Library accomplishments communication plan

At a glance

Based on auto-generated captions; names and details may be misheard. Speakers are not labeled in the captions, so remarks are not attributed to individuals unless the chair named them.

What: how the Library Commission and library staff could tell the community, and city decision makers, what the library accomplishes (programs, attendance, foot traffic), for example through an infographic, newsletter piece or annual report.
Where it stands: study session only; no vote. Staff will discuss internally and may bring ideas back; the chair and others leaned toward a simple one-time "library year in review" in January or February, built on program counts and attendance.

Main points

Origin: a quarterly report idea from the September meeting, plus a question at a council meeting about how impactful the roughly 8,000 library programs really are (as the captions render the number).
Open questions: target audience (current users, non-users, decision makers, teens), frequency (quarterly versus annual), format (website, newsletter, printed poster, council presentation) and what to measure.
Several commissioners favored starting with program counts, attendance and foot traffic as the most understandable numbers for the public; circulation, holds and questions answered were seen as more useful to the commission and staff.
Staff said monthly statistics are already collected reliably and that new measures such as instructional hours or estimated hours of reading would be easy to add.
One commissioner argued for fixing the underlying data pipeline first: library statistics sit in PDFs and meeting packets, are hard to reuse in newsletters, and are not found by the city website's AI assistant or by search tools. Suggested a public library data page, perhaps with an infographic contest.
Another view was that a simple, human story told once would be a better first step than building automation.
Teens were named as a hard-to-reach audience; ideas included working through schools and the teen advice group, but commissioners noted this is a different goal from informing decision makers.
Tying results to positive community outcomes was raised but seen as hard to measure.
Next steps: staff to discuss internally; possible January or February year-in-review.

Sources

Discussion time

About 34 minutes across 1 meeting (from transcript timestamps; approximate).

Meeting	Minutes
2026-10-19 - Library Commission	34

Log

2026-10-19 - Library Commission — Study session on options for communicating library accomplishments; no action taken.