At the Board of Trustees meeting on February 21, 2013, Circulation Services Department Head Nancy Szczepanski provided an overview of reciprocal borrowing. Nancy reviewed 2012 checkouts from our library by residents of other communities, and vice-versa, particularly since the board approval of changes to our Circulation Policy last year. The updated policy affirmed our commitment to sharing with and supporting our neighbors while preserving primary access to Canton taxpayers.

Nancy's presentation, attached here as a .pdf, gave the Board good background on checkouts of our materials by patrons of other libraries, and I hope that you find it useful and interesting, also.

Best,

Eva M. Davis, Director

Our Library Board of Trustees will hold the required Public Hearing on Thursday, September 15, at 7:30pm at the library to take public comment on and approve the library's 2012 budget (attached, with a comparison to our approved 2011 budget), levying a millage rate of 1.5437 mills to generate total revenue of $4.9 million. This is a reduction of about $40,000 compared to our 2011 budget, and a total reduction of about $1.9 million compared to our 2008 budget — 2008 was our "high-water" mark as far as revenues; the recession led to declining property values, which leads to reduced property tax collections and a smaller budget for library services.

Congratulations to our colleagues at the Troy Public Library! After several years of cuts and threatened closures by city council, previous failed millage votes, and a dire economic situation, Troy voters passed a dedicated library millage of .7 mills annually for five years on August 2. This new dedicated millage means that TPL will not close, and will allow them to maintain library services to their community at state-mandated levels. Troy is a great community that deserves a great library. Everyone at Canton Public Library sends our best as the TPL board and staff work over the next several months to rebuild TPL. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Garden City residents, and to all Garden City Public Library cardholders, on the July 18 reopening of the Garden City Public Library.

The Garden City Public Library has announced that they will be open for thirty hours, five days per week, from July 18 through at least the November millage election. Unfortunately, these hours will not meet the minimum requirements for state certification. As a result, the Canton Public Library will not resume reciprocity with Garden City Public Library at this time.

To all Garden City residents and Garden City Public Library cardholders:

In preparation for their anticipated closing due to lack of funding, the Garden City Public Library has announced that the last day they will lend materials is Thursday, May 26, 2011. GCPL will remain open to the public to use materials within the building until June 25, 2011.

Congratulations to Romulus residents, and to all Romulus Public Library cardholders, on the Romulus City Council's recent decisions to establish a PA 164 independent city library and appoint a five-member library board.

The newly-created library board's announcement that they will open the Romulus Public Library for eight hours, one day per week, through the first week of July, and their plan to fund the library at .12 mills after that for service three days per week, is a great start to getting the new independent library started.

To all Romulus residents, and to all Romulus Public Library cardholders:

In preparation for their anticipated closing on May 1, the Romulus Public Library has stopped checking out all materials. As a member of The Library Network cooperative, the Romulus Public Library had a reciprocal borrowing agreement in place that allowed you to use neighboring libraries.

While we here at the Canton Public Library are happy to reciprocate with other communities, that reciprocity is based on mutual sharing; we cannot bear the financial burden of serving Romulus residents when Romulus is eliminating funding for their library.

Everyone here at CPL is sad and upset to see libraries in our state affected by the economy. In addition to the May 1, 2011 closure of the Troy Public Library, the Detroit Public Library will announce layoffs, and the Romulus Public Library may also be closed after a proposed millage failed earlier this week. Coupled with proposed funding cuts at the state level, libraries and library services in Michigan are in jeopardy. As I've discussed with you before, CPL is not immune from these cuts.

That's what makes an article like this one from Scott Turow such a mood-lifter for the CPL family. Our featured author at our 2010 Everyone's Reading program, Mr. Turow spoke to a capacity crowd at the Village Theater last February, staying afterward to answer questions, autograph books, and talk to fans. Despite the bleak outlook for the next several years, we here at CPL will continue to strive for excellence in programs, collections, and services, meeting the needs of our community, as Mr. Turow outlines in his article, while maintaining a balanced budget and living within our means.

Governor Snyder released his budget proposal last week, and as expected, the news is grim. The cuts to public, school, and university libraries across the state are significant, and will affect the services that CPL will be able to provide to our community — namely, interlibrary loan and research databases.

The Governor has proposed cutting state aid to libraries to $3 million. The statutorily-required funding is $15 million. The current funding level of $5 million automatically qualifies the state to receive a federal matching grant of $5 million, which pays for MeLCat (statewide interlibrary loan) and the Michigan eLibrary (MeL — statewide research databases). Cutting state aid results in a cut to, and possibly a loss of, the matching grant, which puts MeL and MeLCat in jeopardy.

MeL and MeLCat exemplify the resource-sharing, aggregation of services, eliminating duplication of effort, and economies of scale that the Governor has emphasized over and over. More than 300 libraries — public libraries, K-12 libraries, and university libraries — pool this funding to provide services to Michigan residents. The $5 million investment by the state nets a $5 million matching grant, and saves taxpayers nearly $72 million annually, when you consider the cost to each library if they had to purchase these same resources on their own.

At its September Budget Hearing, the Library Board of Trustees approved the library's 2011 budget (attached, with a comparison to our 2008 budget, which was our last budget before the recession hit), levying a millage rate of 1.5437 mills to generate total revenue of $4.9 million. This is a reduction of about $300,000 compared to our 2010 budget, and a reduction of about $1.6 million compared to our 2008 budget.

$4.9 million is the size our budget was in 2004, when we served 15,000 fewer people, checked out 600,000 fewer items, and had 40% more staff. It is ironic that these library cuts come at a time when our community needs us now more than ever to help you cope with the down economy. In 2011, further cuts have been made to nearly all line items, notably staffing, materials, supplies, and programming.

