A quartet of recent hires, including administrators, will be leading the Flin Flon Public Library in the new year.
Library administrator Elizabeth Andres, along with assistant administrator Lisa Goodfellow, clerk Lisa Slugoski and Rachel Hyska, will be in charge of the library’s day-to-day operations.
Andres and Goodfellow officially joined the library in December, while Slugoski joined a month earlier. Hyska, who was at one point a summer student at the library, is now the library’s longest-tenured employee, starting full-time work at the library in August.
Andres will fill the position formerly held by Courtney Campbell and was given the keys in earnest earlier this month, finishing her orientation and training. During her training, Andres worked with not one, but two former library administrators – Campbell and Cindy McLean.
“That first day was learning about the building, what to watch out for, things like that. After that, it was all about the accounting and the business end of running the library,” said Andres.
“Cindy came in and she spent up until this past Friday with me. We went through payroll, accounting cycles, did some year-end and month-end stuff. It’s just a matter of sitting down and jumping into doing the job.”
Before joining the library’s staff, Andres worked as an administrator at the Northern Manitoba Mining Academy and with Saskatchewan Polytechnic, working with student affairs, international students and business. It was the experience of working with education-based groups and non-profits that Andres feels made her a perfect fit for the job.
“It’s about running a non-profit that’s smaller, doing programs and putting things in place to make it profitable and a benefit to the community,” she said.
“This is a very good fit.”
“When you think about the library, it’s still really, truly about learning,” Andres added.
Andres intends to boost some aspects of the business – namely, their circulation numbers, social media presence and community outreach.
“Our circulation numbers have dropped a little bit so I’d like to get them back up again. It’s reviewing the type of material we’ve got in, what we’re getting in, what works, what doesn’t work. I’m open to members of the community coming in and telling me what books they may like and see if I could order them,” she said.
Some changes are already visible to library visitors. The library’s new floor, which was installed in late 2019, is ready for the public, while some shelves and storage areas were relocated during the renovation.
More changes are coming soon, said Andres – namely, a possible rebrand of the library including a logo design contest, new social media handles and dealing with some of the library’s stockpile of items in the archive room.
“We’ve already started making some changes. We just got the new flooring in and we got rid of some older equipment. We have too much stuff – it’s all downstairs in the archive room. One of our goals is to grab all that stuff and go through it all, then when we have our discard sale this summer, we’re going to have a garage sale at the same time.”
