View this email in your browser

What’s new at the library?

New Faces in the Library

On behalf of the staff and Trustees of the Hamilton Public Library, thank you to outgoing Trustees Jill Dinski, Lauren Walsh, and Dylan Collins for your years of service. All three of these Board members have gone above and beyond in their service to our community. Trustee Dinski most recently served as Vice President and chair of the Personnel Committee, Trustee Walsh served as our Treasurer and chair of the Finance Committee, and Trustee Collins served as our Buildings and Grounds Committee chairperson. Trustees are volunteer members of our community that donate their time and energy to help make our Library great. We are truly grateful for their service and wish them all the best moving forward.

While we are sad to see them go, we’re delighted to welcome two new Board members, Kate Reynolds and Erin Childers-Loranty.

Kate Reynolds grew up on Craine Lake, and as a kid biked to the Earlville Library all the time. Kate has a BS in Biology and an MS in Oceanography, but has always been a book lover. She was Director of the Sherburne Public Library in the 1990s, and has worked at the Colgate Bookstore since 2000, the last few years as the general book buyer. She serves as an instructor in the Professional Bookseller School, and loves to help and mentor new bookstores and buyers. She is a strong advocate for free speech, and believes everyone should feel welcome at the library, and be able to see themselves reflected in books.

Erin Childers-Loranty has been a Hamilton resident since 2012. Erin currently works as the Assistant Director of University Grants and Sponsored Research at Colgate University. She enjoys spending time with her husband, Mike, and their two teenage daughters, June and Cora. Erin's hobbies include gardening, knitting, cooking, and spending time outdoors.

Last month (and this month) we’re also saying goodbye to two of our employees, Marlissa (Marley) Marchitelli and Lisa Marchitelli. Both Marley and Lisa have done incredible work here at the library as Clerk and Events Coordinator, respectively. It has been our pleasure to work with them and much of our success is a direct result of their hard work and excellent customer service. Thank you both so much from the Board and Staff.

Which again, means we get to welcome some new staff members! Next month we will go into more detail welcoming our new Events Coordinator Marie OrMoren, but for now please join us in welcoming our new Clerk, Natalie Gibson!

Natalie has a BFA in Theatre Arts with a minor in History from the University of Texas at Austin. She is an author with seven published novels who relishes reading and treasures a good library. One of her favorite jokes is that she said yes to her husband so that his massive paperback collection became hers. In 2006, they were married in a library. The moving trailer on the way from Texas to New York was severely overweight due to her obstinate refusal to give up any more books. The first thing Natalie did once they arrived in Hamilton, NY was locate the local public library and get everyone library cards. She truly believes that the library is the heart of Hamilton and has been singing our praises for years as a patron. Natalie is ecstatic at the thought of being of service to her community and eager to begin work as your new library clerk.

Cooking with Caleigh

Upcoming Programs

Calendar of Events

Recommended Reading

Non-Fiction reads for August

• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

• The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

• The Wager by David Grann

• The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James

• The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

• Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz

• America on Fire by Elizabeth Hinton

Recommend a Book

Read a really good book recently that you think other people should read as well? Let us know and we’ll share it in a future newsletter!

Request a Recommendation

Want a personalized recommendation? Fill out the form to let us know what kind of book you’re looking for!

Suggest an Item for purchase

Want to read, watch, or listen to something the library doesn’t own? Let us know and we will consider purchasing it for our collection.

New Books

From the Director

If you’re one of the folks that comes and checks out DVDs from the library, you may have noticed a number of changes in our workflow throughout the last few years. These changes may seem inconvenient, inconsistent, and even inefficient - but there’s usually a reason why we do things the way we do. I apologize for the changes, but assure you these changes are for a good reason. Well, maybe not “good,” but they’re at least for a reason.

For years, fear and conventional wisdom told us that DVDs are easy to steal and must be protected at all costs. The natural response to this is to keep the discs out of their cases and figure out how to pair them with their respective cases upon checkout. That is, until your collection outgrows the circulation desk. After weeding the collection and still being left with too many discs, we decided to keep some of the DVDs in the case, and some behind the desk. Deciding which were protected behind the desk was tricky. They’re all roughly the same price, so which gets shelved? We ended up keeping R-rated discs behind the desk, so that kids couldn’t accidentally watch Alien. Kids' movies were also stored behind the desk, as they’re shelved in the children’s area so little ones didn’t accidentally chew on a copy of Fern Gully. Then we kept anything that might be worth stealing, so any DVD less than three years old also had its disc stored behind the desk. The rest of the more than three year-old PG-13, documentary etc. DVDs stayed in the case.

It was complicated, but it worked. Until it didn’t. About two months ago, we noticed a few discs were missing. This happens occasionally, but we kept finding more and more missing discs from the collection that we deemed ‘unworthy to steal,’ as the resale value for used DVDs that are at LEAST three years old with library markings is… not great. Still, they were stolen. Our Circulation staff combed through every case on the shelf and found dozens of missing discs so…

Anyway, we changed our DVDs back to ALL being shelved behind the desk. Please bear with us while we learn our new system. Thank you for your patience.

And please don’t steal from the library. We’re free already, it confuses us.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me directly at [email protected].

HOURS

Monday - Thursday    10 A.M. - 7 P.M.Friday   10 A.M. - 5 P.M.Saturday    9 A.M. - 3 P.M.

Copyright (C) " target="_blank">unsubscribe