 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Burns Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, we're a webcast, we're an online show, whatever you want to call us as long as it's good things. We are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time online, but we do record our shows, so you can always go to our website at any time and watch our recordings if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We post the recordings of the show itself to our YouTube account if there's any presentations, PowerPoint presentation slides, handouts, documents that are included, those will be added as well, and any interesting websites that are mentioned during the shows as well, we collect into our delicious account. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can get that for any of our past ones and where today's show will appear. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, presentations, interviews, mini training sessions, basically anything library related that's really our only criteria for our show is does it have something to do with libraries, something libraries are doing already, something they could be doing, some interesting out-of-the-box thinking sometimes comes up on the show, so if you see some topics that maybe look a little like why is that on a library show, stick with us, hold on, there will always be something that brings it around to libraries in some way when you watch it. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do present and do things specific to what we're doing at the commission or things here in Nebraska, but we do also bring in guest speakers, and that's what we have this morning from the East Coast, Southeast Coast, Florida. Chad Maren is from the St. Petersburg College. Good morning Chad. Good morning, how are you? Good morning, hi. And he is there, he is their Information Services Librarian there, a specific title there. Manages or Innovation Lab, which is really cool. He's been on the show with us before last year sometime talking about STEAM, science, technology, things that libraries are doing, but this morning I invited him to come on a talk about something, well, depending on your point of view, fun, more fun. Comic-Con, Maker-Con, these kind of things are going on all over the place. I like going through these kind of events myself personally, so it's a little, you know, personal interest of mine, and also the Maker part of it as well. So he's going to tell us about something that they've done down there in Florida for the last few years, so I'll just let you take it away Chad. Great, thanks a lot Christa, I appreciate it. So yeah, today I'm going to kind of go through a lot quickly. I was, I did this presentation a while back from, at the end of last year, and then a lot changed this year, so I'm going to kind of go in, and some of them might be kind of random, because my brain is very random lately, especially after doing something like this. So I'm going to go through this, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to get a hold of me. You've got your, like Christa mentioned, you can ask questions in the interface as well, go to webinar. So to get going here, a Comic-Con is an organized event for fans of comic books, graphic novels, manga, anime, and science fiction to gather and enjoy, discuss, learn about, and participate in the dissemination of information about their interests. So I took it a little bit further, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. So there's a picture of the second year. You can see it's packed, and it's, you know, it's just fun. It's a lot going on. So this was in the year 2014, and I always bring up, you know, we got a lot of press, especially this year, which is great, and I always ask, well, why were we successful? You know, even the first year, we did it in six weeks. The idea came, and we just ran with it. We spent little to no money on it too, and it was the first year 3,500 people showed up. So it was pretty intense. So again, why were we successful? And I think it's because we targeted our county's residents. It was a family-friendly local community, and there was a really nice vibe about that throughout the whole day. And the first day in 2014, but also the two subsequent years too. It's always been free. I'm never gonna, as long as I'm doing this, as long as I'm organizing this event, I will never charge admission. So just because it was free, a lot of first-time visitors came to check it out. People that may have been interested in Comic-Cons and were like, you know, I don't want to go because it's expensive or whatever. Let's go to this one. This is free, and we can at least go there and check it out. The first time we did this Comic-Con in 2014, there was a really large Comic-Con going on. It was the Tampa Bay Comic-Con, and it's huge. So we did it the weekend after that event. And what was interesting is I heard a lot of people saying that they preferred our event over the big one because we didn't have huge long lines. Again, it was free. And for an example, we brought a homemade TARDIS, and we've had it three years in a row now. And it was completely free for people to take pictures and to hang out with it. Whereas the Tampa Bay Comic-Con, they charged $35 to take a picture next to the TARDIS, which for me is ridiculous. Yeah, that's something I've seen a lot in looking into attending Comic-Cons myself. You pay first just to get in, and then for some of these extra things, extra perks, just getting a photo with somebody, you have to pay again. You do, yeah. And it's very frustrating. And a lot of people don't want to do that. I mean, I've seen people pay $100 to go get an autograph. I don't want to do that. So that's something I'm always paying attention to. And also the whole crowded thing. Personally, I don't want to go to an event that is crowded, and it takes forever to find parking and all that stuff. So I want to be able to go easily fight. I mean, our events, we do have a lot of people show up, but it's spread out. