 Hi, I'm Sally Snyder, and I'm standing in for Krista today and we are I'm gonna go ahead and get started on our Encompass live and with me is Laura England Bigs from oh It's not three months. It's keen Memorial Library. That's right. Oh gosh that was hard in full of it's up there on the screen Well, that makes it easier one thing we can do for you to make things better. It's just Oh Very good, because now we have things running Of course you probably want to see this other side and then we have People muted from here But if you want to ask a question using your microphone Just type into the question box and I'm going to be monitoring that so I'll see that you want to ask a question And I'll tell Laura we have a question and I'll unmute you for that and then we will Let you have your question and discussion Otherwise, you can just type questions into the question box and add it appropriate times during the presentation If you don't mind being absolutely all interrupt and say we have a question about what you just said So it'll be more timely, but I'm going to go ahead and turn things over to Laura because she knows what she's talking about Well, thank you Sally I am Laura England Biggs. I'm with Keen Memorial Library, which is not in Keen, but in Fremont, Nebraska It's about 35 miles north and west of Omaha Can everyone hear me okay? If not, I don't know how you'll let me know Well, they could and let's see if we Click on that orange arrow to bring things back out And that side there up a little bit. There you go Okay, and there's a place for people to raise their hands. I thought there should be a place. Yeah, where is that? Well, we'll just keep going. Okay. The microphone is pretty cool. Here we go. I'll carry you nicely some. Oh wonder if I can Type that in there. So yeah, thank you for letting us know Okay, we'll put that away and We'll bring that back up perfect So I'm talking about picture book City, which I've presented before It's how I used my ILS or integrated library system to reorganize our picture books by subjects There's some technical stuff and there's a lot of not technical stuff So we'll get into the meat of it I mentioned that we are a medium-sized public library in Fremont, Nebraska Our service population is around twenty six thousand seven hundred Our collection size when we started all of this Was about a hundred and six thousand items with ten thousand picture books and we use Cersei Dynex horizon for our ILS we have since Gosh, I think the 90s before I worked at the library my background I came from a community college library where I was An administrative assistant. I started out as the assistant director Became the head of technical services and the horizon sys admin all in August of 2005 Graduated with my MLS from University of Missouri at Columbia in December 2006 I've been the interim director several times people always ask. Why don't you just apply for it? The answer is I don't want it. I enjoy my job Especially now that it involves being the youth services librarian as well as all of those other things That is a lot, but it's a lot of fun So before picture book city, this is what our children's section looks like all of our picture books were arranged by the author's last name You had to wander the aisles we have Five sets of bookshelves that are two shelves high Then it graduates to four shelves high and then back to two shelves high And it wiggles around and it was really kind of difficult to explain where things were We had to do a lot of walking people to where the esses were especially after we shifted in January of 2016 we had what I call the hurricane director She blew in January 4th and there was a Lot of storm a lot of eye of the hurricane calm and then a lot of storm and she left on February 4th so While she was there. She had an idea for a favorites wall. She had seen in another library We had three stipulations. We had to do it in six months with no service disruption and Get it right That gives you an idea of what the hurricane was like So I hit the internet because I had never thought about doing anything like this. It was a new concept to me During that hurricane we discovered picture book city Came from a very trusted resource a lot of you out there in youth services land probably no Storytime Katie she has her flannel Friday She has storybook themes or storytime themes that she's put up on the internet She had already done picture book city. She's in a an urban library in Illinois She's never named her library online, so I can't tell you where she's from But the URL is on there and I will share the slides with the commission so that they can post them for everyone Great It's it's really what I used to design the system. We're using We had to go through a lot of steps to create our picture book city first. We had to define what categories we were going to use Once we decided those we needed a labeling system How were we going to communicate the sections to people? So then I created a list of books in my item reporting function in Horizon exported that to excel and went through it and Assigned categories to the books that I knew off the top of my head curious George goes in favorites Pete the cat goes in favorites Thomas the tank engine goes in things that go things like that where I knew specifically what I wanted to put things in Then we pulled out those books. I would Filter the report by each section pull the books in those smaller sections apply the labels Which was a time consuming process? I think