Mar 11, 2021 Library Board on 2021-03-11 3:30 PM

I would like to call the meeting to order. And do we have any visitors from outside who wish to say something? Jennifer, you had said there might be. >> It looks like they did not submit a comment. Is there anybody on the line? No. >> Okay. Then we can go on. And I told Jennifer, I haven't printed out the agenda, so she's just going to follow us down the agenda. So the first thing on the agenda? >> Our first thing on the agenda is to receive nominations and election of a president, vice president and secretary for the library board. Let me go ahead and read off that. >> Do we have to approve the minutes first? >> We do that after there's a -- >> Oh. Okay. Sorry. Okay. Okay. So the section of the Denton Public Library Board bylaws reads at the September meeting of the board, which we did not have a meeting in September. We're just picking up. So this is a delayed board election. Each board member will make nominations for each open officer position by anonymous ballot. In this case, since we are doing virtual meetings, it will be an allowed ballot. The president will collect and read out the nominations and the secretary will record them. After the nominations are read aloud, members will then accept or decline the nominations for any positions. Elections take place in the October meeting by anonymous ballot. Again, we're delayed, and it will have to be over the virtual meeting. And then simple majority will decide on the election of each officer. In the absence of a majority, the top two or three vote recipients will comprise a new ballot on which to be voted. Voting and discussion will continue until after an officer is declared for each office. Nominees will be installed immediately after the vote and will hold office until their successors are elected and installed. So our next election period will start in September. And the officer positions per the bylaws are president, vice president, and secretary. Do we have any nominations? I nominate Kate for president. Are there any other nominations? Jennifer, if there's only one, can we vote by acclamation at this point, or do we need to wait until next time? We should be able to vote. We've got a quorum, so you would be able to do that. Kate, are you willing to accept that nomination? All right. May I have everyone in favor of Kate as Margolis as our president? All in favor say aye. Aye. Or raise your hand so we can count by hand. There we go. Any opposed? Same sign. We've done it by acclamation, so Kate will be our new president. Now can we have a nomination for vice president, please? The vice president takes charge when the president is unable to be there. That's the major role. May I have a nomination? Are you, Jean, are you, can you be, you can be something besides president? Yes, I can be. Okay, so I'll nominate you for vice president. I'll nominate Jean Greenlaw for vice president. And I will accept any other nominations for vice president. Then can we have a vote of acclamation? Raise your hand for everyone voting for Jean Greenlaw for vice president. I can't vote for myself. Alright, accepted. Okay, and Kate, you'll take over after we get done the nominations, okay? And we need a nominee for secretary. Laura, you've been our secretary, haven't you? Are you not secretary? Kate is right now. Kate is right now, okay. Then I nominate Laura Cantu for secretary. Laura, Laura, are you willing? I can't hear you. It takes me a while to figure out how to unmute my thing. Yeah, okay. Are you willing to be our nominee for secretary? Yes, okay. Any other nominations for secretary? May I have a vote by raise of hand for Laura for secretary, please? Okay, that's by acclamation. So Laura will be our secretary. Kate, you can take over right now. Okay, does Laura, do you want to take over taking minutes notes? Laura, can you take over taking minutes now? Yeah. Okay, thank you. Okay. Okay. Do you have the agenda in front of you? Yeah, I do. Okay, so you can just take over from there. Yeah, okay. So now library board president will appoint library board members to serve as liaison to the friends of the Denton Public Library Executive Board and the Emily Fowler Library Foundation Board. So I know that before we've done where it was one person did both for the most part. Oh, look, there's Ben. Is anybody, I guess, is anybody interested in doing that? Attending those meetings? And the friends meet quarterly. The next meeting is in April. It's a virtual meeting and then they're hoping to go back to in person. And the foundation, it's usually about once a year. So it's not a ton of meetings. It's not a big, huge obligation. Does any, is anybody interested in doing that? I'll volunteer. Okay. Anybody else interested or are we good with Laura doing it? Okay, I'm appointing Laura as the liaison for both groups. Great. Thank you. Can I ask you a question? What you said friends of the library and what is the other one? The foundation, the Emily Fowler Library Foundation Board. And we will now consider approval of the minutes from February 11th, 2021. I move approval. I'll second that. Actually you can't second. I can't. I can't do anything. No. Okay. You need it. I'll second. All right. All right. All in favor of approving the minutes as presented. What do you say? Opposed? Same sign. Yeah. Opposed? Same sign. Okay. So we're good. All right. So that passed. I forget I don't have to take notes. Okay. Now we're going to receive an informational report and hold the discussion regarding the Friends of the Dent and Public Libraries from Jennifer. All right. Well, I do have some news from the Friends. They did have there a virtual meeting via