Present were: Margo Callaghan, Elaine Dates, Robert Dilts, Lisa Perrault,

Alice Winn, and Director Judah Hammer

 

The meeting was called to order at 5:02 p.m.

 

After Lisa made one small correction to the secretary's report, Alice moved and Lisa seconded that the report be accepted. This motion passed unanimously. Lisa presented the treasurer's report, commenting that February had been a dull month.

 

Judah went over the librarian's report. The circulation figures are flat now but he hopes that they will rise in a few months. Our media collection is small so that many people have worked through it and are going elsewhere for items. He is trying to expand the collection, but unabridged audio books are over $100 a piece. Alice asked what a good target size for the media collection would be. Judah responded that he has no specific number in mind at the moment. He now is buying two adult books and two juvenile

books each month. He added that in a good library the ratio 30/70 of the collection would be in media items and 70/70 would be in books. Lisa suggested that he look into a service that would provide audio books from the Internet. Judah said he would but the cost may be prohibitive. Perhaps some consortium of libraries could do this.

 

Lisa hoped that when we get new library cards they would be made small enough to fit into a person's wallet. Judah replied that he would see that this was done. Margo pointed out that developing new library cards was a good marketing strategy. Judah will push the new cards in September.

 

Judah is retrospective collection developing the non-fiction materials in the library for there are gaps and a lot of the materials are out-of-date.

 

Elaine and Judah attended the Friends' meeting last week. They have two additional people on their board. The Friends discussed various activities in addition to the book sale, including sending note cards with pictures of various Shelburne places. Margo repeated that she would be willing to design a poster for the book sale.

 

The Board then turned its attention to its review of our policies; wondering what the next step should be. It was decided that Alice and Judah should get together and prepare a rough draft of the revised policies for our consideration at the April board meeting.

 

A discussion of interlibrary loan usage followed. Only a few patrons are using interlibrary loans excessively. There was a discussion about placing a limit on the number of loans any one patron could make in a month or in a year. The general attitude was against this. Nothing will be done about interlibrary loans until after we have finished reviewing our policies. Elaine suggested that a rewording of the request form to indicate what the purpose of inter-library loans is and that routine materials could be obtained under the home card system at neighboring libraries might be effective in decreasing the

number of interlibrary loans.

 

The meeting was adjourned at 6:37 p. m.

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

Robert V. Dilts

Secretary