it took us almost 18 months to label everything We didn't do it consistently every day, which is probably something I would change Then we resheld everything by author while we waited to finish and finally we did a massive reorganization of pull everything off the shelf Change the collection codes put it back on the shelf in its smaller sections So we're going to go through a little bit more detail on those Katie had ten neighborhoods in her picture book city and as you can see from the lists here Concept neighborhood had several streets where she identified smaller sections within the concept also growing up and nature stories We chose a different route. We did not go as far as making streets part of the reason for that was I Didn't have enough colors on my labels Because we chose to do Both words and colors to designate our 13 neighborhoods. We have animals bedtime concepts dinosaurs favorite feelings Issues which is kind of a catch-all for things about growing up But it was shorter to put on a label nature our world Rhymes which also includes songs, but that didn't fit on the label sparkly which covers princesses pirates and unicorns Stories is the catch-all for where the heck does this go and things that go We ended up using as I said words and colors the chart on the left is What's posted around our library and in the back room to help the shelvers remember what order things go in We use the sp1 spine labels for most healthy that print 40 to a sheet on a laser printer and Just do one letter per line for eight characters For each of the word labels We've discovered that size 10 bold works best 12 bold on the smaller shorter words is even better just for easier readability And we worked with Demco for the color labels They had 13 available in the size we use which is a three-quarter by one inch color coding label and I'd be happy to share Specific part numbers with anyone who needs them. I didn't bring them with me There are two greens on there. You'll notice concepts and our world They're pretty close in color So I separated them by quite a bit in the physical plant when we reshelf But we had to do that to get 13 categories. I could not figure out how to condense it into 12 So then we created the list in item report all of our picture books were in what we called J. Oh for oversized So we just pulled up J. Oh books displayed barcode title author and I think that's all we used to create the list because those were the only things I needed For people to be able to pull the books And this is an example of what the spreadsheet looked like I guess I did use the item status, but it wasn't terribly helpful. Oh and call number. Yes Call number is good So on the very far right, I assigned categories using the 13 that we've already talked about and Did the filtering to print out lists for people That process we used volunteers to pull and label I'll talk a little bit about why that was a bad idea later Pulling is not a big problem labeling was a problem Then we applied all the labels our choice was to put the color label just above the call number and The word label just above the color so that it says animals black label J. Oh Brett J for any Jan Brett animal books Most of the time they stayed pretty even across the books Depending on the placement of the call number label It's a little iffy, but for the most part you can follow it all across The books then we reshells the books Which everybody said why are we doing it this way? Why aren't we putting them where they belong? well Because we haven't finished Pulling everything in that section. It's really hard to say to people well this one's over here But that one's over there So we just went with leaving everything where it started our labeling was done We started this all in 2016 We were done November 18th of 2018 So we closed on Sunday So that we could shift picture book city we had Sonia myself Elisa Dan Sarah and Dorlyssa So I think that's six Six or seven of us that worked together Moving shifting putting things in the computer Keeping things in order was the biggest challenge that day for everybody But it also allowed us to do some shelf reading which was nice So they started pulling the animal books Keeping them in order gave the carts to Dorlyssa and myself we scanned them all into the computer One card at a time We have an item group editor that we can use in Horizon So we weren't having to do book by book by book that would be crazy But my director thought that's what we were doing So she wondered if we'd really finish in eight hours Then we would give the cart back so they could start placing the books on the shelf in that order the longest part was the pulling off the shelves in order on carts Then we ran out of carts and places to store things that we were waiting to pull We didn't use a lot of cars We used every cart we had plus some stationary shelving that was movable and Then we just prayed That we wouldn't need more We did not finish on Sunday. We actually needed four hours on Monday so whenever your budgeting time I always advise add 50% Because I Estimated based on how far we had gotten that it would take us four hours. It took three hours and 45 minutes That was a good estimate This is what I was talking about before I forgot I had this slide in there we scanned everything in We have the ability to make groups so we could do one shelf at a time Edit everything at once the collection code in our system has a description line which allowed us to say animal picture books or Bedtime picture