TCPL Board of Trustees Meeting 25.10.09
A Quincy Votes! member attended this meeting. While care has been taken in their creation, these notes are not official meeting minutes and may contain errors or omissions.
October Meeting
October meeting Agenda
Approval of May minutes after corrections; approved
Director's report:
Branch librarian hired for NQ
Hired Reference Coordinator (from Emerson College)
Posted assistant reference coordinator position
Union negotiations are crawling along
Electrical systems have been fixed
Major roof repairs have been completed
Seed Library is sitting in Director's office; Director is talking with some who does that
Winter Crop program on Adams's Shore (soon)
Baker and Taylor (Book Jobber) declared bankruptcy on Monday. They have let most staff go and are liquidating their assets. Library is pivoting to another vendor (Ingram). The library already used Ingram for some small number of books. There will be delays in the switch, due to capacity and such a change in demand. (Baker and Taylor has 50% market share). Book jobbers have a warehouse of books, and people have to pull the books and then get spine labels, plastic covers, bar codes, etc. on them and ships them to the Library. TCPL orders weekly, and various staff members order books. There is a learning curve to using Ingram. TCPL spends over a million dollars on "stuff" for the library (maybe half is on books). The Supply change never recovered from COVID. Furniture and other items were on back-order for months.
Literacy department celebrated 40 years of service. The mayor attended.
Fall after hours (21+) all inside on Friday 24th. Gothic Gala: 6:30 to 8:30.
The Chinese Language library tours have been successful.
Archive Dept is working on an oral history project.
Access to Justice: designed to democratize access to lawyers or legal advice. People who need those services often have least amount of time and money to figure out how to access those services. Relaunched to help people know that these services are available.
City is going to fund 19 hours of Social Worker (run from Manet health). The hope is that will allow someone to be hired for night or North Quincy branch. This program has been more successful than anyone anticipated.
Friends of TCPL:
Closed last year with record setting numbers.
They have started doing eBay and they got their first check for $400. (They are using an eBay vendor).
The new President has been working hard to make the entire organization more transparent.
Also going to launch more merchandise. Their tote bags have sold very well.
They tabled at Heritage Day.
Financial Report:
Balances provided for Citizens and Swab accounts.
Discussed what was paid out for reimbursement checks for conferences, amazon supplies
Typically: twice donations as checks written. This year one trust account check was a third of what is typical.
Some trusts are restricted, so need to make sure we understand the terms of the trust. (One trust: we have to have the clock fixed every year, and then they will make the donation after we provide the bill that we fixed the clock)
Want to collect info and make sure the entire board knows the stories of each trust fund. Years ago, Corrine and Mai went into deep details on the trusts. Finance committee will set up meeting with the Director to go into details on this
Discuss: Director would like to have an annual staff appreciation event funded by the Trustees. (60 staff, have a dinner and DJ, and all Trustees attend). Thinks it would mean a lot to the staff. Motion to spent $4,000 budget on staff appreciation event. Approved. Motion also to approve $1,000 for City Department head gathering (Dec 5th). Approved.