 All right, next up on our lightning round is Mia Boynton, Adventures in Serving Populations of Under 100. She is from the Monhegan Memorial Library, which is in Maine, way up there off the coast of Maine, officially. And she tells us about how she handles a very changing population. All right, so I'm sorry that I don't have a PowerPoint to share with you guys. Hopefully you'll be able to see that. If not, sometime during my presentation afterwards in the archive. Yeah, sorry about that. I'm currently in Guatemala. So anyway, my name is Mia, and I'm the librarian at the Monhegan Memorial Library. So we are a very small library. And today I want to share with you how we run our library and how I came to believe that smaller is better. So where are we? We are located on Monhegan Island in Maine. Monhegan is a mile-long island 12 miles out to sea. And we're famous for our fishing villages, our cliffs, and our miles of preserved forests. The artist such as Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, and most recently, the Wyeth family have all found inspiration. And well, I was going to show you pictures of this, but we just have to take my word for it that we live in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Now, Monhegan has a number. We don't have a bridge. To get here, you have to take an hour-long ferry ride. In the winter, we have a boat only three times a week, and less days a storm, which happens a lot up here in Maine. So we have a very seasonal lifestyle. Our winter population is only about 60 people. And we have a one-room schoolhouse, which apparently has six students and grades capable of eight, one teacher and one ed tech. Most of our community supports themselves by lobster or by working in a tourist industry. So thanks to those beautiful cliffs and art, in the summer, our population can grow up to 600 with cottagers, hotel guests, daytrippers, and the workers who come to take care of them. Now, there's been a library on the island since 1930. It was made as a memorial to two children who drowned. Now, today, we operate with a volunteer board of directors, myself, and two-part time staff. Though we serve a public function, we are technically a private library. We receive no tax dollars. So our summer is usually focused on fundraising with raffles and cookouts. Our library prides itself on being old-fashioned. But we do have desktop computers. We don't have Wi-Fi. And I think we might be the only library in the country that still doesn't. So we still use a physical CAD catalog and Patron sign up our books by writing their names. Now, when people come here, they're surprised to find a library. Well, you have a library all the way out here. I don't know if people really use the library. Now, these are some of the questions that I get asked the most, aside from when people are asking me where the public lesbians are, which happens a lot too. So what is it like to have a library on an island? Well, there are a few challenges, and I think some of these may be familiar to my fellow small librarians. Now, I should mention that of the other unbridged islands in Maine, some don't have libraries at all. So, slow mail service. It takes a long time for things to get here because in the winter, we don't have mail every day, and sometimes we can be up to a week without mail. And because we're not insured, we can't just run out to our local staples or hardware store or what have you to get things. We really depend on the mail. Now, we also have a small staff. And by that, I mean that I run the library with occasional help. We don't have separate librarians for reference or interlibrary loan or children's department or technology, et cetera. So being a librarian is really an all-encompassing job. So since everything is brought in by boat, things are also much more expensive on the island. To give you an idea, our gas and electricity are three times the cost of what it is on the mainland. And like I said, we're a private library so we don't get tax dollars and we must fundraise for most of our expenses. Now, you combine that with the fact that we have a limited busy season in which to do so. Our season is roughly Memorial Day through Columbus Day. Now, I grew up in Heaton. And one of my strongest memories are an afternoon spent at the library, booked with my best friends, which was important since they were only for other kids. Now, I didn't have an MLS degree, but I came back to the island after college and I started to work at the library. Now, going home again, I found that living on the Heaton is a lot different from how it was when I was a kid. Our population is shrinking. Today it's hard for young people to find housing and the cost of living is quite expensive, as I've said. So the Heaton feels small when you're in your 20s. But I realized that I had the library at my disposal to solve these problems. Now, as part of the Non-State Library Consortium, every year we fill out an annual report and it's frustrating because the criteria for libraries doesn't really fit our situation, which I think maybe many of you can sympathize with. So our vital statistics are really sad compared to other libraries. I'd be writing things like daily visits, 20 to 30 adult programs, one question mark. So I decided we really needed to step it up and get people in the doors. So I started by making some programs and one of these was the Writers Group in which we meet once a week to write on a prompt. And sometimes I had two people, sometimes I had 11 people, sometimes I had no people and I would just write by myself. Now last summer was our second year and we were thriving with a core group of four island workers. The small size of this group meant that we became comfortable with each other and pretty quickly everyone was sharing their writing. And it was really exciting to see everyone's confidence build and the beautiful work that they produced. We also do a story hour with the school and which I read a book to them and we do a related art project. I'm able to coordinate with the teacher to make the story relevant to what the students are already learning. And with our class size so small, I can really get to know each person's reading