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute, too. So I do want to mention our first event was Pinellas Comic, or no, it was Mid-Pinellas Comic and Maker Faire. And at the time, this was three years ago, almost four now. I didn't realize that that Maker Faire word was actually registered. It was trademarked. So I got a nasty gram, not really a nasty gram, but I got a almost, it wasn't a cease and desist letter, but it was coming from Make Magazine. And they said that I basically cannot do this. I cannot use that word. And I'm not going to read all this to you, but you can see where I circled it, they basically were like, well, hey, you can use that word, but you have to pay us this licensed fee of $500. And I basically laughed at them. I said, you know, I'll just change the name. So libraries all over the place are doing maker things and maker events. They don't need to be, yeah. Well, I'm kind of against a big corporatization of events. So we changed it. Again, this is in 2014 to Mid-Pinellas Comic and Maker Con. So we added that in there. What's funny is literally, this did not exist. I'm not saying that they stole my idea. I'm not saying that at all. But what's interesting is after I got that letter that said you cannot use Maker Faire in your, so we had to take everything down, I said, okay, I'm not going to pay you any money. I'm just going to change it to Maker Con. And they said, okay, that's fine. And then I noticed literally a couple weeks, maybe a month later, that actually created what's called a Maker Con. And I was like, wow, that's interesting to me. But anyway, I let it go. So I mentioned this earlier. You don't really need to spend a lot of money to do these types of events. The first year we spent less than $300. So I do present a budget proposal every year to the Friends of the Library. And so here it is. And the Friends of the Library have been very generous. So I always present this to them. And here's some basic stuff, you know, our web domain, $11. Our website hosting, $60. Some of this stuff I just scratched off. So I usually go in and I itemize everything. Honorarium, just some things I wanted to do, food, volunteer t-shirts, all this stuff. So I give them this estimated total. And what they've been doing lately is this year they said, hey, well, we'll give you $1,500. Do whatever you want with it. And I said, great, thanks. So that's what we did. So we were able to pretty much spend every penny. So $1,500 is a lot. You can do a lot with $1,500. You can, like I said, you don't have to have a ton of money to do this, though. And most libraries do have a friends group. And a lot, if you just go in there and ask them, say, hey, how much money do you have for an event like this? And just tell them in the budget proposal, this will provide a ton of visibility for our library and your friend store. So they always sell comic books and stuff throughout the day. And they actually do really well. I also had the friends do raffles, so they got to keep all the raffle money. So they gave us $1,500. They were our main sponsor, but then I gave them all the raffle proceeds. So that was good. I should mention, too, that what we do is when I have, and I didn't put, I didn't show you this, but I used just a basic web form to get registrations for vendors. All the money that we collect for vendor fees goes to all children's hospital. So I had a gaming group called Gamers on the Edge, and what they do is they took the payment and then all the money goes right to that charity. So they've raised $25,000 in, like, the last year or so, which is amazing. So they do gaming events to raise money for a charity. And so instead of me collecting money and all this stuff, I didn't want to do that. I used their PayPal account, and so all that money went to charity. So this last year, we raised $1,480 for charity, which is really cool, I think. Nice, yeah. Yeah. So it turns out really well. So a couple of things. So I'm going to rewind a little bit. So the first year, I was like, you know, I want to do this Comic-Con thing. And so there was another public library that did it. And I asked them, I said, hey, you know, first off, how did you do? And they're like, oh, we had 600 people show up. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. So I thought our first year we would have 600 people. If we had 600 people, that was going to be huge. But we ended up having 3,400 or 3,500. And that was an actual estimate from the fire marshal and the sheriff. So that was pretty neat. So anyway, I asked them, I said, so what worked and what didn't? And their main statement to me was their number one complaint for the first year was they had no food. So they had this eight-hour event, people were showing up, having a good time, but then they were like, where's your food? So they had no food. So I said, okay, for my first year, I'm going to make sure, and every year, we've had food trucks. So my college at the time, though, because I should say I'm a joint use. So I work in a public library and an academic library, which is great. So because then we have a ton of excellent resources that we can use. But anyway, going back to food truck, my college never used food trucks before. And so I said, well, I want to use food trucks. Can we do it? And my provost was like, you know what, we've never done it before. I'm getting ready to retire soon. So let's do it. I said, okay. So we had like five or six food trucks the first year. So I had to jump through quite a few hoops, though, to make sure all the paperwork insurance and all that stuff was added to our risk management department. So you can see we've got quite a few food trucks. This is right out in front of our main center. The second year, we actually parked all those food trucks past our soccer field. And so some people complained that they had to walk a few feet, I guess, you know, maybe 120 feet to a food truck. I'm like, you know, okay, so you can't win no matter what. So this past year, we actually moved them back to the front again so people as they walk in can see all the food trucks. So they do really well. They're there all day long. And people are happy because we have a variety of food for people. But