Posts by Cari
Read On! Annual Report
Last week, libraries across Oklahoma submitted their annual reports to the Oklahoma Department of Libraries. It’s a good time to get a snapshot of the past year and to start making future plans and goals.
In the annual report, I get to tell the state how we spent our money, how many items we have available to our community, and how many community members we served in various ways.
In our physical collection, we have 33,789 bound books; 1,371 audiobooks and music CDs; and 1,460 DVDs. This means our building currently holds 36,620 items.
In our digital collection, we have 42,927 ebooks; 10,937 audiobooks; and 682 videos. This makes our complete collection an impressive 91,166 items available to our community.
I’m proud to say we had 50,024 items checked out of our physical library. When we add the number of items checked out of our digital library, that number goes up to 77,715 checkouts. That’s a lot! You guys were busy!
Speaking of you guys, we’ve got 12,182 active library users. In a town of less than 10,000 and a county of just over 40,000, I’m quite pleased with that number. And I’m even more excited every month when I look at how many more people get new library cards — almost 70 a month!
Last but not least, my two favorite statistics to watch: We had 63,886 visitors through our doors (over 200 each day) and we answered 21,187 questions! We love answering your questions, so keep them coming!
Thank you so much for using your Pryor Public Library so often and so well. We are truly having a wonderful time serving our community. And if you haven’t been to the library in a while, come check us out!
If you’d like to let us know how we can serve you better, come to our focus group meetings on Aug. 27th and 30th from 6 – 7 PM in our meeting room. We’ll have cookies.
Read On! Summer Reads
It was a summer full of reading for your Pryor library staff. Here’s a short list of the books we enjoyed most this summer:
For Fiction Readers:
“Cold Earth” by Ann Cleeves (found in adult fiction) is the latest in Cleeves’ “Shetland” series. The series is set in Scotland’s Shetland Islands and follows detective Jimmy Perez as he solves crimes on these remote islands.
“The Magic Misfits” by Neil Patrick Harris (found in Overdrive, our ebook library) is the tale of how young Carter went from being a street magician with his evil uncle to saving a small town from a con artist’s carnival and gaining much needed friends along the way.
“The End of the World Running Club” by Adrian J. Walker (found in adult fiction) follows Edgar Hill who finds himself on the wrong side of the country when world-ending devastation strikes. His best hope to run through the 500 miles of wasteland that spans between him and his family.
For Nonfiction Readers:
“#GIRLBOSS” by Sophia Amoruso (found in Overdrive, our ebook library) is inspired by Amoruso’s climb from being a grifting teenager to the founder and CEO of Nasty Gal, one of the fastest growing retailers in 2012. Amoruso offers advice for other non-traditional leaders on how to trust their instincts and blaze their own path.
“The Truth About Animals: Stoned sloths, lovelorn hippos, and other tales from the wild side of wildlife” by Lucy Cook (found at 590.2 COO) offers surprising and humorous facts about animals, debunks some common myths, and is an all-around fun read.
“Wild Embers: Poems of rebellion, fire, and beauty” by Nikita Gill (found at 821 GIL) is a book of poetry that explores “the fire in every woman.” Highly recommended by the staff member who read it.
Of course, we have many more books to recommend! All you have to do is ask!
Read On! First Day of School
When I was in school, I always viewed the first day of school like New Year’s Day. It’s a day for new beginnings. To encourage new habits, to reinvent my scholarly self, to perfect my planner’s color coding, and to finally break my habit of procrastination. (I never accomplished that last one.)
If the first day of school is similar for you and your family, I encourage you to add the library to your list of scholarly resolutions.
Some suggestions:
Make the library building a place for you and/or your kids to do homework.
Search the library’s online resources when doing research before trying Google.
Make friends with the library staff at the beginning of the school year so you don’t feel shy about asking for help once the research projects are assigned.
Include at least one fun read each month while you slog through all the required reading.
Learning Express, Mango, and EBSCO are probably our most student-friendly online resources. If you haven’t checked them out, I encourage you to grab your library card number and explore them. Learning Express features math, reading, and writing lessons from fourth grade through college level and will help you get ready for just about any standardized test. Mango is our language learning resource that’s fun and easy to use. EBSCO is a suite of resources for all your researching needs.
To explore at home, you’ll need to go to our website (pryorlibrary.org), find the “Use the Library” tab on the right and head down to the “Research & Resources” link. From that page, you’ll find all of our online resources available to you from home. You simply need your library card number to access them.
If you need help getting started with one of our online resources, please let the library staff know. We would love to help you find what you need.
Read On! Libraries Make Connections
Recently, Forbes published an article suggesting libraries should be replaced by Amazon. As a librarian I find a lot wrong with that idea. More importantly, the article signifies that the author doesn’t understand what libraries do.
Simply put, libraries make connections.
Libraries make connections for the members of our community in four basic areas: Information needs, Literacy, Culture & Cultural Conversations, and Community.
Our information needs connection encompasses everything from crossword help to providing a robust nonfiction collection for lifelong learners. We also provide free internet services, which are used for job searches, at-home businesses, research, and more.
When we make literacy connections, we do so by providing and recommending books, teaching early literacy skills to the toddlers and preschoolers in our storytimes, offering online resources for basic adult education, and partnering with our Friends of the Library group for English language tutoring.
Culture and cultural conversation connections come through offering cultural classes and events like Robert Lewis’ Cherokee storytelling. We also make these connections by providing bestselling books and movies for checkout. Having access to the internet helps our community stay abreast of the latest meme craze as well.
Finally, we make community connections by offering classes and events where our community can gather. We house information our community needs. (Want to read the charter language that we’ll vote on in August? We’ve got it.) And through our internet services, we enable those without internet the ability to connect to a larger, world community.
Libraries do a lot. And we’re far more than just a service for books.