. I have new staff and school collaborations and we are all settling into a good schedule. I am trying one more time to bring back up the attendance at my book clubs; they've dwindled to one kid and one family and while I don't mind doing it for them, I'd really like to draw back in some of the younger kids, especially with the number of kids that are struggling to read right now.

I pay a lot more attention to our circulation numbers; our total children's/juvenile circulation for the year was 101,908. 13% of that total was circulated via institutional (school) cards. (There are a few institutional cards that are not schools - nursing homes - but the schools are the only ones that consistently use them.) This was statistically a small increase from the previous year, but taking into account the overall increase in circulation, it meant an increase of school circulation of several thousand.

In general, most areas in the collection increased in circulation. I weeded, reorganized, and replaced a ton of picture books and our circulation there increased by about 2,000. The real stand-out was the JBC, juvenile beginning (or branching) chapter section. I added over 1,000 titles to this collection and circulation went up by over 3,500. I think this is due to there being more choices in this area, but also I am hearing from the schools that a lot of kids are struggling and reading below level, or just preferring shorter, easier books (and I personally can't fault them on that, considering my current reading choices...) Juvenile fiction circulation increased by almost 2,000, a lot of which I put down to building our JPOP (popular series and characters) collection and school requests for multiple titles for book club reading. Juvenile nonfiction was not far behind, with an increase of 1,000 and that's with a lot of gaps in the collection and areas that need to be updated. There was a small drop in circulation for our early readers; this collection hasn't been weeded since 2019 and I need to look at some of the new reading curriculums and possibly adjust my labeling system.

Our teen collection overall stayed about even with 2021; we'll be more selective in our choices here, as we never really got back a lot of teen readers and I will try especially to be more selective in my nonfiction purchases, since we didn't have as much call for those this past year as we had in the past.

The biggest drop, which I had completely expected, was in our children's dvd collection, almost 1,000 down. This was offset by the increase of 600 in our video game collection, but this collection is rapidly becoming passe. Interestingly, the adult dvds collection continues to increase in circulation, but I think I have a lot more people subscribed to streaming services for kids or letting them use devices. The monthly circulation averages around 500 and seems to be primarily our families that don't have/want devices or streaming (in which case they generally only check out a handful of specific shows) or temporary caretakers picking something up for the weekend or evening. It's my eventual goal to cut this collection down so that the shelves can be repurposed for our maker kit collection and the free-standing shelf they're on now removed to open up the area and that may start happening this year. We'll see.

I'm shifting to a new ordering system, doing two massive orders during the year and doling them out to our technical services department so they don't get overwhelmed. As I've just finished weeding/reorganizing several big areas, a large part of my initial order is replacements, especially prebound replacement titles. Did you know if a title is available in paperback you can request it in Paw Prints binding from Baker and Taylor? These bindings are guaranteed (which is marvelous for my Dogman!) and they will replace them if they fall apart! It's interesting to see which titles I need to purchase prebound - Captain Underpants is no longer popular and I have a lot of multiple copies on the shelf. Attention has switched to Dogman, so I buy those in multiple prebound copies. A lot of graphic novels, especially Babysitter's Club, Amulet, and the Raina Telgemeier genre have to be repurchased as their bindings can't hold up the colored pages. The only print titles I regularly purchase in prebound are Warriors (the original cat titles), Wings of Fire (print and graphic adaptations), and Shannon Messenger's Lost Cities. I'm kind of surprised that these giant tomes remain popular, but they are read to pieces, literally. I will buy Wimpy Kid and Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales in prebind when available, but they aren't always released in paperback.

I'm finishing up the vestiges of my collection projects before starting another, but I've got most of my initial 2023 orders ready to go, so another year begins!