now what's great is now we have the college, this is three years later, the college uses food trucks for everything. And I feel kind of a sense of accomplishment that that was kind of the little library with this event wanted to push forward these food trucks. Now the whole college, which is huge, has food trucks everywhere. So it's easier now for us to get food trucks because we don't like, like I had to get paperwork from everybody and pass it on to the attorneys. And it was a nightmare. Now we've got a vendor list and we can pretty much pick and choose who we want. So it's a lot easier than it used to be. Just also, I mean, I'm sure you all use Google Docs. If you're going to do something like this, highly recommend using Google Docs to keep everything in one place and have it in one living document. So here's what our campus looks like. I've had to work with security, fire planning, the fire marshal, all that, with my provost, the college white security team, the sheriff, our IT department, library staff, and facilities. So without those people, you will not be able to do this. So most libraries have these people, right? And you're going to want to sell it to them. I apologize for the iCloud thing, I've had to turn it off. So you're going to want to let them know what your vision is and what your plan is. And a lot of the times, these people are interested in this kind of event, too. And so they'll just jump on board. And I've had so much help from these people that make it easy. It just works. So this year, though, the fire marshal came up to me and said, hey, your first year, you had 3,500 people. The second year, you had over 4,000 people. He said, now that you know it's consistent, you've got to take this crowd management training course. So I had to jump through this course. It wasn't too difficult, but I had to take it. So I got my certificate. It lasts for five years. So now I can go. This past year, the event we did on September 10th, over 5,000 people showed up. So it's continuously growing every year. It's great. That's interesting. I wonder if that's something that I've not heard a lot of libraries knowing about this kind of thing that, once you get so big, there's other considerations you need to worry about. Yeah, definitely. Especially now, with all these scary things happening throughout the world, you've got to be prepared for the worst. And if you're not, then you're going to make huge mistakes and you don't want to do that. We also, the first year, every year, something new comes up. I didn't realize we had to have a weapons policy. So when I started reaching out to my college attorney, that whole department was freaked out. So I'm not going to read this to you, but they wanted me to create a weapons policy. But they specifically told me, do not put that policy on your marketing materials. Said, okay, that's not a big deal. So we didn't have to include all that language on our marketing materials, thankfully. They just wanted to make sure that all the attendees had enough advanced notice so that we could manage their expectations. So we did post this policy on a few signs near the entrances. And so far, knock on wood, we've had zero issues with regards to weapons. Now, every event, we have Sheriff and some of his deputies on campus. And they just walk around and make sure things are going well. And what they do is, if they see a weapon, or even if it's like a stage prop or whatever it is, they'll ask to speak to the person and they show it to them and then they let them go through, which is great. Like I said, again, we've had no issues with this. Copyright issues, something to think about. Our first flyer, we actually got verbal permission from Harley Quinn's Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti. They are the artists on that Harley Quinn picture you see there. But our marketing department here, and I'm not going to get into the issues I have with them, but they basically said, you can't use that. I said, well, we've got official permission from the artist to say, well, did you get them to sign the consent and release form? And I said, well, no, can you give it to me? So they sent it to me and I never was able to get in touch with those artists. It can be difficult sometimes to get that. So we had to actually take that image down and use other images that we got permission for. So make sure you've got your consent and release forms ready. Also, this was something that came up this year. We had to have a policy for vendors who sell unlicensed fan art. So I again reached out to the attorney and said, hey, how do you want to word this? I had some ideas. I said maybe we can just say that we don't support it. We're not condoning it, that kind of thing, and then maybe provide a link as an educational purpose type of thing. So that's more what we're interested in. I'm not going to police this and walk around and say, you can't sell this here and that kind of thing because Disney's not going to walk through our event and pull these people down. But it's educational. So again, we were like, hey, it's really not okay to sell unlicensed fan art. So it was more educational. But again, be ready for that. It's a big issue in Comic-Cons now. So really the first year, we didn't have a lot of TV and newspaper coverage because they didn't really believe what we were up to. They thought, well, yeah, okay, you're going to do an event, whatever. But we did get a lot of word of mouth. We did, we got up on a digital billboard through the city of Seminole, which is right across the street, really the city hall, right across the street from the library. We did some YouTube commercials. We, you can see Spider-Man came and did a little appearance for us and we had flyers everywhere. And then you can see here, we started getting more and more results on Google. So the more stuff that's out there, if you optimize your search type stuff, you're going to start seeing people post. And obviously Facebook, you can't speak about Facebook enough. I'll talk more about that in a minute too. Going into the licensing movies for the big screen, we actually did