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2024-08-14 LB MinutesCITY OF . SOUTHLAKE SOUTHLAKE LIBRARY BOARD MEETING: August 14, 2024 LOCATION: 1400 Main St., Southlake, Texas Southlake Town Hall TIME: 6:00 p.m. SOUTHLAKE LIBRARY BOARD PRESENT: Will Doby, Lori Burr, Natan Ton -That, Christina Taggart, and David Treichler. SOUTHLAKE LIBRARY BOARD ABSENT: None. STAFF PRESENT: Cynthia Pfledderer, Deputy Director of Library Services. OTHERS PRESENT: None. 1. CALL TO ORDER Will Doby called the meeting to order at 6:00 p.m. Ni sli &I#,'ki A. APPROVE MINUTES FROM THE REGULAR SOUTHLAKE LIBRARY BOARD MEETING HELD May 8, 2024 APPROVED A motion was made to approve the minutes from the March 20, 2024, Southlake Library Board meeting. Motion: Doby Second: Ton -that Ayes: Taggart, and Treichler Nays: None Abstain: None Vote: 4-0 Motion Carried. Lori Burr was not present yet for this vote. City of Southlake Values: Integrity ♦ Innovation ♦ Accountability ♦ Commitment to Excellence ♦ Teamwork Minutes of the August 14, 2024, Southlake Library Board Meeting Page 2 of 4 3. DISCUSSION A. Southlake Summer Reading Review City Librarian Pfledderer presented an infographic about how well Summer Reading 2024 went by the numbers, from May 24th through July 19th. During that time there were 27,802 visitors to the library. There were 2,134 readers this year, which is a little less than last year, at 2,298. Summer readers turned in 32,660 hours read. There were 35 unique programs offered with 3,704 attendees. There were scavenger hunts and weekly challenges/puzzles for people to participate in, and there were 307 participants. A total of 114 adults and teens participated in Book Bingo, and they read 342 books. The Bigfoot Hunt drew 1,306 kids to the search. A total of 398 attendees attended the family programs. During this time, 76,571 items were checked out, which is 20% of the library's circulation. Attendance numbers were down across the board, but this might be attributed to nicer weather for travel, as well as a limiting of the space for the number of attendees in the program rooms, to prevent overcrowding. There was a lot of communication to the public that the policy would be in effect, which may have deterred people. B. FY2025 Proposed Library Budge The amended budget for 2024 is $1,323,615. The proposed budget for FY2025 is $1,265,886, which is a decrease of 4.4%. A total of $75,000 was taken out to account for the Library Administration moving offices across the street and purchasing furniture for the space. But all departments were asked to reduce their budgets by 2.5-3%, to bring the cost of running the city down, and it needed to come out of the general fund. The library is solely funded out of the General Fund. This came to about $32,000. The library has a very simple budget beyond the personnel budget. It has about $260,000 to run the library as far as programs and materials. A budget of $159,000 is set for materials and $50,000 for programs. A little over $20,000 is set for digital services, and then it breaks down amongst cataloging supplies, offices supplies, postage, printing, etc. The big areas of the budget are materials and programs, which is where the cuts had to occur. A sum of $6,700 for programs was returned to the library budget. The staff uniform budget, which is typically $700 per year to purchase staff new shirts, was cut, so there will not be new shirts for the staff this year. Digital services were cut by $6,840. A total of $14,750 was cut from the materials budget, which is 9% of that budget. Programs will be reduced by $3,000, or 6% of that budget. Budget reduction means these services will be discontinued: Brainfuse, NewsBank, Biblio+, Kanopy, and NewsStand from cloudLibrary. There will be some additions, which will come from the technology fund, rather than the General City of Southlake Values: Integrity ♦ Innovation ♦ Accountability ♦ Commitment to Excellence ♦ Teamwork Minutes of the August 14, 2024, Southlake Library Board Meeting Page 3 of 4 Fund. The changes proposed for the library catalog are all going forward to Council as recommended. The library is planning to add Aspen Discovery to the library catalog. It will include a free branded app. It will combine digital and print in one area and will allow for some marketing as well. We will be adding the EBSCOhost databases, which we lost from Texas State Library last year and we will incorporate article searching into the catalog. City Librarian Pfledderer presented to the Board examples of Aspen Discover from other public library webpages. We'll also be adding Open Athens, which is a single sign -on service that means when a customer signs in to the catalog, they are now signed into all our digital services. The library estimates to start this project in January, and finish in two to three months. 