To: All Correspondents
From: Karen Marriott & Kay Bauman

The use of an automated registration and tracking process for the Summer Reading Program has been under consideration for several years and the time has arrived to implement it.

Beginning in summer 2014, we hope to have our Summer Reading Program registration and tracking completely online!  The Outreach Coordinators, Deputy Executive Director of Materials & Outreach and Deputy Executive Director of Library Operations are investigating with other staff the best way to proceed.  The Director of Development and the Development Associate are seeking sponsorships bearing in mind the impact online registration and tracking will have on the overall program.  The MLS Summer Reading Program involves all departments and as the time nears we will consult with additional departments. 

We want to grow our summer reading program and know from other libraries’ experiences that online summer reading programs see an increase in participation.  Increased participation can translate into increased staff workload, which we cannot sustain.  Therefore, in order to grow our program we need to visit every aspect of our summer reading program to discover ways to streamline the staff duties.

I’m sure you have tons of questions right now.  At this point we don’t have any answers, only questions.  However, we do have some goals that will guide us:

• Focus the program on lifelong learning for all ages by adding an adult reading component to the current three levels
• Encourage adults to model lifelong learning by participating in the program with their children
• Increase participation without increasing staff workload
• Streamline processes
• Retain the Teen Volunteer Program
• Retain relationships with past sponsors and build new ones
• Reduce the volume of paper used throughout the program
• Allow online self-serve registration 24/7
• Allow online self-serve tracking of reading 24/7
• Ensure participants may also register and/or track online in the library with minimal computer wait time
• Automate the management of the incentives
• Automate the collecting of statistics
• Provide reports that are easy to produce

We are excited about this new direction.