09/13/2000 BOARD OF LIBRARY TRUSTEES Minutes

Home Browse Search

Public Library P.O. Box 657 Mashpee, Ma 02649 Circulation for the month of September 2001 totaled 9,446 items. This is slightly less than last September (201 items less) I am sure much of that is attributed to the terrorist attack. We have found many people saying concentrating on reading has been difficult since then. Year-to-date, 37,581 items circulated. Overall, this is still 1,432 items more than the first quarter of FY 01. I have not yet received reports from CLAMS and was not able to break the monthly figures into categories for you. I have completed the financial compliance report for the MBLC and that will be going into the mail,tomorrow. The amount of state aid the library receives is based on the information in the ARIS and Financial Compliance reports. I needed a breakdown from the Personnel Department of benefit expenses paid from the town's budget rather than the library's budget. I received the information I needed to complete the calculations on Friday, October 5u. As point of interest,the town pays $33,561 in benefits such as health insurance, life insurance, pension and social security for library employees. The MBLC has begun tracking that to get a better comparison of library costs and services statewide. Some libraries have these benefits in their budgets and other libraries receive them from the municipal budget. In recent years, we have been asked to provide these figures regardless of which budget the funding came from. I am working on an update of the library's inventory for insurance purposes. This is a very time consuming task because of the large amount of equipment within the library. I suspect the library is under-insured and providing a detailed inventory should demonstrate that and convince the town to increase the insurance on the building and contents. I recently completed weeding the Large Print collection. It was so overcrowded that stacks of books were on the floor in front of the shelves. The collection is very up-to- date and heavily used, so there wasn't a lot of dead wood to withdraw. I was able to make a small amount of room to get the books off the floor. I will be weeding the adult fiction later this year. I will have to use the top and bottom shelves throughout to free up more space for the Mysteries and Large Print collections. We have reached the capacity of the building and must continually withdraw little used items to make room for new acquisitions. This will be on going until we are able to expand the library. During the month, $951.65 in overdue fines were collected and turned over to the Treasurer's office. Year-to-date, fines collected totaled $3,211.70.