Public Services Managers Minutes - February 13, 2025

Welcome & Introductions

We welcomed Daniel to his first meeting as a Library Manager and Jason K to his first meeting.

GX Moments

Randy helped with interviews in OES. Edmond had a guest reader at storytime, the Edmond Mayor came and had storytime. Taylor (IT) updated the phone greetings with tax info so that helps decrease the number of calls CIS receives. Midwest City got an award from the Midwest City YMCA, the Service to Youth award for 2024. Everyone was prepared for polling and the possible winter weather.

‘Breaking News’

No breaking news this month.

Tote check-in

Janeal joined the group to share about the tote manifestation process. Please make sure that the totes are checked-in appropriately when they arrive at the library. When a library doesn’t check in the tote and hand checks in (or misses checking in) the totes when they make it back to the Service Center then the sorter doesn’t allow another tote to be manifested until the first one is received. When the staff at the Service Center receive the tote, that can create some issues. For example, if a hold was hand checked in, the guest comes in and checks it out and then the tote is received, then that hold is removed from the guest’s account. Please make sure that you are not hand checking in totes and that you are receiving the totes in the system.

Installation of extension on SC sorter

Please remember that the sorter is being extended at the SC Feb 26^th through Feb 28^th. During that time period totes will not be manifested as the Service Center staff will have to be hand sorting all materials. There will be an email sent out when they get to the point of not manifesting totes. Some reminders, please do not put weeded materials in the outgoing bins, put them in the Friends bin. Please remember that if there is not a 2 letter library on a hold slip that it stays at the location that it is at. Please put magazines in routing envelopes. CS will be talking with MTC and to help with workflow during that time, you may see red totes in use in the delivery.

Keys

As we found out several weekends ago, we do not have physical keys to lock/unlock doors at some locations. Please review any keys that you have in your building and let your RD know if you have a physical key for the front door and staff door. The RDs will be talking with MTC about this at their budget meeting.

Schedule Anywhere

Please remember to ‘deactivate’ an employee if they leave the system. Please do not add placeholder ‘people’. We do pay by the person and we only budget for so many ‘seats’. We were charged an additional fee due to being over the number of seats recently. The divider rows are not something that we pay for so you can have as many of them on a schedule as you’d like. If a staff member is moving between locations, please do not ‘deactivate’ them, simply change their department and add them to the new schedule, after removing all of their currently scheduled shifts on their current location. Please give only the appropriate permissions to staff, the list is in the Schedule Anywhere document. There is a Schedule Anywhere document in the LMT SharePoint with how to do different tasks in the software (and was sent in an email at the end of December). If you have questions, please let Erin know. If a shorter quick sheet would be helpful also let Erin know.  

Scheduling

We had a discussion about scheduling expectations for Guest Services staff.

Wufoo Forms/Surveys

Please make sure that any forms that we are asking guests to complete are going through COM to make sure that we have access to them as well as ensuring that language is consistent. Please do not use personal accounts to send out forms to guests.

Also, please do not send out surveys to an outside group without going through COM. This allows COM to standardize language and help with the best way to ask a question to receive the information that you are looking for. It also helps us have an awareness of what is being put out to the public and we won’t be surprised if anyone asks questions about it. We are working on standardized surveys for program feedback.

Self-care ideas for staff/Wellness Connect/Staff Appreciation

Reminder that each location has staff appreciation funds to use for staff. With everything going on it is always good to check in with staff and find ways to help with staff morale. Right now the Wellness Challenge focus on mindfulness things like belly laughing, stretching, and breathing to help reduce stress. Some ideas that were shared: ED has a bulletin board with staff pets, CH is updating their pet wall, AL has a staff appreciation committee and they ask individuals how they would like to be appreciated, OES decorated gingerbread houses at the SC, VI is having a cookie exchange and voting on a t-shirt design to then purchase for staff, BI has a valentine’s exchange, SO has a birthday survey and then they purchase something from the staff appreciation funds to give them in a bag that other staff can contribute to throughout the person’s birthday month, DC has a board of appreciation manager’s also contribute and staff notice that they are taking part.

Meetings with GSLT

We are looking for ways to let staff know that administration cares about what they are doing and knows what is going on in the locations. Are there ways that would be useful in going about this? Things brought up: holding GSLT meetings at various libraries, having GSLT work on the public floor, be informal, attend events, skip level meetings (Susan and Jason as well)

Responding to requests

We just wanted to remind everyone of how to respond to requests for various things. If a warrant is brought in, please ensure that staff are contacting administration so that it can be reviewed by our legal counsel before we respond to it. If there are things such as surveillance video requested, make sure that the request is emailed to open records or Dennis. We are working on a simplified version of Guest Comments on Library Materials and will be asking that it be discussed in staff meetings. Also, the full training is available in MetroU and we’ll be adding that as option training that will show up on all guest service staff’s home page of MetroU. Please make sure that you are talking with staff about ways to handle requests and concerns. If the person making the request or expressing their concern would like to speak with a manager, please provide them with the appropriate information to do so.

Budget Check-in

Just a quick reminder that budget time is coming. Charisse is planning on having the spreadsheets out to the location managers by the end of the week. She’ll be sending invites to the budget training that she will be having as well. The combined 5160/5161 from last year will be your base 5160 for this coming year. The systemwide themes will be sent out soon. For travel, you will not need to determine what amounts to put in for that, we’ll be sending out a spreadsheet with those numbers again this year. If you have notaries who’s commission is expiring in the upcoming fiscal year, then please add that to your budget. If you would like to replace a notary please put that in your budget.

Trauma Informed Workbook Chapter –Personal Belongings

We ran out of time for this one, we’ll add that to next month’s meeting.

Location Sharing/Happy Notes/Weird, Scary or Strange

Tricia worked with the VI to update the missing/lost list to make it more user friendly, the template is in the SharePoint.

NW Readerpalooza had over 200 attendees.

Winter Reading is doing well almost 4000 signups which is a 50% increase over last year.

New Library Manager for the CLs, Tina Reid and new Regional Director, Floyd Council, start on Monday 2/17.

CH is starting their After School Feeding program.