books so that that's how it shows up in the pack in the Online catalog so people know where to go on the shelves We ended up having to double check every picture book that was returned for the next two months Because there were a large number of picture books checked out. They're kind of our bread and butter So we had to put them all on a wooden cart Check them to make sure they had gotten moved and if they didn't move them It was two two and a half months before we said okay the wooden cart can go away That got us through the majority of the circulation cycle There were 29 books That were in long-lost Status, I think 27 of those eventually came back so I count that as pretty lucky. That's great So drum roll, please We are pleased to show you animals Our collection code is joe a We ended up with 13 collection codes now well 14 We kept the the standard joe for ordering some my vendors don't have to do all the extra work And we do the picture book city labeling in-house It's our largest collection Animals is with at least 2,800 books we've added to some to it since then But you can see kind of what I'm talking about where you have the colors going along in a semi Ordinary regular line Then comes bedtime Which is a lovely blue shade We just Had to move some books into bedtime that I discovered we're in the wrong section that was an interesting challenge I'll explain that in a few more slides. I was going to ask you that if you made decisions to move things Yes, that'll be part of the tips and tricks perfect. Thanks Concepts we have about 450 I need to add some there I'm discovering because some of these are falling apart they get so much use So that was a good thing We tried not to pay attention to condition as we put things into picture book city I said, you know, we did that when we were inventorying people started paying attention to the condition of the books and That's not the purpose. Just get it where it needs to go. We'll catch it later when we shelf read Dinosaurs 116 I thought I had more than that as popular as dinosaurs are so I'm going to be doing some looking for that section I know I've added at least 10 since this picture was taken Favorites your mileage may vary your collection may vary because of what your patrons considered their favorite We have as you can see where's Waldo Pinkalicious skippy John Jones He has to be in there because he's missed Laura's favorite Pete the cat curious George, I can't remember who else is in there And I quite honestly have to look up from time to time to remember Did I put them in favorites or are they an animal and there may be a time when we rotate somebody out? If they don't circulate well there. I don't know yet. I went too far Feelings I discovered I need more books on feelings to help kids deal with those only a hundred and seven is not enough So I've really been looking for books about that and really looking more critically at where did I put that? issues covers things like adoption that wedding going to school Bullying and I've also put a lot of my lgbt qia in here because a lot of kids may be questioning and I didn't think it belonged in regular stories. I thought it was more of a life issue that people might need a little assistance with So a lot of things they're trying to work through go in this section I love this section because I love to take parents there to say you want to work with your kid on Bed wedding I've got a book about that Great and Exactly, it's no longer one in the middle of ten thousand books. It's in the middle of five hundred and I can find it a lot faster Nature includes my science my planets Anything about the seasons It seems kind of to go hand in hand It's a little confusing to people that science goes under nature, but I think it makes sense. We have a question. Oh She was too good. Oh, is this for fiction only? What about nonfiction is a question at this time? It is fiction only at some point I do intend to go back to my nonfiction books and pull out some of the easier nonfiction that would possibly double as a picture book level reading and Incorporated into this I don't Intend to storybook or picture book city The whole nonfiction because I I I'm old school. I think that's what Dewey does for us But yes, I do want to put some of the lower level nonfiction into this to expose kids to that level of book So something like Clayton Anderson's a is for astronauts that has the alphabet story in it in bigger type But also in smaller type has some nonfiction information on each page Could fit in in the picture book city because of the Design of the book and also you can just read the story and you can read more of the nonfiction sections. Absolutely Absolutely a lot of the DK readers Yeah, are good for It's nonfiction, but it can cross over into this collection now that it's been broken into sections We could put it in the nature if it's the book on Dolphins say Well, dolphins would go in animals. Oh true. Anyway, I'd have to think long and hard about that one Our world I love this section. This section is also An example of some bad practice for us this section covers biographies anything geographical and anything historical You can see in about the middle of the picture the colored labels show up on top of the words That's where I was talking about having volunteers do the labeling wasn't necessarily a good idea We did not monitor them as well as we should have in the labeling process and They got away from us and did not follow directions I have a very particular way. I