End of the Year Tasks

Photo by Dafne Cholet

Yesterday was my last day of work in 2015 and for the past couple of weeks, with schools out (no booktalks) and our winter programming break on, I've been concentrating on some end-of-year tasks that will have me in good shape when I return to work in 2016.

• I updated my yearly meeting and program planning doc for 2016. I changed the dates, penciled in meeting agenda items, added dates for submitting program publicity to marketing and special tasks like booking summer performers and ordering prize books for Summer Reading Club. This way, as our department meeting approaches each month, I have a starting point to put together our agenda and I can make sure we have plenty of time to brainstorm program ideas, etc. 
• I looked through our brainstormed list of book display ideas and penciled in twice-monthly display themes and started making the display signs. I think this is a task I may delegate to our new part-time person, so I only made the signs through March. While I love putting up book displays and I've found that we get the best results when we change them every two weeks instead of once a month, it was difficult for me to come up with display ideas on the spot. Planning them out and penciling in ideas helps, and of course we can always change it up if we have great ideas later in the year. 
• We decided our monthly Reading Wildly topics at our last meeting and, together with one of my teen librarians, I have been finding and saving articles for us to read and discuss. 
• As I completed annual evaluations with each of my employees, I made sure to print out a list of their goals so we can touch base throughout the year. 
• I started working on compiling our 2015 statistics for the annual report we submit to the State. Of course, we were still doing programs yesterday so I don't have all the numbers yet, but I hope it'll now be easy work for next week since the bulk of the adding-up is done. (This year, I'm going to compile the stats monthly to share with stakeholders and to make it easier as we're putting together the annual reports next year!)

Unrelated, but still exciting: I finished our 2015 weeding this week, having discovered the magic of teen volunteers pulling weeding candidates. We're all working so many more desk hours now that we have two desks to cover that weeding has been a particular challenge for me. I'm hoping to spend more time in the stacks since we're getting additional part-time help this year. 

What end-of-year tasks do you find helpful?