Monday, May 26, 2008
Downloadable Audio Books and Movies Free at PDL!
I’d like to take this chance to remind our patrons that you can borrow downloadable Audio Books (as well as popular eBooks) from the library, free of charge. You can listen to them on your computer, or burn them to disk and use them in your car or on your MP3 player.
We have great titles: New audio books from John Lescroart, Fern Michaels, and Dean Koontz, non-fiction like the “For Dummies” series or business titles. Even children’s books.
This service has expanded, now offering movies that you can view on your computer or a portable device.
You can get to the MLC Overdrive collection by going to http://ebooks.mlcnet.org/ or clicking the "Audio Book Downloads" link on our Good Reads page. Browse until you find something you like, download and install the software to play or read it, then the file.
Overdrive books are not currently compatible with iPods. Some of the books can be downloaded any time, others need to be reserved. Check your email frequently if you reserve one -- you have 48 hours to pick it up once the book is reserved in your name.Also: This article, Download and Listen to Audiobooks, in PC world, mentions the audio book download service that we use as a great place to get free books. It's a good overview of how the author listens to audio books, and contains a couple of links to other sources of free audio books in the public domain.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Two recomendations
Over the weekend, I took out of town visitors to the Air Zoo. Not only did they have a great time, but we went to their annex in back, where they have a great aerospace exhibit, and displays of early twentieth century stuff, which includes a plane you can walk aboard.
They're still running their promotion where you get half off when you show your Portage District Library Card.
Also, Joe Schrieber, an author who's read for the library, is publishing a serialized novel titled The Triggerman on his website. He has posted four chapters as of today. If you like Stephen King, or thrillers, go take a look at his free novel being published one chapter a weekday.
They're still running their promotion where you get half off when you show your Portage District Library Card.
Also, Joe Schrieber, an author who's read for the library, is publishing a serialized novel titled The Triggerman on his website. He has posted four chapters as of today. If you like Stephen King, or thrillers, go take a look at his free novel being published one chapter a weekday.
Monday, May 19, 2008
New Collections in the Atrium
Now available in the New Book section of the Atrium are New Talking Books on CD and New Large Print. We are putting the newest arrivals on CD and in Large Print on the last section of shelving in the New Book Section. New Items will remain in the new section for 6 months and then will be removed and placed in the regular collection.
Also available are a print list of Talking Books on CD and Large Print books. These will be updated quarterly. They are located on the end columns by their collections.Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Book Discussion in a Bag New titles
Attention Book Groups! Need titles for lively book discussions? Try the library’s newly stocked Book Discussion in a Bag collection of sixteen bags. Each bag holds ten copies of a single title, plus the author’s bio and discussion questions and author interviews when available. Those titles include novels, memoirs, poetry, and nonfiction by local, bestselling, classic and award winning authors. Each bag holds ten copies of a single title, plus the author’s bio and discussion questions and author interviews when available. All you need is wine and cheese and you have all the fixings for a rousing discussion. Each bag checks out for a month. Here is the new list of titles:
Book Discussion in Bag Titles 2008
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (nonfiction) by Barbara Kingsolver
This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tucson to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. The book's bulk, written and read by Kingsolver in a lightly twangy voice filled with wonder and enthusiasm, proceeds through the seasons via delightful stories about the history of their farmhouse, the exhausting bounty of the zucchini harvest, turkey chicks hatching and so on.
The Crows (mystery) by Maris Soule (local fiction writer)
Described by some as a psycho9logical cozy, The Crows is part mystery, part suspense. Wry humor is combined with fast paced events giving the reader a view of life in a rural Michigan farming community. Follow P.J., a C.P.A who discovers a man dying in her dining room after coming home from an afternoon walk in the woods, as she learns that what appears to be true could be deceiving.