want the label oriented. They put it the one inch side going tall vertical I like it the one inch going horizontal So that it saves more of my spine and I don't cover as much of the title So note to self Monitor volunteers closer Rhymes and songs is myth fairy tales and things like the wheels on the bus Because that's more of a song than anything and I don't consider it a thing that goes I consider it a song for the wheels on the bus. I don't know why I just do But a lot of ASAPs fable The retelling of the three little pigs I just relabeled six different varieties of the three little pig The three horde pigs the three habalinas The three little alligators all of these are retellings of the story and got put in the wrong sections And then there's my sparkly the pirates are offended by the light pink label But the princesses and the uniforms love it Well, they out voted the pirates again. That's right And I have fewer pirate books than I thought I did So or then there's the princess and the pirate Sometimes you have to make a decision Aliens go in stories Monsters go in animals When it's dinosaurs and aliens Does it go in stories for aliens or in dinosaurs for aliens love dino pants? Interesting call we went with the dinosaurs because the dinosaur was on the cover good call stories Second largest collection surprisingly, it's not the largest But it's where everything else goes and I listen to my staff I listen to my patrons if they come up to me and say I don't know why you put this here It belongs in just it up. I will listen to them and I will say, you know what you're right I probably should have put it there. I wasn't familiar with the books. I didn't read it very well And it's white so it's a little hard to tell in the picture, but it's stories white label call lumber And then there's my last things that go Some of Thomas the tank engines snuck into favorites some of them are here We're trying our best to move them into the things that go because that's where my kiddos go when they want their trains But anything planes trains automobiles boats Anything you can drive horse and buggy see how I'm causing your trouble. Oh, that's a Yeah, I would have to think long and hard on that one. It could be animals because of the horse Just trying to cause trouble you are I pointed these out before it's a bigger shot of the laminated signs I had to use the actual stickers to create them because of some CMYK RGB conflict That's designer speak for the color resolution between the screen and the printer You can't create the exact color you want unless you just use the label So I sat there making 13 of these and then we laminated them so they wouldn't get destroyed They're used in our third-grade tours So that's miss Sonia can say okay What if you wanted a book on and she holds it up and asks from what color it would be? It's wonderful. So tips and tricks Weed weed weed before you begin and Then clean what you keep because we often found that the covers were disgusting Dear and you don't like to apply labels over schmutz Because you're keeping the schmutz forever It's very important to have one person decide what goes where the Decision-making process is sometimes a Little discombobulated up here, but most of the time I remembered why I was putting it where I wanted I Would have one person do the training on the labeling and watch them closely Make them show you before you turn them loose that they know what they're doing Make sure you have that final plan for the shifting and understand that you will never have enough carts. I Don't think anybody will own enough carts because you never need to move your entire collection at once until you do something like this Definitely close to the public and Allow that 50% more time We worked for eight hours. We were supposed to take an hour long lunch We took a half hour and everybody looked at each other and said let's get back to it We had two people scanning four people shifting and then somebody else came in and relieved somebody It's hard work shifting. I really I Applaud those folks who did that work. That was Elisa and Sonia and Dan and Sarah and one other person who I can't remember now Might have been Susan those folks Did the hardest work ever? Up and down and on their knees Their hands were sore their shoulders were sore, but they didn't complain They just kept going Mark edit is your friend if you're not a cataloger. You've never heard of it It's a wonderful piece of freeware created by Terry Reese. It helps you edit the local call number in all of your mark records One thing to do is make sure you have a bib number or a match point That's consistent among your records because if you don't Once you make the edit to the call number to insert The wording if you go that route so that instead of J. Oh subfield B Brett J It's J. Oh animals subfield B Brett J. Sorry for the catalogs B If you finish all of your inserting which you can do in regular expressions, they tell me I did it the hard way When you re-import those mark records without a match point it creates a duplicate record Which has no items attached over here and you have to go through by hand Title by title through all of your collection to merge all of those bids This is a good thing to know ahead of time It's a very good thing to know ahead of time because I literally touched all 9,800 and whatever records we had and Darlisa helped me with about three 400 but I did most of them myself because it was just busy work while I was on the desk and I could be