interests and all the kids love to read. Now when you consider that they have only each other and one to two teachers every day for their entire childhood, story time is extra important because it offers them a chance to interact with other adults. Right now, since I'm away, another woman is doing story hour so the kids are getting to know a new person and building new connections which is so enriching for them. Now I've always wanted to host a well-known author at the library. Of course, libraries invite authors all the time but it's different for us because an event I'm going to require is a boat ride and stay overnight. So we decided to apply for a grant and see what happened. And we were only the moon to book Richard Blanco who was the poet for Black Obama's inauguration in 2013. He came to the island this past July and as you can imagine, it was an amazing experience. So how do we pull this together? One word, volunteers. As I mentioned before, our board of directors is made up of entirely volunteers and when you are planning an event in a small town, you find that people are really willing to help out from making cookies, setting up tents, cooking supplies and running electricity cables. And we also found out that when you have something unique to offer, like the chance to visit one of the only year around island communities, you're more popular than you might think. So in our case, having Richard Blanco and Mahegan was a gift for us and it was very special for him as well. Now, I should say that not all my attempts are a success. One of our biggest challenges is the winter. After the tourist leave, we unlock the library doors and patrons check out books using the honor system instead of having hours. And we do this because it's very expensive to heat the building in the winter. This year, I decided to hold hours in November and December but people still didn't really come in. With the isolation of being on an island in the winter, the reality is that today, many people, including myself, choose to come and go during the off season. This can make stress-willing events and having programs difficult. So I'm still working on how to make the library a happening place all year around. It's no surprise that the internet has been a great tool. Now, I was going to show you a slide of our Facebook page on our website. You can see our website right here. It's Mahegan Library. We're also on Facebook under Mahegan Memorial Library if you want to give us a follow and see what we're up to. So today, everyone is interacting online and when we are in old-fashioned library, it's obvious that embracing technology is vital for rural communities. And on Mahegan, it really is a lifeline for us to the outside world. So in conclusion, I hope you can see why, despite the challenges, having a library on an island is so important. Though I began by thinking about ways to increase our numbers, eventually I went back to the lesson of living in a small town. We're so much greater than our numbers. If one person uses a library, there is a success because in a community like this one, each person truly does count. We may not have 100 or even 10 people in a program, but if an event leads one person to a favorite book or to make a piece of art or to tell their own story, then it matters. Now, when you hear, you'll never be a big place and that's okay. In my case, this job has been a journey that's led me as an adult to become involved in my community. And that's a challenge that makes a difference in my life here. And I have a small library to thank for that. So thank you. And once again, I apologize that you can't see the slideshow, but hopefully you'll be able to see that again in the archives. Yes, thank you, Mia. Yes, we will, yeah, email me the slides and we'll post them up afterwards. You'll be able to see. And I did, we did look at them when we were doing our test. Gorgeous pictures of this island, yes. Definitely think it would be good to visit in the summer. Yeah, definitely. Not right now, of course. If you have any questions, go ahead and type into the questions section there. Someone's already looked at your Facebook page. It says, they loved your Halloween decorations that you did something of your later Facebook page for Halloween. Oh yeah, we decided to make a haunted house for Halloween. That was one of my end of the season activities and the kids got to run around and play in the library. It was fun. And oh, somebody has actually visited your library. They said they've taken a vacation. Oh really? And spent time in the library. Explore the Rockwell Kent collection. And oh, wildflowers. They mentioned the wildflowers as well. Oh, nice, that's awesome. So it sounds like during the winter season, the summer, it's like one of your normal events in libraries, things going on. I think you said your population goes up to potentially 600? Yeah, yeah. So a big leap. The island sinks a little bit. It seems like what you're kind of running is almost trying to get things going when it's not the season. Two different libraries. Yeah, yeah, it does feel like that at times, for sure. Because of the different populations there. All right. Oh, the person who said they said he was there in summer 2009, so quite a while ago. Oh cool, yeah, that would be before I was the librarian, but I'm glad to be a visitor. All right, well, thank you very much Mia. We'll definitely look forward to the pictures. It sounds like you have one of the most more unique libraries that I've had on the, we've had on the conference before. Hopefully we'll get more people coming to visit and check it out. All right. Yeah, well, I so hope so. Thank you so much. Thank you. And thank you for coming in from so far away. We really appreciate it. Oh yeah, it's a pleasure. All right, on to our next lightning round is Sherry. Sherry, you're there, I've unmuted you. Yes, I'm here, can you hear me? I can hear you, all right. I'm gonna make you a presenter, so you can get your presentation up on the screen. You should see that coming up. Okay, can you see that? Waiting for it to come through. Sometimes it's late. No, we're not seeing your screen yet. Did you do the show your screen from the GoToWebinar?