June Meetings Recap

Collected from meetings held 6/7 & 6/14:

Closing Procedures
Since it is now the busiest time of year, everyone needs to be out on the floor 15 minutes before closing to help clear the building. If you are scheduled to do book drop or in-house, please complete those tasks beforehand.

Collection Maintenance
I have replaced the “Log - Books from Other Systems” link on our blog with the “Log – Missing AV and Orphan Items” system-wide link: https://houtx-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/g/personal/laurie_covington_houstontx_gov/ETQLOYk86L9OoXglBV3oU08B4op-3L3PfVz7RTdBMIEIAg?e=vX2HVM This is an Office 365 spreadsheet that will required you to log in with your email credentials to view or edit. There are two tabs: incomplete items & items from other libraries.

Please try to put items in order on the carts.

We are still finding a lot of items on the shelf that are still checked out to customers. Please watch the screen when checking things in!

Garden Club of Houston
The Garden Club of Houston has new board members. Sally Hilliard is now in charge of the archives located inside the garden room. She is a former librarian at River Oaks Baptist School. She will be requesting the room in the coming weeks to reorganize the collection. If she or someone else from the garden club request the room in advance, it is okay to block off the room in the calendar for them. Garden club members do not have to fill out the garden room form to use the room.

Meeting Rooms
The upcoming change in library hours is not yet public knowledge, so if someone requests a meeting room on a Friday or Saturday morning after August 1st, just tell them the room is unavailable. You can also refer them to Jungman for Saturday morning requests.

Summer Reading Program
Customers who participated in SRP last year can use their same account to enroll in this year’s program. You can tell they are properly enrolled if there is a green check mark next to where it says Babies (or Kids or Teens) Summer Reading Program 2018. If there’s a box with no check mark, they haven’t registered for this year’s program.

SRP prize reminders

• Green pins are for kids. Purple pins are for teens.
• Participants get a program pin after logging 5 activities. The truck with color is for completing 5 HPL activities. The plain truck is for Around Town activities (bird watching, taking a walk, etc.)
• When making pins, make sure the smooth pieces aren’t stuck together.
• Babies only get a book at registration.
• We have the 10-day and 20-day prizes for babies. Don’t give the parent the whole bag of finger puppets to look through. Pull out a handful for them to choose from or just pick one for them.
• A folder with prize information is in the drawer where the garden room clipboard is.

Details about SRP programs are on the back of the SRP calendars.

Flip Kits
There is a new folder in the Desk 1 drawer for surveys that CMH has sent over for specific customers. These surveys are for customers who checked out a kit without a survey. If this happens, get the customer’s name, library card #, and phone number and give that information to Donna. She will contact CMH for a survey. After the customer fills out the survey meant specifically for them (it will have their name on it), you can give them a CMH pass.

Do not give a customer a CMH pass if they only give you a survey. One of our Montrose colleagues observed a customer remove a survey from a Flip Kit at Montrose and then try to get a pass. The customer then came here and tried the same thing, even claiming Montrose sent them to Looscan.  Customers are only eligible for CMH passes if they return a survey WITH a Flip Kit they have checked out.

May Meetings Recap

Collected from meetings held 5/3, 5/17, 5/24 & 5/31:

Attendance

• Everyone acknowledged receipt of the Interoffice Memorandum regarding Absenteeism and Sick Leave Usage.
• If you are going to be late or absent, you must call within 30 minutes of your start time. You must call the branch and speak to whoever is in charge that day.

Circulation & Account Procedures

• Please be cautious when checking in material. Watch the screen at all times! Pop-ups, bad tags, or a lag in the system can result in items not getting checked in properly.
• Please put notes on customer accounts. This is extremely important when a customer has turned in an item that can’t be checked in because it is missing a part or if a customer is being charged for a damaged item. Another person looking at the account will have no idea what’s going on if there’s no note.
• Remember to do a name search before creating a new customer account. This will cut down on duplicate cards.
• We will no longer be doing paper registration for library cards after June 30th. I have already requested that IT put an icon with a direct link to the online MYLink registration form on both catalog computers. I have also requested a security cable so we can secure a laptop to the desk and use that as an alternative to the catalog computers.

Collection Maintenance

• Yolanda is asking for assistance with shelving certain juvenile material during the summer.  Nonfiction, beginning readers, and board books are the areas anyone can help shelve.
• HPL will no longer order music CDs or audiobooks when the new fiscal year starts.
• To better track in-house use of board books, let’s face all of them in the same direction with the spines out. If you are scheduled to do in-house or happen to notice books facing in different directions, collect and scan them for the in-house count.