interrupted and We just finished that We started it in December of 2018 and finished it last week So that's a lot of work We used our item group editor function to update the call numbers in the item record and As I said we used it for the collection code We maintain that generic collection code for all of our EDI ordering We label the product when it comes into the library We don't make the vendors do that labeling for us. It would be too much to ask them to keep those labels in stock and Do that much work Plus when I order I don't always know where I'm going to put it. Well, you haven't read the book I haven't read it yet exactly And check your statistical Setup we discovered too late that all of our picture books went into a generic J fiction collection For Statistical purposes, so I can't tell you whether or not moving the picture book city has made any difference in my circulation That's too bad I can look at my J fix statistics and I can tell you they did go up, but I can't attribute it to anything in particular We have since moved everything to its own picture books collection For statistical record keeping so I can tell you from November 18 To November 19, I'll be able to tell you if there's an increase but Unfortunately that historical statistics is just lost to me That's a shame it is So well speaking of that and since it says questions Do you have some parents and children making comments about the new arrangement? We do Anecdotally people have been giving us very positive feedback. They like not having to sort through all the shelves to find what they want the The mothers who are home school and just want books on nature and science Really like knowing I go to purple And I can browse it even if I don't want to go to the catalog The kids love going straight to things that go in that back corner Overall the reaction has been very positive. I would go right for animals every time. Yeah, I My girl kid if I had more colors, I would break animals down into dogs and cats and horses and rabbits But I didn't have any more colors Limited by colors. Yes So if you have questions for Laura, you can type them into the questions section on the go-to-webinar little Icons of things there and ask a question or you can type in there Please unmute me and I will do that. It will take me longer, but we can do it We've actually decided to take some of picture book city and apply it to our first grade second grade third grade Readers, we're going to put colored labels on those to help with sorting Because they're so skinny on the shelf the the leveled readers the early readers so we're going to use Striped labels with the stripes going horizontally So that they're not exactly the same as picture book city. I was just going to ask that Some circle labels that have the horizontal stripes and then we can have red blue and green and are those Three sections already pulled out separately. Yeah, so you know they are already separate. I've got about a thousand in grade one and Two and then grade three has about 1,400. Are those sections used a lot? I can only heavily I Just looked at grade one to try and weed it before we do this based on no check out since May 1st of 2016 There were 16 books that I could weed out of almost a thousand. Wow Well Not much at all. That's not much to weed and it also tells me I need to add more to that section to refresh it It's hard though because I've got my own chart. I don't know if you realize this But every publisher uses a different system to number their level books. Yes, they did anyone who's ever tried I Have a chart which I'm happy to share with anyone I would love a copy of your chart. I would love to do that And I've gone through and looked at it based on my own criteria Is it a picture book? Is it grade one grade two grade three or does it go all the way up to our what we call J? fiction great So I'm happy to share that for that because that would be very helpful Oh, I have another question. It'll come back to me. Okay. Oh I Can only assume that your staff was behind this After you explained the idea because it sounds like they worked so hard to help get this all Absolutely, the the head of circulation Was a little skeptical because she thought it was going to be a little harder for the shelvers but she saw the practicality for the users and Has come to see that it really is easier because it does break things down in smaller sections and you can sort by color and Within except session Section you were saying is the blue or has the main word and then the color and then the And then the column number so it's still alphabetical by author within each section. Oh We have another question. Yay. Could you put that publisher leveling chart with the slides another presentation? collateral Absolutely, we can have that happen too. That's a great idea than anybody who's Looking at the show can just download it and say thank you very much. I would be happy to do that I'll email it when I get back. Thank you now you Your library director now because it's all kind of got started with the hurricane Director and then you have a different director. Yes, we have a wonderful director who came in and what I assume is the Little level of this happened being that worked on it and being done and her support Tina Walker is our director. Sorry. I could not she is Super super supportive. She's the one who helped us close for a day to get this done. She brought us lunch She made sure that we have everything we needed. She has been Uber supportive of all of