Eat, Pray, Love (memoir) by Elizabeth Gilbert
At the age of thirty-one, Gilbert moved with her husband to the suburbs of New York and began trying to get pregnant, only to realize that she wanted neither a child nor a husband. Three years later, after a protracted divorce, she embarked on a yearlong trip of recovery, with three main stops: Rome, for pleasure (mostly gustatory, with a special emphasis on gelato); an ashram outside of Mumbai, for spiritual searching; and Bali, for "balancing." These destinations are all on the beaten track, but Gilbert's exuberance and her self-deprecating humor enliven the proceedings
Great Gatsby (fiction) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." novel became The Great Gatsby. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captures the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
Inheritance of Loss (fiction) by Kiran Desai
Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states—Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." The tranquility of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (nonfiction) by Bill Bryson
Few childhoods are interesting to anyone other than the individuals that lived them. Even a mundane childhood, though, can be made interesting through good writing, and Bill Bryson’s memoir fits this category. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is Bryson’s nostalgia-soaked story of his childhood in 1950s Iowa. Bryson describes his family, friends, and the city of Des Moines with reverence for the profound effect they had on his life.
One Oar (poetry) by Marie Bahlke (local poet)
Marie Bahlke has created a powerfully graceful collection of reminiscence as she describes caring for her husband as he slips deeper into Alzheimer’s disease. Marie shares with us her moving journey into the heart of grief, loss and unrelenting love.
Out of the Dust (fiction-poetry) by Karen Hesse (Newbery Award Book)
Karen Hesse has taken the Dust Bowl and narrowed her focus to a single family living in Oklahoma in 1934. Through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Billie Jo, the reader is treated to a series of poems describing the catastrophic events that come from living in a world of dust. Each poem is a small masterpiece, slowly expanding to give the inhabitants of Billie Jo's small Okalahoma town depth and purpose. You meet families migrating west to California, bums on railroad tracks. There are abandoned babies and musicians with names like Mad Dog Craddock and the Black Mesa Boys. To read this book is to find yourself completely immersed in the Depression.
Pomegranate Soup: A Novel (fiction) by Marsha Mehran
The Irish hamlet of Ballinacroagh is the unlikely new home for three Iranian sisters and their new Babylon Cafe. Twenty-seven-year-old Marjan, the most skilled in the kitchen; Bahar, the tentative middle sister; and Layla, the charming teenager, fled the Iranian revolution and, after some years in London, have arrived determined to succeed. Initially wary natives soon fall under the spell of the cafe's cardamom- and rosewater-scented wonders, But town bully Thomas McGuire, who loathes "feckin' foreigners," and gossip Dervla Quigley, who thinks "they're all sluts," will do anything to drive the sisters away.
Q Road (fiction) by Bonnie Jo Campbell (instructor Kalamazoo College)
A farm in rural Kalamazoo County, Mich., provides the backdrop for this May-December love story. Rachel Crane, a homely, motherless, foul-mouthed teenager, lives on a houseboat with her reclusive mother, Margo. They are tenants of George Harland, whose wife abandoned him to maintain his declining farm alone. George becomes irresistibly drawn to Rachel and asks her to marry him; she accepts, but just so she can inherit "his damned land." Only when her young friend David's life is imperiled, does Rachel begin to allow herself to feel genuine love for anything but the land.
Solace of Leaving Early (fiction) by Haven Kimmel
A romance evolves in the wake of a domestic shooting in Kimmel's intelligent and compassionate debut novel, which brings two friends of one of the victims together in a small Indiana town. Amos Townsend is the male protagonist, a 40-ish preacher who counseled the late Alice Baker-Maloney as her frayed marriage degenerated into a fatal confrontation with her controlling husband, Jack.
A Thousand Splendid Suns (fiction) by Khaled Hosseini
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations...One School at a Time (non fiction) by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Water for Elephants (fiction) by Sara Gruen
Jacob Jankowski is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. He is reminiscing about his life in the circus. After his parents were killed in an automotive accident, Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. As a veterinarian student he is put in charge of caring for the animals. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people. August, the animal trainer, is a certified and cruel paranoid schizophrenic Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass. According in Publishers Weekly, the ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely.
