Two long time employees announced their retirement in February.

Ruth Sobota, library assistant since 1995, and Kathy Draine, Reference Librarian since 1997 will both retire. Kathy on April 30, Ruth on June 30. Both of these women have been valuable members of our team. We will miss them very much!

I offered the job of Reference Librarian to Maureen Skinner, a part-time employee since July 2011. “Mo” has proven herself to be a great asset to the library. She is in library school, slated to receive her MLIS in June 2014. Kathy is taking great advantage of her remaining time to train Mo on the specifics of reference work here at the Sandy and Hoodland Libraries. We’ll be advertising for a bi-lingual clerk to replace Ruth’s hours.

Susie Jenkins, Maureen Skinner and Susan Winsinger attended special training on Overdrive – Library2Go which will be upgraded in March. The training was offered by staff at West Linn Public Library. Overdrive is the vendor that we use for Library2Go, our statewide consortium collection of digital materials such as audiobooks and e-books.  The demand for digital materials is rising, and we are hopeful that the upgrade will make this source more user friendly.

With the increase in the use of digital materials, the Clackamas County  libraries have agreed to create an “Advantage program”, a separate collection of digital materials that will be available to Clackamas County residents only. This new collection will help to decrease the long wait times for some digital material.