By T. Scott Boatright
June’s :Lincoln Parish Library Board of Control meeting felt more like a celebration Thursday with the announcement of a $25,000 donation being made to the LPL in honor of the late Barry and Ruth Johnson.
“I met with Bobby Conville of Conville, (Smith) and Associates and he told me that Barry and Ruth Johnson, who were longtime library patrons, left us a legacy of $25,000,” said Bolom. “The only stipulation on the money was to use the money so that children can use the library.”
Bolom then made a request on how the funds can be used.
“I know it doesn’t sound very exciting for children, but I have a plan on how to use what I would like to see the money go toward that can still tie in to children,” Bolom said. “Everybody knows we’re not going to get any more walls any time soon” but that the funds can be used to purchase moving, sound-dampening walls.
“You can also use tacks on them, so if kids have any art displays, instead of in the children’s room we would have them in the lobby where people could actually see it easier without having to go into the children’s room,” said Bolom.
“The other thing that brought this to mind is that I’ve been approached by a professor at Louisiana Tech who wants to try to get a group together to do tutoring with Louisiana Tech students and professors in their spare time in the library. We don’t easily have spaces for meetings like that, but if we had things like this, we could have little cubbies for people to meet in.”
Bolom said the family of the Johnsons requested a letter of explanation stating what the funds would be used for and that he doesn’t expect them to have any issues with his plan.
Ruth Johnson passed away in May of 2023 while Barry Johnson died last August. A plaque honoring the Johnsons will also be included on one of the movable walls.
The Board of Control passed a motion to use the Johnson’s donation to purchase the movable walls as well as a plaque to honor the Johnsons.
Also approved were tweaks to the fax policies put into place during last month’s meeting because those policies had been written to accommodate an “old fashioned” fax machine.
“This fax service is not a traditional one like the other one was,” Bolom said. “And that’s what I wrote the policy (adopted last month) based on, as if it would be a fax machine sitting there.
“It now goes through the internet and is a completely different monster. After the system director went through the policy and we were doing faxing again, they got some weird messages, they got some weird failures (messages) two days later.”
So the policy was again tweaked to accommodate use of the new faxing system.
“The software monitors what’s going on and will try to successfully send a fax at least nine times,” Bolom said. “And if it doesn’t go through after that it gives an error message that staff will monitor, even though the policy says it’s up to the person using the library to send that fax that’s responsible for that.
“If it does fail and (the patron) wants their money back, we can easily give them the money back. That’s really the main changes — the sending part.”
Bloom said that since bringing back the option of using the library, the response has been strong.
“It’s used all the time,” Bolom said. “It definitely gets used.”
Bolom said programing numbers were way up in June because of the kickoff of the LPL’s summer reading program which had 375 people in attendance.
The LPL Board of Control also spent 45 minutes mid-meeting to discuss undisclosed personnel matters.