the initiatives that we've taken up to try and make things better for the patrons That's really her Her strength is seeing that it's better for the patrons. It works well for us in new services It works for the Shelvers so So now I'm not I'm gonna make you backtrack a minute because okay, you were talking this was First suggested to do a favorite Shelf just a favorites wall wall wall so This has actually made it so much Seems like much better organized for your users who come in and the kids who run for the things that go or the dinosaurs Absolutely, it went beyond the favorites wall to Really categorizing everything so that it wasn't just Here's the picture books and here's curious George and whatever the favorites are And it really helps me when I'm ordering because I think do I need another animals book? Do I need another no, I need more dinosaur books. What am I looking for in this catalog? good point and You have a much better idea of The topics you're looking for and I really know my collection now. Oh, yeah, I mean Lots better Here we go based on your experience. Do you think this would scale up for a larger collection? I Know it does when I was at Kosugi, which is the customers of Cersei dynex users group incorporated Conference back in March there was another library that had done this it was a ten branch library nine branches and a bookmobile They did it using Cersei dynex symphony, which is the sister software to Horizon and I went to their presentation They followed many of the same steps. I did had some of the same pitfall But they were able to apply They actually changed their whole call number label So it would say concepts and then their call number underneath it They did not use color coding as I recall So that made it so that you have to read the label to sort it And then another question is does your library float its Jail collection? We do not we're a single site So we don't have that Particular issue to deal with it would be It would be intriguing if you had a branch somewhere and you were it was whether everything went back to the starting point or if they could Yeah, I know they had several conversations about that during the other presentation. I went to at Kosugi getting nine children's librarians to agree what this book would be and Figuring out how to float their collections was a whole separate issue. I Didn't honestly pay attention to that part of it because I don't do it Making sure there's I'm going to move on to the next slide. So if you have questions, there's my contact information Thank you If something comes up later Now I'm going to ask this isn't fair, but I can do this Everything you told us this morning. What is your number one recommendation for someone considering this? Just one thing or is there like seven Number one would be weed Make sure that you go through your collection We didn't and I ended up weeding a lot of things that we took the time to label and put a label protector on and Just the time it took to decide where it would go in the first place And then when I ran the weeding list I discovered I didn't need to touch that book and it would have saved me so much time good point Cleaning books is probably the second We didn't clean the first batch. I didn't have the same youth services assistant My first youth services assistant had to leave the library for health reasons and my current assistant Sonya is I won't say OCD, but if I did she would understand she likes the books clean and fresh and Really takes good care of the collection that way great. We have a thank you Laura You're welcome and as you said if anybody has questions after you After we sign off here and you just want to send a message to Laura You can use her email there. We will also make sure that that's available. We'll have the slides. So absolutely there And I would also like to thank you. This has been very interesting and I have to confess I have not heard of picture book cities really I've been well I don't they were 12. I know about those and other things But I'm really happy to have learned so much just today. I'm glad to share And I'm going to go look up some stuff now when they get back to my office very good and we like to thank everybody who Signed up for today who are here with us live and also of course that's we'll go into our archive So you can come back later and check on it or for those who signed up but couldn't come for whatever reason they can watch this at their convenience. So that's nice and We have an encompass live every Wednesday almost every Wednesday As starts at 10 o'clock central time the only time we don't have one It's when the Nebraska Library Association and Nebraska School Librarians Association this year were with Iowa Iowa every association conference happens because Wednesday is the Pre-session day, right? So we don't have an income like that day or if it falls on Mike I think the only data could possibly fall on would be Christmas It's for July 4th or not this year. Yeah, not this year. So check our calendar on our Nebraska Library Commission webpage and you can look and see what's coming up and you can look through the archive too and see what Recently been recorded that you might be interested in Thank you again, Laura, and I bet you you'll get a few more questions. Wonderful in the next week or so Really appreciate you coming to Lincoln Spending some time with us. Thank you for having me Thank you everybody and now we'll end the the income The fly and see you next week. I have to buy everybody