I made the mistake of blinking and now the semester is over; actually the entire year is hours away from being over! It was definitely a semester of survival. We hired three new students at the beginning of the year to try and get all of our locations covered. Training and data collection became two of our top priorities.

We spent much of the time trying to perfect the new printing processes. The 3D printing procedure has changed about twenty times even though we had put a lot of forethought into creating it. The biggest issue with the printing is time and educating our patrons on the uses of it. Our most popular items continue to be items like the articulated fish and octopus. Everyone is amazed that the printer "spits" them out just like they are. There have been orders for other objects though including turtles, a mini-piano, a DIY fishing lure, and a marble racer.

The poster printer has turned out to be one of the more popular items but takes a lot of training for both our staff and for the patrons. Increasing the size of a document or photo to print can be pretty tricky. We are experimenting (often with patrons) and learning all of the ends and out. We now offer four paper options (glossy and satin photo, cardstock/presention paper, and regular thin poster paper) to our patrons. We held a workshop for our staff showing them how to use Adobe Lightroom to print incredible photos. Even though it was during a busy time of year, only three staff members were unable to attend.

Our developers are in the final stages of releasing three new programs for our department in the library: passwords (a tool for sharing passwords with department staff), checklist (a tool for providing checklists for training and office responsibilities), and staff access (a place for staff members to share links that can be personalized). We are very excited for the final releases of these products.

During the semester, we lost two valued student assistants and then two more graduated at the end of the semester. Next semester one of our students will travel abroad and two more will be student teaching in the spring which means they can only work ten hours a week. Since we will be losing three developers in May, we decided that we needed to hire more developers to learn the ropes. We hired two more developers and a third student that could possibly step into a developer's role and a fourth with other roles in mind (3D printing and statistics).

I look forward to the new year - excited to get to know this relatively new student staff that we have gained. We will continue to perfect the processes for our two new printers and work on training all of our students on these new processes. Developing transitions will be a top priority and of course, eresource statistics will hit full force as we try to get the data collected and organized for all the spring reports that will come due all too quickly!