A little news for the week

FOL Book Sale @SW February 16-19. Please take a shift if your supervisor can spare you. It's a lot of fun and we generate a lot of money for the library. FOL has pledged $50,000 toward the new library. Help us get a little closer to that goal! Sign up here. Note that you need to create your own username and password.

I'll be pitching KPL to Carthage social work students later this month in the hopes that we can get another placement as wonderful as Savannah.

Coming up:

African American Read In (AARI) , Kenosha Public Museum  February 3rd
Library Legislative Day, Madison, February 6th
Spring Primary February 20th NS and SW

This week's Bright Spot nomination comes from Zander:

"I'd like to nominate Megan Nigh for a Bright Spot.
After the last book sale, we had boxes of books meant to go to the Sustainable Shelving Program. These were stored in the garage FOL area, and it was no small amount. There were over 100 boxes of books taking up much needed space for maintenance, donations, and weeded books awaiting the next book sale. While I'd been able to print off the delivery labels easily, it is another matter to black out the previous labels, mark the boxes for PINK designation, and tape the labels. While I was considering how I would fit this into my schedule, Megan approached me and asked if there was a way to help. She also needed the space for weeded books and thought the best way to open up space was to help clear it out. Together, this made the process much, much easier. Megan prepared nearly every box that was there for delivery while I scheduled delivery and made sure new boxes were on the delivery cart each day. What I initially thought would be multiple months of slow work shoved into my busy schedule became a few weeks of diligent effort. We had two full pallets of boxes as well as boxes on the floor, and now staff can make it to the back of the storage area.
I cannot express how helpful her efforts were. She used her time for weeding to accomplish this great task and help out everyone."

More pics and a podcast

Hello and Happy January Cold Spell ⛄

Our new children's library is coming to life! We have a drywall delivery and lot of electrical boxes. Thanks to Aaron for these pics- it was one of those sunny days!

Our Campaign Committee will meet on Tuesday afternoon at 4pm to see the space and brainstorm ways to get us to our $3 million goal. We're almost halfway to that goal and there are some big gifts in the works, so think good thoughts!

Brandi, Kahlil and I visited with Building Our Future to talk about the library's programs and services and what we're doing in the Uptown neighborhood. It's a fun 37 minutes- take a listen and see what you think. Hope we made you proud!

This week's Bright Spots

From Karen: "Jason is amazing he goes above and beyond what is expected. I needed some lights to use outside with the kids for my Frozen Science program this week. The lights he had here didn't work with the solar generator, so he brought his own lights from home for me to use. He tested the entire set up and he showed me how to use it. Thank you, Jason!! You are awesome!!"

From Barb: I nominate the entire Maintenance Staff who will be working extra hours during our snow storm to keep us cleared and safe!  We appreciate you so much!

New pics from the kids library

Yes, it's really happening! Here are pics from Week One of construction!

For those of you wondering what the state legislature is up to in regard to library oversight, WLA has created a page on their website to keep us all up to date. See "Bills We're Watching" here. 

There's a FOL meeting tonight at NS and a Board meeting tomorrow night at NS. The Board meeting will feature progress reports on the 2021-2023 Strategic Plan by various staff members- come if you can, and if you cant, the Board packet contains a nice summary.

As a former tech person with an appreciation for how much work and care goes into keeping our computer systems running, I am continually impressed by our CNS team. The more we rely on technology for our daily work, the more grateful we should be to Brent, Max and Rob for keeping us online and for how seamlessly and quickly things work. Yes, we have hiccups, but it's mostly external factors out of our control. So thank you, CNS folks, for your tremendous support! You are my picks for Bright Spots this week.

Happy Monday, everyone!

Barb