The budget outlook for the library remains bleak in 2011. As I wrote last year, the deepening recession and declining property values mean less money coming in to the library — 95% of our 2010 revenues come from taxes Canton property owners pay to support library programs, collections, and services — which means more cuts for the next several years.

In 2011, our budget will drop another $300,000, to $4.9 million, bringing our cumulative total cuts since 2008 to $1.6 million. $4.9 million is the size our budget was in 2004, when we served 15,000 fewer people, checked out 600,000 fewer items, and had 40% more staff.

Our new returns system is here! This new system will allow us to better serve you and more accurately handle the 2 million+ items you checkout each year by automatically checking in returns as you put them into the slot. "Why aren't my returned items checked in yet"? is the most common question we receive over the phone and through our website, and our new system will take care of most of those issues.

With our budget cuts due to the recession — we've cut nearly 20%, or $1.2 million, from our budget since 2008 — we have held nearly all vacant positions open to save money. With fewer people working, but ever-increasing demand for materials (we hit a record of 2 million checkouts in 2009), we have struggled to keep up with all of the work that needs to be done. Many of you have experienced this when you return an item to the library and it takes us a day to clear your record. After holiday closures, it was not uncommon for us to need several days to catch up with all of the returns. We are only human, and simply reached a breaking point where our manual processes could not keep up.

Realizing that we were overwhelmed, a team of library staff who know and do the work examined how we do things and made suggestions for improvement. One of their suggestions was to install an automated checkin and sorting system (the conveyor system we are using is the same as/similar to conveyor and sorting systems used by UPS, USPS, Netflix, and Wal-Mart) that would let us devote more staff time to shelving and other patron services, such as retrieving and processing holds. These suggestions coincided with our need to upgrade our RFID inventory system, and last year we began the work of retagging all of our 300,000 materials with new RFID tags, eliminating nearly all of the locking cases that so many of you hated, and six months ago we launched new checkout, self-checkout, and processing equipment.

This past spring, our Copy Center services were distributed to other areas of the library, and the room converted for the new Sorting Room. New outside and inside return slots were installed, which feed directly into that space. The sorting system arrived this week, and today's launch of our new Sorting Room marks the end of this long journey. The majority of returns will be checked in and removed from your record automatically and pre-sorted into categories (bins). This means fewer hands have to touch items to get them back on the shelves. This, along with the other improvements made and suggested by our staff, means your library card record is more accurate, we will make fewer errors, and you'll see faster turn-around of items to the hold shelf or their home shelf location.

Check out our video for a demonstration, or stop by during our regular hours to look through the glass doors and see the sorting system in action.

These improvements were funded through the library's savings account and the generous donations of the Friends of the Library. We still have some kinks to work out — nicer signage for the new outside return slot, for example, among other things — and I thank you for your support, patience, and good humor while we work on fine-tuning our new system.

Best,

Eva M. Davis, Director

Our 2009 Annual Report is now available. Our sincere thanks to all of you who supported the library in 2009 — patrons, volunteers, Friends of the Library, and contributors to our Endowment and Operating Funds. While the recession has affected our bottom line, the library Board of Trustees and our great library staff remain committed to continuing our core services to you and demonstrating good stewardship of your tax dollars and donations. For example, we are presenting our annual report in an online-only format for the first time, which reduces our design, printing, and mailing costs. Placing our annual report online also achieves one of our strategic planning objectives: Being more transparent about our operations and communicating more directly with you, our public.

I am pleased to announce that one of our librarians has been named a top librarian in Michigan! Anna Slaughter is the 2010 recipient of the Michigan Library Association's Frances H. Pletz Award for excellence in service to teens. I, along with her colleagues from the Children's, Tween, and Teen department and several members of her family, were on hand last night when the award was announced at the MLA conference in Kalamazoo.

CPL has been blessed with supportive patrons and an excellent staff. We are proud to have one of our own singled out for the wonderful work she does with teenagers in our community. Please join me in congratulating Anna on this accomplishment!

At its September Budget Hearing, the Library Board of Trustees approved the library's 2010 budget (attached), levying a reduced millage rate of 1.4980 mills to generate total revenue of $5.2 million.  This is a reduction of about $600,000 compared to our 2009 budget, and a reduction of about $1.2 million compared to our 2008 budget.  While cuts had to be made to balance the budget as required by law, the Library Board also directed the administration team to preserve our 7-day operation and maintain our 72 hours of library service per week.  I am pleased to report that we've achieved these goals without permanently cutting library hours or having to enforce furlough days or layoffs.

These necessary cuts are a result of several factors, which all fall under the umbrella of "the recession:" 

Yesterday, the Michigan legislature's budget conference committee proposed another 40% cut to funding for joint library services, from $10 million to $6 million. A minimum funding level of $10 million is required to receive federal matching grant dollars of $5 million. These federal matching funds for MeLCat interlibrary loan and 25 MeL databases are at stake; due to the local economy and cuts to local funding associated with the recession, the Canton Public Library does not have the revenue to pay for interlibrary loan or online genealogical, historical, or reference products if the state legislature does not act to maintain statewide library services — Canton residents would lose access to these resources.

As you know from media reports, a tragic shooting occurred today outside of the library. We are thankful and relieved that library staff and patrons were not injured, and our hearts go out to the families of the two people who were involved. While the library is closed for the remainder of the day today, we will be open our regular hours on Wednesday. We thank all of you who have expressed concern about our well-being; it is a comfort to us all to have our community’s support. We also thank the Canton Township Public Safety Department for their quick and professional response to this emergency, and ask that any inquiries about their investigation be directed to them.