This fiscal year concludes on June 30, 2013, and it has been a whirlwind of change and transitions in Central MN Libraries Exchange (CMLE)!  It’s good to look back over the year, while also looking forward to next year and exciting new possibilities! I’ve included a few highlights as a warm up to writing year-end reports soon:

• Beginning last July, CMLE vowed to Refocus, Retool, and Evolve at the conclusion of its strategic planning process. The Governing Board helped us make some hard decisions. The most significant one was the sunsetting of our physical interlibrary loan service after a 10 year downward spiral in usage. Costs for providing the service have not decreased, so the cost/benefit analysis spoke loudly to all involved. We continue to assist users of that service in finding alternate ways to order interlibrary loans.
• The Board got even more excited about the results of an opportunity analysis for CMLE, some of which you experienced this year.
• Beginning in September, we replaced our quarterly newsletter and began to use our  weekly communication streams including our Weekly Review email messages, our blog posts, Facebook and Twitter. The first month we made this change, we went from 62 hits on our blog to 584! News on the street was that our users loved this change and we loved the new freedom and immediacy that a blogging platform provided to us. By January, we more than doubled our September blog hits at 1,506!
• We offered two popular e-book events in the fall; one for academics, one for K-12 media personnel. We also continued our Bridging Information Literacy Across Libraries initiative work, including a college student survey to 400 students, and beginning development of a video.
• Kate Bessey left CMLE in January to return to her librarian role at Rasmussen College.
• Michelle Kiley began as our invaluable new Information Specialist upon Kate’s departure.
• I took a six week medical leave of absence to replace a very worn out hip in mid-February. Ouch, but much better now!
• Upon my return we initiated seven Quick Question Polls (QQP’s) on various topics to gather data to help us refocus our programming in FY14.
• In early June, I will return to the orthopedic workshop for a new knee. I know, it’s been a tough year!  Michelle proved her ability to hold down the fort during my first leave, and will valiantly do the same this summer.

Our summer CMLE to-do list is quite different from our weekly work during the academic year. Summer is an important time for administrative work including year-end reports, discount agreements, internal system updates, program planning, and  our commitments to library conference planning too. So, it might seem a  bit sad, but our Weekly Review and associated blog posts will be on a short hiatus during the summer months, but we will be back in the Fall! We will continue to wrap our arms around the glut of library news and opportunity, distill it down to an easy to digest format, and write it up again for you starting in September. We remain committed to offering tips, shortcuts and application ideas too. According to one of our QQP’s, many of you will be gearing down a bit in your professional  summer reading too, so we hope this little blip in service gives everyone a refreshing “breather”. Watch your email in the event that something significant happens this summer that we feel a need to share immediately. Otherwise, enjoy quiet moments of summer serenity curled up with a good book under a big shady tree. Summer is a great time to renew and refresh. See you online in the Fall!

Didn’t have time to read any of our blog posts this year? Go to http://cmleinfofeed.wordpress.com/ and meander through this year’s posts!