The Women were Leaving the Men (fiction – short stories) by Andy Mozina (English Department, Kalamazoo College)
Andy Mozina draws readers into the everyday lives of characters that are instantly relatable but intriguingly flawed. Knocked beyond the brink by departed family members, curious obsessions, and unruly physical attributes, Mozina‘s characters climb and scrape their way toward intimacy, sanity and redemption against the often-absurd odds of their lives in this quirky, humorous and poetic collection.
Year of Wonders (fiction) by Geraldine Brooks
Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders describes the 17th-century plague that is carried from London to a small Derbyshire village by an itinerant tailor. As villagers begin, one by one, to die, the rest face a choice: do they flee their village in hope of outrunning the plague or do they stay? The rector, Michael Mompellion, argues forcefully that the villagers should stay put, isolate themselves from neighboring towns and villages, and prevent the contagion from spreading. His oratory wins the day and the village turns in on itself. Cocooned from the outside world and ravaged by the disease, its inhabitants struggle to retain their humanity in the face of the disaster.
You might want to invite local authors to your book groups. Most authors visit groups for food and the opportunity to join into a discussion about their work.
Book Discussion in Bag Titles 2008
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (nonfiction) by Barbara Kingsolver
This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tucson to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. The book's bulk, written and read by Kingsolver in a lightly twangy voice filled with wonder and enthusiasm, proceeds through the seasons via delightful stories about the history of their farmhouse, the exhausting bounty of the zucchini harvest, turkey chicks hatching and so on.
The Crows (mystery) by Maris Soule (local fiction writer)
Described by some as a psycho9logical cozy, The Crows is part mystery, part suspense. Wry humor is combined with fast paced events giving the reader a view of life in a rural Michigan farming community. Follow P.J., a C.P.A who discovers a man dying in her dining room after coming home from an afternoon walk in the woods, as she learns that what appears to be true could be deceiving.
Eat, Pray, Love (memoir) by Elizabeth Gilbert
At the age of thirty-one, Gilbert moved with her husband to the suburbs of New York and began trying to get pregnant, only to realize that she wanted neither a child nor a husband. Three years later, after a protracted divorce, she embarked on a yearlong trip of recovery, with three main stops: Rome, for pleasure (mostly gustatory, with a special emphasis on gelato); an ashram outside of Mumbai, for spiritual searching; and Bali, for "balancing." These destinations are all on the beaten track, but Gilbert's exuberance and her self-deprecating humor enliven the proceedings
Great Gatsby (fiction) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." novel became The Great Gatsby. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captures the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
Inheritance of Loss (fiction) by Kiran Desai
Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states—Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." The tranquility of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (nonfiction) by Bill Bryson
Few childhoods are interesting to anyone other than the individuals that lived them. Even a mundane childhood, though, can be made interesting through good writing, and Bill Bryson’s memoir fits this category. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is Bryson’s nostalgia-soaked story of his childhood in 1950s Iowa. Bryson describes his family, friends, and the city of Des Moines with reverence for the profound effect they had on his life.
One Oar (poetry) by Marie Bahlke (local poet)
Marie Bahlke has created a powerfully graceful collection of reminiscence as she describes caring for her husband as he slips deeper into Alzheimer’s disease. Marie shares with us her moving journey into the heart of grief, loss and unrelenting love.
Out of the Dust (fiction-poetry) by Karen Hesse (Newbery Award Book)
Karen Hesse has taken the Dust Bowl and narrowed her focus to a single family living in Oklahoma in 1934. Through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Billie Jo, the reader is treated to a series of poems describing the catastrophic events that come from living in a world of dust. Each poem is a small masterpiece, slowly expanding to give the inhabitants of Billie Jo's small Okalahoma town depth and purpose. You meet families migrating west to California, bums on railroad tracks. There are abandoned babies and musicians with names like Mad Dog Craddock and the Black Mesa Boys. To read this book is to find yourself completely immersed in the Depression.
Pomegranate Soup: A Novel (fiction) by Marsha Mehran
The Irish hamlet of Ballinacroagh is the unlikely new home for three Iranian sisters and their new Babylon Cafe. Twenty-seven-year-old Marjan, the most skilled in the kitchen; Bahar, the tentative middle sister; and Layla, the charming teenager, fled the Iranian revolution and, after some years in London, have arrived determined to succeed. Initially wary natives soon fall under the spell of the cafe's cardamom- and rosewater-scented wonders, But town bully Thomas McGuire, who loathes "feckin' foreigners," and gossip Dervla Quigley, who thinks "they're all sluts," will do anything to drive the sisters away.
