[Publib] ? Saturdays before or after a holiday in small, rural, poor counties

[Paul Ericsson]

Good morning Phalbe --

I understand the context of your question, and certainly for my 
personal life I'd love to get some long weekends every now and then.

For comparison - We are a medium sized public library - 60,000 items 
in the collection and annual circ around 200,000.  We serve a small 
city and a large surrounding rural area.

But the reality of our schedule is that we do not stretch weekends 
when a holiday is on a Friday.  Last year the 4th was on Friday and 
we were open Saturday July 5.  It was a slower than usual summer 
Saturday on circulation, but certainly plenty of activity.

As a Manager, I see we benefit enormously from being open on slower 
days.  At our branch, none of the staff get hardly any off-desk time 
-- if we are lucky maybe 1 or 2 hours per week.  But we all have 
enormous amounts of work to do besides directly serving patrons at 
the desk - selecting books and materials ; planning programs ; 
preparing reports ; planning projects.  If we did not get some of 
these slow days to get work done while we are stationed at a public 
desk, we'd all have larger backlogs of non-public-desk work than we do now.

So, for the personal lives of staff - if we want a long holiday 
weekend - we take a vacation day.  We work well enough as a team so 
that we take turns on the holiday weekends and the subs are generally 
happy to get any extra hours they can work.  For the schedule I 
always have at least one full time or senior p/t staff on every 
shift. The other 2 or 3 people can be subs (we need 3 staff per shift 
to keep the building open).

Paul

Paul Ericsson
Branch Manager, Bemidji (MN) Public Library
218-751-3963
ericssonp at krls.org


At 07:54 AM 6/3/2009, Henriksen, Phalbe wrote:
>Good morning, all. (And greetings to those for whom it's not morning.)
>
>Our county manager is suddenly questioning why we're closed on 
>Saturdays after a Friday holiday or before a Monday holiday. We're a 
>small, rural, poor county, with a small percentage of high school 
>students continuing on to higher education. I'm new here, but it's 
>been my experience in other places that those Saturdays would not 
>have enough door count to justify being open.
>
>I'd like to hear from other like libraries if you *are* open on 
>those Saturdays.
>
>Thanks.
>
>Phalbe Henriksen
>Director
>Alexander County Library
>Taylorsville, NC
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