Zoom on Thursday, February 25th. At that meeting, they were one person short for a voting quorum. They had some members who had some technology issues. So as a group, what they decided to do was to vote in the meeting and then put out the remainder of the vote via email. And so the library presented its request, Casey Fenucci, the assistant branch manager at North Branch, which is our, she is our summer reading challenge committee chair, presented our request for $6,000 for summer reading challenge prize books. And that vote was approved. It was unanimous by the six members who were in attendance online, as well as there were votes via email the next day. The Friends also discussed the reopening of the bookstore and resuming their book sales to coincide with as the library begins its reopening process. And so they are interested in moving forward with that, possibly having their summer book sale so much as contingent on as they, as things get closer, they'll make that final decision and then hopefully opening up the bookstore when the library does reopen this summer also. But they are making plans and getting commitments from their volunteers for that. They did discuss the bylaw updates to change the number of board members and add an addition that would require board members to maintain their Friends of the Denton Public Library's membership, which was not in the bylaws earlier. That was mostly it. They set up their new meetings for the rest of the year. The July and October meeting coincide with their usual meeting timelines. The April meeting was adjusted by one week to bring it forward so it's a little bit closer to the library's planned May opening for walk-in service so they could talk more about the bookstore and their book sales. And those dates are on the agenda information sheet. And next we will receive an informational report and hold a discussion regarding the Emily Fowler Library Foundation. So no real change there. The latest checking account balance was $1,094.73. They still have that $100,000 CD. The majority of that CD is allocated for special collections and genealogy. It's mostly bequests. But that's all they've got. Okay. And receive a report and hold a discussion regarding library phased reopening plans during the COVID-19 pandemic. So these are constantly evolving. But I do have some exciting news. We are in phase two right now. We have a phased reopening plan. Phase two is limited core services. We are going to expand that. Our plan was to open with phase three, which is walk-in service on May 1st. But it's almost two months until that time, and we did want to offer some more services. So starting next Monday, the 15th, we will add browsing appointments. So anyone can make an appointment for a 30-minute browsing visit. They can browse, use the self-check machines to check out materials. So they can do that, as well as we are going to add evening hours for curbside at each branch one night a week, it will be until 7 p.m. So let me make sure I've got them in the correct order. North branch is Tuesday evening until 7. South branch is Wednesday evening until 7. And Emily Fowler Central Library is Thursday evening until 7. Otherwise it's 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. And this is starting next week? On Monday. And how will people make appointments for those browsing? They can call the library. And we are about to do a social media push tomorrow, and we'll be updating the website tomorrow, too. But they can call the library to make the appointment. We'll be able to start accepting appointments as soon as that social media push goes out. And they can make an appointment up to seven days in advance. Each appointment is per household. So it's one appointment per household per day at each location. Because maybe you have materials that you need to pick up at two locations. We don't want you to have to wait a week. So you can make an appointment per day at each location. Any questions or discussion about that? So we should wait till Monday to call then to make the first appointment? You can call. We've got it set up in our system. And then it'll be advertised tomorrow. We're expecting most of the phone calls to start in tomorrow and over the weekend. Because I get my grandchild on Thursday. So I'd like to she's been nagging me, "Grand, can't we go?" Thank you. Anything else? Okay. So receive a report and hold a discussion regarding 2021 winter storm. Well I hope everyone survived their winter storm at home without ill effect. The library was very lucky. Before the winter storm, we knew it was coming. And so library services were affected February 15th through 19th. So we knew ahead of time that the city was going to close facilities. So we didn't have staff already at facilities that had to get home. We were open on the Saturday, the 13th. Then we have normally been closed lately during COVID on Sunday. And then we were closed Monday through Friday, the 15th through the 19th. We had no staff in facilities. Staff who could tried to work from home. But of course, most of us also had rolling outages. Some of us had some staff had their internet go out and even when they had power, the internet never came back. So we had some challenges with that. Before we closed, we changed the outgoing phone message and we updated the website. We linked to the city's website that encouraged people to hold on to their materials until after the storm and it was safe to return them. We notified people that the holds would remain available. We weren't going to turn them over. And we reminded everyone that we do not charge overdue fees. So don't worry about your accounts. And that all downloadable and