Plans for 2024 - Summer

At the library

• Collection Development
• The board book collection is almost done - I'm working through books as they are returned and have about 100 to go.
• Absolutely no work was done on the juvenile nonfiction. Maybe this summer.
• Programming
• Winter/spring - The Very Hungry Caterpillar celebration was a big success, Dewey love to read not so much, speaking purely to numbers. Book clubs had consistently low to no attendance, teen programs as always are a gamble. D&D was very popular in the winter and then died off as people got busy again. Drop-in programs seem to be the sweet spot.
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  Looking forward to summer, we are doing a very low-program summer. Kids are very busy with other things and continued staff shortages, especially as our circulation and traffic increases and additional pressure is put on our school partners, are leading to burnout for our department. I plan to start putting more margins in for staff to take time off and for unexpected things to happen and this summer we will focus on staffing the youth services desk, running the summer reading program, and having drop-in and self-directed activities.
• Overview of summer reading programs/Family Reading Adventure
• Logs from Everyday Reading
• Tween and teen summer reading
• Summer reading challenge 
• Summer event calendar
• General plans and projects
  
• This is probably the last year we will do extensive field trips, due to various scheduling challenges and stuff happening next year. There will potentially also be changes in outreach as well. I'll be ready to be flexible and work with whatever the schools can do, but I need to think of creative ideas to reach the kids in other ways.
• I am hosting an intern this summer, a MLS student, which will be very different from our high school volunteers/interns! It's been.... a LONG time since I had a "real" intern, and I hope they get a lot out of the experience.
• We will almost certainly be facing budget cuts next year, so I'll be spending some time this summer looking at next year's budget and any ways I can economize, grant-writing, etc.
• I'd like to get neglected projects taken care of this summer, from updating inventory of the storage in the basement to rearranging and labeling our Library of Things. I usually aim to cover the desk 9-12 and 3-5 on week days, but for June and July I'm aiming at 9-5 coverage, so we'll see how it goes.

Personally, I am continuing to work on being more active. I am doing a pretty good job of hitting my very realistic goals and although I don't necessarily feel like it's made a big difference, I'm going to keep going. I'm finishing my main garden projects this weekend. I need to finish some sewing projects I have, instead of continuing to wear my "experiments" lol and hopefully I will get to that soon. I had hoped to make some furniture purchases and rearrange my apartment, but an unexpected medical bill put a big dent in my savings, so right now I'm just shifting shelves around and working with what I have.