4. LIBRARIAN'S REPORT City Librarian Pfledderer shared the performance report as a post annual summer review, so the numbers represent a comparison through July of last year. Just this month, July, 36,885 items circulated in the library and 7,750 items circulated in the digital library. Other digital usage was 170, which is World Book and BookFlix. Total circulation was 44,635, which was slightly down by less than 2%. As for programming numbers, adult programming had an increase of 3% for the year so far. Kids programming is down 11 % for the year. Story Time has an 8% increase. Traffic has a 4% increase for the year, 96,854 so far. Traffic to digital services saw a decrease of 14%, at 19,433. Study rooms have had a big increase of 43% for this year. Library use for work and study continues to increase. In the process of currently renovating the family restroom in the library, which has never been renovated. All new furniture is coming as well on August 22"d This includes 18 new chairs. There will also be a carpet cleaning, which means by September, the library will have clean carpet, new chairs, and a renovated bathroom. Board member Will Doby expressed concern over the decrease in attendance in children's programming. There was a 24% decrease in attendance from last for the month of June. City Librarian Pfledderer pointed out that 2023 had a large increase in programming and the decrease may be attributed a slight rebound from that. Overall programming is only down 3% at this time. 5. LIBRARY FOUNDATION OF SOUTHLAKE UPDATE Lori Burr presented to the Library Board the results of the Summer Writing Camp that was offered this summer. It was a two -week program for kids to work with a professional writer to put together stories and illustrations, which was then put into a printed book. These kids are now officially published authors. Each child received a copy of the printed book. There were 27 kids that were signed up for the program, and 25 kids completed the program. There were also two City of Southlake Values: Integrity ♦ Innovation ♦ Accountability ♦ Commitment to Excellence ♦ Teamwork Minutes of the August 14, 2024, Southlake Library Board Meeting Page 4 of 4 workshops put on by author James Ponti, and both were a big success. The final program was a City Spies program, which was a code -solving challenge for kids to solve. There were 135 kids that completed that challenge. 6. NEW BUSINESS There were questions at the May Library Board meeting regarding the status of the new library. The new mayor has been speaking publicly about the veteran's memorial, and doing that in conjunction with a new library, so he has been promoting the idea. For now, there are no updates regarding moving forward with the library. Natan Ton -that is on the focus group for the mentioned Veterans memorial, and it was discussed on how to scale it in conjunction with a library. That group has not been given direction on how to scale for both. Librarian Pfledderer shared that the only two options that she knows of for a location for a new library would be at Bicentennial Park, and the Parkwood property. Additional applications have been submitted for Library Board, so there should be new members by the next Board meeting in October. PUBLIC FORUM The public forum opened at 6:36 p.m. asking anyone wishing to speak to come forward. The public in attendance, Trevor Khoury and Ross Hendley of Fransen Pittman G.C., a developer that builds libraries, attended only to hear what was going on with the new library. They are currently building the new Allen Public Library. The forum closed at 6:37 p.m. 8. ADJOURNMENT The next meeting will be scheduled for October 23rd, 2024, at 6pm. The meeting was adjourned at 6:37p.m, with Will Doby moved to adjourn. Will DobyvChair CyntMa Pfledderer, City Librarian City of Southlake Values: Integrity ♦ Innovation ♦ Accountability ♦ Commitment to Excellence ♦ Teamwork