Desk Etiquette

• Please keep in mind that customers can see what you are doing on the computers at the desk. Do not go on Facebook when you are at the desk.
• Be on-time to the desk.

Flip Kits

• There is a new procedure for returning Flip Kit surveys. Instead of filing the completed survey in a folder at the desk, just put it back in the kit. Remember to check the kit out to LOO-REFURB and send it to CMH.
• If a customer reports that a survey is missing from a Flip Kit, get the customer’s name, phone number, and library card number and give the information to Donna. She will forward the information to Evelyn at CMH, who will send back a personalized survey for the customer. The customer must fill out the form to receive a museum pass.

Holds
KEN holds are now going to ROB.

Incident Reports

• Do one for anything that causes a disruption
• Do not do them in all-caps
• No abbreviations
• No opinions
• Write in the third person
• Describe the person (clothing is optional)
• You must call the police if you do an indefinite suspension
• Indefinite does not have to mean forever
• Do not use your personal definition of obscenity or pornography when assessing the content being viewed by customers
• Obscenity, as defined in Section 43.21 of the Texas Penal Code, “means material or a performance that . . . depicts . . . patently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, including sexual intercourse, sodomy, and sexual bestiality; or patently offensive representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions, sadism, masochism, lewd exhibition of the genitals, the male or female genitals in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal, covered male genitals in a discernibly turgid state or a device designed and marketed as useful primarily for stimulation of the human genital organs; and taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value
• Per the above definition, that means that customers can watch women twerking in thongs, wearing bikinis or sheer t-shirts, and can look at the naked torso of a woman.  Customers can also look at fine art, artistic photography, and legitimately medical websites that depict full-frontal nudity.
• Use your best judgment, but don’t base your actions on personal opinions. You can always ask a customer to be cautious if an image is borderline obscene. You can also ask a customer to switch computers.
• Issue a suspension notice if you suspend someone for more than a day. A customer does not have to sign it (put “refused to sign” if they won’t). Do mention the suspension notice in the incident report.
• Accurately calculate the suspension time (Google it… “90 days from today”)
• The yellow suspension binder in the manager's office is organized with tabs for each suspension level. Each section has a legend with the person, description, violation, and date.  The incident reports are organized alphabetically if the name is known and then by date (newest first) if the name is not known. Blank suspension notices and trespass affidavits are in the front of the binder. Trespass affidavits are presented by the police and are only valid for one year.
• Copy Leonore and Melissa when emailing incident reports to NL Incidents.

Meeting Rooms

Please use loo.library@houstontx.gov to email meeting room forms if a customer cannot come in person to make a reservation. Advise the customer to follow up with a phone call to ensure the form was received.

Printing

• Coin Copiers has new paper: Relay MP International Paper
• Staff paper is still DPS by Staples

Public Computer Use

• The patron type for computer cards should be ACOMP (not ADULT). ADULT is for library cards only. If you make a computer card with the ADULT p-type, then the card can be used to check out material.
• The public computers currently automatically extend time to 60 minutes when 7 minutes are remaining, except at closing.

Statistics

Please remember to notate foreign language spoken as well as questions about citizenship classes, ESL, or language learning on the statistics sheet.

Summer Reading Program

• There is an online tutorial for Beanstack on the homepage of the training portal: http://houstonlibrary.libguides.com/training-portal
• This year, library staff will have to help sign-in and serve breakfast to Camp Stream participants. Camp Stream is July 24th-26th. Donna is coming in early all three days. Tina is scheduled to help on Wednesday, and Antoinette will come in early on Thursday. More on this later.

Volunteers

Our summer intern will start on June 11th. The intern will attend a training at Central on June 13th.  The intern’s last day is August 3rd.

Summer!

TECHLink

Check out HPL's TECHLink page to see the types of technology available to patrons. Click on each section (Graphic Design & Art, Digital Creative Space, Music Studio, Tiny Techs, Video Studio, and Workshops) for detailed information.

SRP Registration Now Open

Kids can register for the Summer Reading Program starting today. However, there has been a delay in the shipments of both the lanyards and the button makers. So, while registration is open, prizes will not be awarded until June 1st. The message that people get when they register reflects that they can go to their local library beginning June 1st to collect their registration prize.

Scanning/Faxing

Since this seems to come up a lot, Post-N-Parcel (3733 Westheimer Rd, Houston, TX 77027) doesn't have scanning services but does do faxing.

FedEx (1703 Post Oak Blvd, Houston, TX 77056 or 5110 Buffalo Speedway Suite A, Houston, TX 77005) does faxing and scanning.

SRP

Registration for SRP starts May 15th: http://houstonlibrary.org/summer