The struggle for resources, the complex planning, the management of staff and leveraging of dollars, the extraordinarily important task of determining what library users require for teaching, learning, research, and public service programs are either not observed or news of them soon forgotten.

Annual reports provide a record of those events. They help establish benchmarks noting where our library has been, where it is at present, and perhaps where it should be in the future. Frequently, a library staff member will read a report from long ago and remark on how things appear just the same as they used to be! They are not. But all the labor and hard thinking and political maneuvering that it took to bring our library into the more useful, effective and efficient state it finds itself in from year to year is only a shadow of those efforts when reflected in reports such as this.

But what a successful year this report records! How could our staff efforts have set marks beyond those of the year before? These singular results, this good news to share (along with a few reminders of miles yet to march), these ongoing accomplishments, all belong to a terrific library staff and friends in many places.