8:01am

3:28 pm

Met with Emily Chameides at the library in the morning. First time we had spoken at length since December. Reiterated to her the need to work on long term objectives.

HAL Board of Directors meeting and Annual Meeting at 5:15pm. Here is my report:

President’s Comments on 2014 and the Future
March 11, 2015

First let me thank everyone for attending this annual meeting of the Hudson Area Library. A special thanks to all of the Board members, Friends of the Library, volunteers and staff who have worked hard during the last year to continue to make the library successful and important to our community. To new Board members I welcome you to the board and look forward to your contributions during the coming years. For Mark Young, departing after six years of service, we thank you for all you have done.

Last year showed continued strength in the operations of the library. Virtually every area showed continuing upward trends, even the smallest increase, distribution of books and other materials, was up over 2014. This is in contrast to many other libraries.

The library staff continued to provide many ongoing and occasional programs and these were supplemented by work by the Local History Committee and Friends of the Library. Library Director Emily Chameides continued her solid work including hiring new staff, improving the collections and program offerings, just to mention a few of her accomplishments. And, it must be noted that we closed out 2014 on budget for the fifth year in a row. Every year we have to marvel at how much we do with such sparse funds.

Thievery played a role this year. As many of you know a large collection of books gifted to the library was stolen in transit last year. This lead to an acceleration of the expansion of our collection that was recommended two years ago and that we included as an objective for our Armory campaign program. Due to insurance coverage restrictions we had to act now. The library staff, supported by many volunteers, purchased almost $55k of new books for the library in the last four months. This is almost 3,000 volumes or roughly 15% of our total book collection. So we have been forced to achieve a head start on one of our library expansion goals for the new library. You can see part of this mountain in the pile of boxes outside the office downstairs. I expect that we will see a string of press releases about additions to specific collections.

The Armory project continues as our central focus. Raising funds, planning for furniture, equipment, and the actual move itself. With the slow down in work caused by asbestos abatement work and the extremely cold weather of this winter we may find that the opening date will be pushed back when Galvan Foundation updates us at the end of this month. Nevertheless the move is on the horizon.

From my perspective, the most important development this year has been the significant expansion of Board committees. More people, both from the Board and volunteers are taking ownership of important elements of the library’s future.

The Campaign Committee has been very active producing many fundraising events and carrying out a continuing outreach campaign in the community. David Murphy and Theresa Parsons are the co-chairs. Participants include board members Betsy Hamilton, Marie Rasner, Mark Orton and volunteers Eileen Halloran, DeWayne Powell, and Laura Goodwin. The committee has able consulting support from Betsy Miller and Doug Wingo. The thermometer outside shows that they are making good progress in our three year campaign to raise $2 million.

A spin off from this committee is the Fund Raising Committee, lead by Marie Rasner. This committee is developing an ongoing program to raise the operating funds we need. Notably this committee is predominantly made up of volunteers. We obviously need to create a series of events and probably one signature event that will allow people to identify the library as a place they feel they need to support every year.

The Local History Committee, led by Jeff Rigby, continues to be a power house of activity. They expanded hours that the room is staffed. Recently Marie Starck, Assistant Library Director, has added her expertise to the mix. They completed a full inventory of the items in the collection and launched and accelerated a series of lectures. The most recent was a standing room only event last Thursday with Peter Jung speaking on Hudson River painters. Again most of the members of this committee are volunteers.

The Finance Committee made up of the Treasurer, President, Gwen Gould, Christine Abitabile, Brian Stickles and former board member and Treasurer Ed Gower as well as Director Chameides has met quarterly to keep on top of financial planning, compliance, and procedures.

Recently the Nominating Committee with leadership from David Murphy has been working actively to seek out and recruit new board members and volunteers to work on library projects. Joining David has been Gwen Gould, Marie Rasner, Ginger Benedict, Theresa Parsons, Christine Abitabile, Brian Stickles and myself. We have interviewed a number of people and are beginning to develop a more strategic sense of what skills and expertise we need on the board while achieving a reasonable representation of our community.

In sum we have significantly improved our operational capacity and effectiveness this year. We have more active self-directing committees with increased participation by volunteers. Our current strengths and the future potential of the new library is drawing new people to us. We are building the structures to provide them opportunities to engage with the library along a continuum of commitments from single discreet events to deeper leadership roles.

Looking forward we need to develop committees focused on the near term project of actually moving the library up the street and the longer term requirement to develop a structure to capture the programming needs and energies of the community. Emily will take up the move in the near future.

I look to RoeJan Library in Hillsdale as a program development model. They have a program committee that produces dozens and dozens of events each year covering an enormous range of topics. It would be great to think that we might have staff devoted to this, but in the near term we need to do it through volunteers. And practically and philosophically this is not a bad thing. We have enormous resources locally, we need to provide an outlet for them. We need to harness the energies of our community.

Finally Emily and I have begun to talk about a Strategic Planning process for the board that we think we will carry out this coming Fall. The current plan is very out of date. We need to articulate a new vision and strategy to carry us forward.

2014 was a good year for library. 2015 will be better yet. Thanks again for your continued support of the library.

Mark Orton