2012 Annual Reports

Annual Report of the Trustees for 2012
 

Our new offering to our members this past year was free or reduced admission passes to local museums, which included Canterbury Shaker Village, the Museum of New Hampshire History, the Currier Museum of Art, Mt. Kearsage Indian Museum, and the SEE Science Center.  We’ll evaluate their popularity and decide which ones to renew for 2013.

We continued to offer a book group discussion night for adults, and morning storytimes for preschoolers.  As the finale of our Summer Reading Program—Dream Big…Read!—we had a visit from a Squam Lakes Natural Science Center staff member, who brought along a porcupine, a skunk, and a saw whet owl to highlight his discussion about nocturnal animals.

The new online catalog has proved very popular with our members, with many of you using it to reserve or renew  materials.

Thank you so much to everyone who supported the library through visits, volunteer work, and donations.  Thank you, especially, to Judith O’Donnell, for her generous donation.

Attendance was down slightly in 2012, with 2470 people coming in to the library, but those who did visit increased the number of materials they checked out to 7039. Members also checked out 537 ebooks and 738 audiobooks through the New Hampshire Downloadable Books service. We removed 563 materials from our collection, and added 708, giving us a total of 11,314 books, audiobooks, and DVDs for people to enjoy.  Other New Hampshire libraries borrowed 433 of our materials and we, in turn, borrowed 193 from them. We added 77 new members, and lost five, leaving us with 690 registered members.
 

Respectfully submitted,

Sandy Starkey, Chair
Sue Barnes, Secretary
Marty Bender, Treasurer