End of Community Read — Thank you!

A quick thank you to all who participated and helped promote the Library’s Community Read — Unapologetically Positively You — which officially ended on October 8th. A very special thank you to Olivia and Susan for developing much of the content and leading various programs to support the Read’s theme of body neutrality.

The Library has received a lot of positive feedback but sharing a few circulation statistics to help celebrate its success!

1. Fat Girls Hiking by Summer Michaud-Skog: 89 lifetime circulations/72 circulations during Community Read. 80.9% of circs happened during CR

2. Starfish by Lisa Fipps: 90 lifetime circulations/52 circulations during Community Read. 57.8% of circs happened during CR

3. Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder: 58 lifetime circulations/42 circulations during the Community Read. 72.4% of circs happened during CR

The Library also sent 70 copies into the wild in various book boxes sprinkled around local businesses like the YMCA, Pleasant Street Center, Starbucks, and Fat Larry’s. All copies were taken and hopefully passed around among friends, families and acquaintances.

Canva Clean Up

To those of you who use our Canva account, it is time to clean it up. Please go through the images, including QR Codes and either move the images to a specific folder (click the three dots on the right of the image and move to a folder.), or delete it.

When uploading a QR code, make sure to name it, especially if you plan to reuse the code.

Questions? Ask Michelle or Desiree.

Staff Shout Outs

Are you ready for some shout-outs? If you’d like to submit a shout-out, fill out the form on the Forms page. Don’t be shy! Shout it out!

Shout out to Andrea F, Susan, Susie, Chris & Michelle for going above and beyond, helping a co-worker, exemplary customer service, solving a problem, and keeping it positive. Each of these staff members deserves a big thank you, and perhaps a hug, for managing a difficult patron situation while coordinating many last-minute changes and technical difficulties associated with the Autumn Concert that moved indoors due to weather. There was a lot of grace and kindness shown to patrons and each other with a bit of humor to help everyone get to 9pm. From Ally D.

Shout out to Ashley W for going above and beyond, coming up with a new idea, and exemplary customer service. Ashley has spent the past year thoughtfully developing every piece of the new Healing Library from book titles to resources to overall packaging. This was a special project and Ashley put a lot of care into each piece, working with local partners to ensure patrons have access to resources and content that support a variety of mental health needs. From Ally D. and Cate.

Shout out to Jamie for juggling a variety of tasks and workloads while Lauren is out. She has done it with humor and cats. From Michelle.

Shout out to Olivia and Lisa R. for going above and beyond, coming up with a new idea and keeping it positive, You two are the Halloween dream team! The new play area is inspired, the TikTok is spoooooky, the ideas are as sweet as PSL, and the Halloween vibe is contagious! Boo! From Cate.

New Collection: Healing Kits

We have a new collection at the library! Our Healing Kits are part of the Healing Library and live in the Health Nook (turret next to reference and teen room). The Health Nook and Healing Library are ongoing, developing projects. But for now, the first 10 Healing Kits are ready to go!

What is a Healing Library? The RPL Healing Library is a series of kits customized with books and resources to help a person, group or family navigate areas of trauma and personalize the healing process. Topics include depression, divorce and family change, gender identity, domestic violence, and various forms of grief. Each kit contains a selection of books curated to appeal to a range of ages (kids, teens, and adults). Also included are a sharing journal and a binder with local resources, therapeutic activities, and further reading suggestions. See the full list of topics here!

Important Circ Info: Kits are holdable, but must be picked up and returned here at RPL. Similar to other kits, each item will be checked in/out individually. There is a guidelines sheet inside each kit to help you know what/how many items to look for. (A typical kit contains about 5-7 items). Please visit the Health Nook turret and check them out!

This is a soft launch. The kits will be shared at the Recovery and Remembrance event on Wed. 9/28, and a large-scale PR campaign will start in early October.

Please let Ashley or Ally know if you have any questions. Thanks!

Some Printing Instructions

Here are some of the instructions for the new printing software.

Wireless Printing. I’ve left copies of the instructions at the print release stations, at Borrower Services, Ground Floor and R and R desks. They are also available under Instructions on the Intranet. Read through them and practice printing!

To override printing, two staff laptops have the TBS staff printing portal software loaded on them. There is one at the Borrower Services desk and one in the white cabinet in the Reference Office, labeled Staff Printing Portal.

Video instructions to use the staff portal are here.

Video instructions to print are here.

Payment/Kiosk information is here. The network upgrade seems to have slowed the payment service down and may not be fixed until Monday.

I know that we’ve had a lot of changes over the past week and I appreciate your patience as we all learn together.

Staff Shout Outs

Are you ready for some shout-outs? If you’d like to submit a shout-out, fill out the form on the Forms page. Don’t be shy! Shout it out!

Shout out to Carol for helping a co-worker. Shout out to Carol for helping with the craft prep for the Fall Faire! Thank you for helping to cut out sooo many tiny apple leaves. You rock! From Lisa R.

Shout out to Suzy and Louise for helping a co-worker, Big shout out to Suzy and Louise for helping out with the fall faire craft prep! You two rock! From Lisa R.

Shout out to the Borrower Services staff for keeping it positive, Thank you to everyone at Borrowers’ Service for all of your hard work and patience this past month and a half. Adjusting to Lauren being gone, training on the lockers, and dealing with multiple internet/phone outages (among our normal day-to-day tasks and weirdness) has been challenging, and you have been awesome. I especially appreciate your patience with me and Jamie as we’ve been trying to navigate through it all. You all rock! From Valerie.

Shout out to Jocelyn and Amy for going above and beyond and coming up with a new idea, Amy and Jocelyn have been working on digitizing the microfilm for both the Reading Advocate and Reading Chronicle. This will be a great improvement for all those researching Reading history. Thank you! From Andrea F.

First Amendment Auditors

Town Hall received visits from “First Amendment Auditors” last Thursday. This is happening here and in surrounding towns. The best approach is to remain calm and professional. Please review this presentation from KP Law addressing these visits.

The goal of these individuals is to provoke employees into unlawfully detaining or otherwise violating their First Amendment rights. Employee response should be calm and consistent. The library is a limited public forum, “First Amendment Auditors” are allowed to videotape while in the building. They may not go into the clearly marked staff-only work areas.

Following up on our staff meeting from last week, please contact EAP if you have an upsetting interaction. RPD has also made Taunya available for any of our employees that would like to speak to her.