online resources would be available. That was before we had the blackouts. But when the power was on, if you could access it, you could. Great operations resumed on Saturday, February 20th. The only impact we had in the facilities was at one point on Monday, I believe it was during the storm facilities. Someone from facilities went to South French to check on something else and thank goodness they did. There was a pipe burst inside the front entryway with the sprinkler system. There's just not heat there and so it froze. And that did leak into the book drop room, but luckily nobody had been returning things in massive quantities. So we only had three items that had fallen off of the book bin, out of the book bin. So only three items were lost. Carpet was really wet and there was some drywall that got pulled out, but that's all been repaired. ServPro came and did all the remediation to dry everything out. We were very lucky. There was no equipment. It all happened where there was no furniture or technology, and it was happening underneath the book bin as opposed to over it. So we lucked out with that. We did also notice there is a large scanner in the Special Collections Department and Emily Fowler that has stopped working. We aren't sure if it was due to the repeated outages. It is also an older piece of equipment, so it may have just been slightly too much for it to recover from. But those were the only effects that the library had. We were very lucky. Does City Insurance cover that scanner and those kinds of things? So the scanner, because we aren't sure if it was really the power, because it is an aged piece of equipment, we are looking into just seeing if we can get -- it's a power source, but because it's older, it's hard to find a power source. So we're looking into getting that. We did claim all of the damage with the City Insurance. We did have to report that. Okay. Anything else from that? Okay. Next subject is the RFID technology upgrade. So we have been working with purchasing to replace our RFID, which is radio frequency identification equipment, and that includes our self-check machines, the security gates, the smart shoots, that when you return an item, it's automatically checked in, and then each workstation has -- it's a little square, it looks like a black square, the RFID pad that reads the tags inside the materials to do the checkouts. And our equipment is older. Some of it is no longer supported. It's outdated, and we just have to replace it to keep it moving. It's no longer covered under maintenance. So we've gone through that purchasing process. It went through an RFP, and we are almost at the tail end of it. The item goes before council next Tuesday on the 16th, and then we should be able to place that order and start getting that new equipment in soon. It is the same vendor, so as far as the public, it's going to have the same look as the current system. It'll just look -- there's some slightly different graphics to make it look a little crisper, but it should work the same, but look nicer. >> I think that's it, right? Are there any concluding items? >> Jim asked for me to mention the American Rescue Plan Act that was just -- well, it's about to be signed, but it does include library funding, and I wanted to mention that, and I will add it to next month's agenda for discussion, but some of the funding that is in that act is there's $200 million allocation for Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is exciting because those funds get filtered down into the state library systems, and then the state library system, ours is Texas State Library Archives -- Texas State Library -- TSL -- Archives Commission. There we go, TSLAC. They will have grants based on certain parameters set by IMLS, so there is some great potential for us. We don't know what that will be until TSLAC gets the money, and here's from IMLS. There is also some potential money through the E-Rate program for possibly some more equipment and devices. We're looking into that. We are not an E-Rate library right now, so we're trying to see if we would qualify for that, and then there's also $135 million for National Endowment for the Arts, and the same amount for -- or National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and that will be for programming grants that would be eligible to libraries, and so we are interested in those as we start to hear more about that, but I will add that on next month's agenda and include information from ALA, so y'all can read more about that, and we can have a discussion about some potential opportunities. >> When you say programming, would that be money to bring in authors as speakers and -- >> Oh, yes. >> Performances, yeah. >> Fantastic. That's exciting. >> Great. Anything else? Okay. I guess we are adjourned. We can be adjourned, right? >> Yes. >> I can just say that. Okay. >> I have one more question. I have one. >> Yes. >> I didn't hear anything. You said RFID upgrade. I didn't hear an overall cost of what something like that would cost. >> It is -- >> What are you taking before the council? >> It is a -- it is next Tuesday, it is 160,000 and change -- I can't remember the exact amount off the top of my head, but it's around 160,000. >> And you say that was for all the libraries? >> It's all three libraries. So it is security gates at all three libraries, which North Branch is a double because the wide entry there. Two self-checks per libraries, two SmartShoot per library, the software, and I think one additional RFID pad and maintenance for our 18 existing RFID pads that we are able to still use. We don't have to purchase new for those. >> Okay. Thank you. >> You are welcome.