We started our move out of the First American Title building on February 20. The library staff worked very hard and very efficiently getting us moved. I’m very impressed with the dedication and perseverance displayed by the entire staff. Nevertheless, by the February 28th we knew that we couldn’t get the library up and running by March 5th, which was our target date. We sent out notices and emails to let folks know that we had to postpone our opening till March 7th.
Kathy Draine and Chris Wilhelmi deserve special recognition for “above and beyond the call of duty” work that they did in organizing the move. It was difficult to plan how to recombine items from two different locations and keep them in order, not to mention how
to keep the interlibrary loan processes from bogging down while we were closed.
Our opening day was incredibly busy. Like moving into a new house, we were still struggling with finding places to put things and then looking for where we put them. The chart attached shows how significant the increase was over the circulation on the same day the past two years. We were above 200 circulations each hour, whereas we are usually under 100 per hour. I take this to be an indication of how our community loves the library.
On March 9th I conducted our first official tour with a group from the Senior Center. They were happy to see the improvements and had many interesting questions.
The Grand Opening on March 10th was an extremely successful event. We had approximately 400 attending! We did run out of food, but we had live music by a harpist, and the Friends of Sandy Library provided door prizes for the drawings that occurred throughout the evening.
On March 23 we had to have the front doors replaced. This was a planned fix. On the 23rd I also met with the new Director of the Library Network office, Kwang Kye. After a year and a half without one, it is such a relief to finally have a manager in the Network office.