Q Road (fiction) by Bonnie Jo Campbell (instructor Kalamazoo College)
A farm in rural Kalamazoo County, Mich., provides the backdrop for this May-December love story. Rachel Crane, a homely, motherless, foul-mouthed teenager, lives on a houseboat with her reclusive mother, Margo. They are tenants of George Harland, whose wife abandoned him to maintain his declining farm alone. George becomes irresistibly drawn to Rachel and asks her to marry him; she accepts, but just so she can inherit "his damned land." Only when her young friend David's life is imperiled, does Rachel begin to allow herself to feel genuine love for anything but the land.
Solace of Leaving Early (fiction) by Haven Kimmel
A romance evolves in the wake of a domestic shooting in Kimmel's intelligent and compassionate debut novel, which brings two friends of one of the victims together in a small Indiana town. Amos Townsend is the male protagonist, a 40-ish preacher who counseled the late Alice Baker-Maloney as her frayed marriage degenerated into a fatal confrontation with her controlling husband, Jack.
A Thousand Splendid Suns (fiction) by Khaled Hosseini
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations...One School at a Time (non fiction) by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Water for Elephants (fiction) by Sara Gruen
Jacob Jankowski is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. He is reminiscing about his life in the circus. After his parents were killed in an automotive accident, Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. As a veterinarian student he is put in charge of caring for the animals. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people. August, the animal trainer, is a certified and cruel paranoid schizophrenic Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass. According in Publishers Weekly, the ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely.
The Women were Leaving the Men (fiction – short stories) by Andy Mozina (English Department, Kalamazoo College)
Andy Mozina draws readers into the everyday lives of characters that are instantly relatable but intriguingly flawed. Knocked beyond the brink by departed family members, curious obsessions, and unruly physical attributes, Mozina‘s characters climb and scrape their way toward intimacy, sanity and redemption against the often-absurd odds of their lives in this quirky, humorous and poetic collection.
Year of Wonders (fiction) by Geraldine Brooks
Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders describes the 17th-century plague that is carried from London to a small Derbyshire village by an itinerant tailor. As villagers begin, one by one, to die, the rest face a choice: do they flee their village in hope of outrunning the plague or do they stay? The rector, Michael Mompellion, argues forcefully that the villagers should stay put, isolate themselves from neighboring towns and villages, and prevent the contagion from spreading. His oratory wins the day and the village turns in on itself. Cocooned from the outside world and ravaged by the disease, its inhabitants struggle to retain their humanity in the face of the disaster.
You might want to invite local authors to your book groups. Most authors visit groups for food and the opportunity to join into a discussion about their work.
After Hours Coffee House Jazz
Enjoy a cup of coffee or tea and listen or dance to the WMU Jazz Trio featuring Ryan Andrews: A jazz ensemble in the classic piano trio format of piano, acoustic bass and drums, featuring students from Western Michigan University's internationally acclaimed jazz program.
Drawing from a repertoire of old and new standards from the Great American Songbook as well as classic jazz compositions by the great jazz legends, this ensemble will have you tapping your toes to the rhythm of America's own classical music: jazz!
For adults, please register at the Adult Information desk at the Portage District Library, 329-4542 X 600.
Friday, May 16, 2008 6:30 to 8:30 PM
Registration starts May 1, 2008
Location: Senior Citizen Center located next to the Portage District Library.
Drawing from a repertoire of old and new standards from the Great American Songbook as well as classic jazz compositions by the great jazz legends, this ensemble will have you tapping your toes to the rhythm of America's own classical music: jazz!
For adults, please register at the Adult Information desk at the Portage District Library, 329-4542 X 600.
Friday, May 16, 2008 6:30 to 8:30 PM
Registration starts May 1, 2008
Location: Senior Citizen Center located next to the Portage District Library.
