Good Afternoon,

Last Saturday night I was at a baseball game with one of my brothers in law. There is nothing remarkable in that, as he and I have attended an average of one Saturday night baseball game per month for as long as we have been brothers in law, which is a long time now. As we sat freezing and eating our tasty albeit overpriced hot dogs in the largely empty stadium, a foul ball was hit very hard, very close to our vicinity. Too close. Fortunately, the baseball crashed into the empty row of seats directly in front of us. So all I had to do was walk to that empty row of seats, and pick up the ball. I wanted to give the ball to a little kid. But there were no little kids nearby, and my brother in law is older than I am. So I kept the ball, the first souvenir in all the many games we have attended together.

While contemplating the ball, and our good fortune that neither of us were struck in the head by it, and that neither of us had choked on our expensive hot dogs, I started thinking about Kevin Costner. Yes, that movie. The fact that some of the defense played on the diamond that night looked as if the infielders were Shoeless probably was a contributing factor in my thought processes, too.

As many of you are aware, one year ago TLN migrated to a new integrated library system. For TLN staff this meant a great deal of training, many phone call consultations, data conversion, meetings and the like. All of this started well in advance of the May 29, 2018 go live with the new ils. So we had no time to devote to the recruitment of new partner destinations for the Michigan Activity Pass program last year. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, as we have a lot of really great partner destinations already. But to my way of thinking, it is nice to give patrons something new, and libraries something new to promote to patrons.

Fast forward one year, and we are still learning new things about our ils. But with the steepest part of the learning curve mostly behind us, we did have some time to turn to MAP recruitment again. Thus to the subject of this message: If you promote it, they will come, to the tune of, as I am typing these lines, a total of 19 brand new partner destinations for the Michigan Activity Pass program for this year! In addition, we have a verbal commitment from a well-known Detroit metro area destination to join MAP at the end of summer. And I expect additional MAP partner destinations to get on board prior to the renewal of the program on May 24, 2019.

Without further adieu, here in no particular order are our 19 confirmed new MAP partner destinations!

Finally, the "If you promote it, they will come" theme is of course in play for MAP at the local library level. The public neither knows, nor cares, what a library cooperative is, or does. But time and again public libraries are given high marks as being one of the most, if not the most, trusted and respected institutions in local communities. As that is the case we hope libraries will work to promote MAP by including a link to the site on their homepage  http://www.plymouthrockets.com/michiganactivitypass/ by including references to the MAP Facebook page, which now has in excess of 7,000 likes https://www.facebook.com/MIActivityPass/  by printing the bookmarks, brochures and posters that are available at the MAP promotional page  https://tln.lib.mi.us/map/ by telling your local media outlets about MAP, and by spreading the word about the benefits of the Michigan Activity Pass to potential partner destinations in your community.

Let's work together to make this, the 12th season of MAP, 2019-2020, a HOME RUN!

Thank you for your support and promotion of the Michigan Activity Pass program.

Sincerely,

Jim F.

Jim Flury
Technical Services Manager
The Library Network
41365 Vincenti Court
Novi, MI 48375
248-536-3100, ext 133
Fax 248-536-3098
jflury@tln.lib.mi.us