Canton Public Library connects your community.

The year 2010 at Canton Public Library can best be characterized as a year of partnerships. As we faced further budget cuts and increased usage, we looked for partners in our community to help us stretch every dollar. By teaming up with our schools, community groups, other nonprofit and service organizations, arts consortia, and businesses, we were able to maximize our offerings and fulfill our mission of connecting your community.

Grants

Our staff searched tirelessly for grants to help fill gaps in our funding. This year, we were the recepient of several grants, including an Action for Earth Grant, a partnership project between the library, the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum, and Project S.N.A.P. that allowed us to train 20 families in environmental stewardship and helped us create and install the mosiac mural just outside the Children's Library. This grant was supplied by the Erb Family Foundation Grant.

Additionally, we qualified for our second ARC grant to create a small rain garden at the back of the library, reducing the area of our grounds that needs mowing, watering and pesticide application, and adding native plants to help filter ground water and runoff.

The Giving Hope Women's Giving Circle Grant we received was used to start a book group for girls ages 5-12 and their mothers or another significant woman in their life. This grant, along with the Target Family Reading Grant, and the ALA Great Stories Grant

made it possible to host book discussions for both young readers and their families as well as teens at the Starkweather Center, an alternative high school.

The Ford Road Meijer Store entered us into the Pepsi Refresh project and surprised us with a check for $400, which we were happy to accept.

News

Our proactive attempts to streamline efficiency and find other funding resulted in a few new iniatives. In June, we replaced our old hand sorting method with a new RFID system that both checks in and sorts materials to the proper bin for staff to place back on the shelves. Not only does this get materials back into circulation faster, it also saves hundreds of staff hours sorting and checking in materials and reduces the errors that come with handling 6,000 pieces daily. This project also saw the debut of another of our firsts — our patron education video series. We produced several videos to help educate patrons about library services, for example, how to use the self checkout.

In November, we teamed up with the Northville Barnes and Noble for our first-ever book fair. Purchases from the store or online during our fair benefitted the library.

October 2010 was the 30th anniversary of the library, which we celebrated all month with blog posts, historical photos and videos, and online contests. It was amazing to see the growth of Canton from a small farming community to the vibrant, thriving population of 90,000 that we have today. As a result of that growth, we also suffered through an eight-month long road construction project that widened Canton Center Road, making it easier and safer for our patrons to get to the library.

Some other notable news from 2010:

• Our Living Book program debuted, sharing the knowledge and experiences of living, breathing people with interested patrons
• We teamed with area business and Canton Economic Development to develop Check Out Canton, a unique offering of special savings from Canton businesses available for checkout from the library
• Our well-received Summer School for Small Business series kicked off with seven one-hour sessions created just for the needs small business owners and entrepreneurs
• We introduced Text A Librarian, a service that allows patrons to text message librarians for reference question or to request materials
• Storytime sessions were added in the Tamil language
• Our teen librarian, Anna Slaughter, received the Frances H. Pletz award from the Michigan Library Association, recognizing her outstanding service to teens

• We created two items to help patrons understand the library's budget constraints and how we were dealing with them. A budget overview video was created and we also posted a value calculator to help patrons figure out how much replacing CPL services would cost

Partnerships

As we stated, 2010 was a year of partnerships. We made use of many partnerships to expand our services and offerings and offset budget reductions. Here are some of those partners:

• Detroit Area Diaper Bank
• College Night
• Michigan Military Moms Partnership
• H&R Block Recovery Act Program
• Canton Township Economic Development Strategies of Success
• MLK Partnership with artist Byron Reed
• Canton Township Leisure Services Partnerships
• Museum Adventure Pass Program
• Park and Read Program

Statistics