Monday, May 12, 2008
SURVEY SAYS PORTAGE DISTRICT LIBRARY IS HITTING THE MARK
Portage District Library is conducting a number of surveys this year because we want to be sure that what we are doing is worthwhile to you and that you are feeling satisfied (or better) with your library. We have just received the results of a recent mail survey in which we asked some general and specific questions about the library and offered an opportunity for respondents to give feedback in open-ended questions. Since our goal was to obtain opinions and preferences about the library from a representative cross-section sampling of our library patron population, this survey was mailed to 2,000 randomly selected registered borrowers. Out of those, we received 397 responses - a sufficient number to get a good assessment. Once again, the library was assisted with our survey by Dr. David Hartman (Director) and his staff at the Kercher Center for Social Research at Western Michigan University who administered the survey tool and compiled, organized and analyzed the responses. Here are some interesting statistics from that survey:
> When asked HOW OFTEN they used the library, 48.2% answered "once a month" and 24.7% said at least once a week.
> When questioned about their primary use of the library, 73.1% said for personal enjoyment and 14.4% said for children's use.
> When asked "WHY do you usually visit the library?" 89.6% responded it was to borrow materials; 35.2% said it was for reference/research; 21.5% said it was to use the Youth Services area; and the balance of respondents indicated a variety of other reasons including: to attend programs, to study/work, to use the Internet, to read magazines & newspapers, to get homework help, to use the Business Room, or to meet and relax with friends.
> When questioned about what services they used when visiting the library's website, 45.8% said they searched the library catalog, 32.7% said they checked their account or reserved books, 21.9% said they found out about events and classes and 13% said it was to find out about open hours or location.
> When asked: "How easy is it to find what you are looking for?" 51% of respondents said it was extremely easy and 48.5% said moderately easy, which indicates to us that we have done a good job of making our collections, resources and public spaces user friendly.
> The very BEST outcome of this survey was responses to the questions: "Are the library facilities welcoming, clean and comfortable?" (99.5% said Yes!) and "Is the library staff responding quickly to your inquiries and requests?" (94.1% said Yes!)
These responses indicate to us that patrons are using the library and our website in ways that we anticipated they would and that we are allocating our budgetary resources in appropriate areas. The high ratings confirm that we are hitting the mark in our goals of making the library a desirable destination and optimizing patron access to library services and resources… and this is GREAT NEWS for our community! Thanks to everyone who participated in this survey and I encourage all of you to continue to share your opinions.
> When asked HOW OFTEN they used the library, 48.2% answered "once a month" and 24.7% said at least once a week.
> When questioned about their primary use of the library, 73.1% said for personal enjoyment and 14.4% said for children's use.
> When asked "WHY do you usually visit the library?" 89.6% responded it was to borrow materials; 35.2% said it was for reference/research; 21.5% said it was to use the Youth Services area; and the balance of respondents indicated a variety of other reasons including: to attend programs, to study/work, to use the Internet, to read magazines & newspapers, to get homework help, to use the Business Room, or to meet and relax with friends.
> When questioned about what services they used when visiting the library's website, 45.8% said they searched the library catalog, 32.7% said they checked their account or reserved books, 21.9% said they found out about events and classes and 13% said it was to find out about open hours or location.
> When asked: "How easy is it to find what you are looking for?" 51% of respondents said it was extremely easy and 48.5% said moderately easy, which indicates to us that we have done a good job of making our collections, resources and public spaces user friendly.
> The very BEST outcome of this survey was responses to the questions: "Are the library facilities welcoming, clean and comfortable?" (99.5% said Yes!) and "Is the library staff responding quickly to your inquiries and requests?" (94.1% said Yes!)
These responses indicate to us that patrons are using the library and our website in ways that we anticipated they would and that we are allocating our budgetary resources in appropriate areas. The high ratings confirm that we are hitting the mark in our goals of making the library a desirable destination and optimizing patron access to library services and resources… and this is GREAT NEWS for our community! Thanks to everyone who participated in this survey and I encourage all of you to continue to share your opinions.
