SEMLS News

Submitted by Cheryl Bryan, SEMLS Assistant Administrator for Consulting and Continuing Education

Earth Day will be on April 22 this year. One way to reenforce your library's image as earth friendly is to call attention to the library as the ultimate green agency in your community. There are so many ways to celebrate this monumental day—ways that don’t require a big budget but instead a bit of lead time and some creative thinking. You could put an article in your local newspaper highlighting all the recycling that goes on in running a library, invite a local green business in for a demonstration and information session, plan an exhibit of artwork made from recycled materials, or run a contest for the best earth friendy idea to implement in the library. More ideas are available from the Going Green series in the SEMLS Newsletter last August through December at http://www.semls.org/news/newsletter/index.html.  How will you use the community interest to spotlight your library?

Programs may be cancelled if the registration is low. If the determination is made to cancel a program due to low registration, a notice will be sent to those who have pre-registered.

 Emergency weather cancellation procedures:

For many years, the Friends of the Somerset Public Library have funded a bus to bring some South Coast library supporters to the State House for Legislative Day. This year the Legislative Breakfast Committee has teamed up with Somerset and Fall River Friends and is making a bus available for Library Legislative Day on Tuesday, March 9.

The SEMLS Office is giving away the following items on a first-come, and first-served basis to our members, so please e-mail semls@semls.org if you are interested.

Spreadsheets are a great way to create budgets and track expenses. On March 11 from 10-1 in the SEMLS Computer lab Barbara Andrews of Andrews Consulting will offer a workshop on creating spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel.This hands-on workshop will explore all of the pull-down menus, toolbars and features that will help you create worksheets and charts. Learn to create and edit a spreadsheet, use formulas, preview and print a worksheet and create and edit charts.

The  spring delivery survey will be conducted the week of March 22-27, 2010.   Please remind your circulation staff of these dates.  The delivery survey forms will be sent out by the end of February.

There is a change in how this delivery survey will be done. 

1.  Please report the amount of books and AV materials placed into delivery each day, a separate   space is  provided for each item each day.

2.  Please report the amount of incoming bins and outgoing bins.  Again a separate space for each day is  provided. (Do not include any empties in your count)

3.  Do not count empty delivery bins picked up by the driver.

4.  Answer question on the backpage of the delivery survey each day.

5.  To provide the best delivery service, we are also asking that  your library hour be reported on the form each day.

When you have completed the delivery survey, please send it through delivery by April 1, 2010 to the SEMLS office.

This may be the last delivery survey that SEMLS will supervise.  Thank you for all of your help in making this information available.

Massachusetts Library  System FY 2011 Cooperative Purchasing

The Pledge, Participation and Supply Listing forms for the FY 2011 material and supply cooperative are due by March 31, 2010.  These forms are available at:  http://www.selms.org/what/coop/materials.html.

 Previous forms were sent out in January;  if you review the new forms and want to add any amounts to new catagories, please fill out the forms again. We apologize for cross postings.

The Pledge form now includes catagory 18, which is for video games (Wii, Xbox, etc.).  For the supply portion of the cooperative, there is a 27-page listing for all supplies; please fill in only the number for each item that is anticipated to be purchased for the next fiscal year.  (No dollar amounts.) Only return the supply list pages that contain items  to be purchased.  

These forms are used by the statewide coordinator to review and use the current pledged amounts to approach different vendors to negotiate the best discounts for our members. Feel free to contact the SEMLS office for further information.

Are you looking for a way to deliver library programming online for those users who cannot make it to your building? On March 10, from 10 - 3 SEMLS will offer a hands-on workshop on Podcasting in the SEMLS Computer Lab with Beth Gallaway. Podcasting is one way to reach out to patrons at home. With a podcast, your library can record library events, book reviews, poetry slams and talks and easily make them available on the Web. SEMLS now has recorders available for loan to libraries to help them create their own podcasts. In this class participants will create a podcast by recording the audio file, editing the recording, uploading it to a server and syndicating the show.  Participants should have basic Internet proficiency before taking this class.

As the Planning Committee works on a model for the new MA Library System, I know that many of you have questions about services.  FY 2011 will be a year of transition for services that the region provides.   All of us, the Planning Committee, SEMLS Executive Board and SEMLS staff, are looking at the core services and second-tier services to make sure that these continue through the transition year. To those of you receiving delivery service, FY 2011 is the last year of the delivery contract with Optima.   Optima will continue to provide delivery service to you during FY 2011.  At the next few board meetings, the SEMLS Board will look at databases to see if there are any that SEMLS should keep going for FY 2011 or if there is a better model to provide databases to you.   As information about services becomes available, I will share them with you.    As this transition moves along, I want everyone to know that first and foremost in our planning is how to maintain services for you during FY 2011.