screen a film this year. But I got the rights from the actual filmmaker, so that was cool. But we also, in our big room here, you can see, I'll fast forward it, you see the screens we have in our room. I wanted to play movies on there. But we need to license this. So movies licensed for home use are now available to show in libraries, right? As long as you have an annual public performance site license. So that license allows public libraries an unlimited number of exhibitions of copyrighted entertainment movies for a flat annual fee. And so we use library.movelink.com. And basically you can go in and do a search and see what movies you have the license for. And then we found out we had a bunch of movies, so we were able to freely play those throughout the day in our room. And for anyone here, and I'm not sure if this is, other states may do the same thing, here in Nebraska, we at the Library Commission actually pay for a license for all public libraries in the state to be covered. Oh, that's awesome. It's a blanket license that we provide and just got renewed through September of next year, because it just got done last month. So that's something to look into as well. See if there is something like that. If you're state library, that's what we are, the Nebraska Library Commission in Nebraska. For those of you who aren't from here, that's our version of the state library. See if they maybe have something that's already been arranged on your behalf. And then you just be able to say, yes, I'm public library, boom, it's covered. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, it's good to know. And most state libraries I think do that now too, which is just wonderful, because it does get, I don't know how much it costs, but it can be kind of expensive. I'm not sure either, but it's a great, because it's such a common thing that for all sorts of different events to want to show a movie that's related to whatever the story time or the something coming up or whatever, and it's just good to have that base covered. Absolutely, definitely. All right, so here we are, this is the day before the event now, and this is where it gets kind of crazy. You can see this was from last year, and so I had tables set up for everybody. So when I did, when I had the registration form, by the way, I used JotForm, J-O-T-T Form, dot com. It was really a nice way to integrate PayPal and all that stuff. But anyway, so the first two years I had tables and chairs for everybody. And you can see in that room, the second picture, it wasn't the best utilization for space. So what I ended up doing was bringing one of the facilities guys in with me, and we measured everything. Now we're actually getting the blueprints, the CAD files, and we're going to actually make it interactive, and then it'll be a lot easier to measure the space and also know how many vendors we can have in that room, which I think now we can have about 45 vendors, and that was full, by the way. So in our library program room, we opened up completely and we had 20 vendors in there, and then we had some other rooms that I'll talk about in a few minutes too. So this year we actually just kind of taped off the areas, and then I charged $10 extra for a table and two chairs. So some vendors said, you know what, I always bring my own tables. So I'm just going to pay $50 for a 10 by 7 space, or some paid $60 for a 10 by 8 space, which is super cheap by the way, and some that wanted a really small like 6 by 4 paid like $40. And again, if they wanted tables and chairs, it was a $10 extra, which was nice because then I could just tape off the area, put their sign there, and that's where they set up. And then if they needed a table, then the table was set up. So you definitely want to set up the tables and the taping off of their spots and all that stuff, and ask them to come the day before so they can get set up and not have to be setting up with a bunch of people doing it. So what's nice is electricity sometimes is an issue because in the center of our conference center, we don't have electricity in the floors for some reason. I don't know why they designed that. Sorry guys, I can't turn that off. That's my phone ringing. So what we've did is I looked up at the ceiling, you can see where the projectors are, and I said, well, there's a bunch of outlets up there. First off, why didn't you guys put them in the floor? And they're like, well, apparently we didn't have enough money when we did it. I said, okay, well, can we get those little pull down outlets from the ceiling? And they were like, yeah, let's do it because this is always an issue. So that's another thing that this event has done is the first one was food trucks and all this. And now we're like, we need power. So now our conference center has all these pull down outlets that people can have power anywhere in the conference center. Also, make sure all your audio and video and all your technology is working the day before. So if you have problems, you don't have to deal with it the day of. So you're going to want to test all the gaming tournament stuff and all your entertainment areas. Because we do have separate rooms set up just for gaming. So we had a video game room that the gamers on the edge group that I mentioned earlier is there to set up for us. And then we had a board game room, just a complete classroom filled with all this board game stuff. And it was all hosted by one of our vendors, which was great. And then make sure your stage is set up if you have one for any live entertainment. So luckily, I work at a place that has a lot of really great stuff. So I consider myself so lucky because we do have this high tech room called the Digitorium. And you can see we've got this big video wall. So this is up in the control room, making sure everything's set up. And we've got our graphic there and everything, which I'll talk about in a minute. So here's what our stage looks like. Here's Ken Spivey kind of rehearsing, getting ready. He's a doctor who themed musician. And he had a little four piece band up there. This is where we also have our costume contest. So we've got a pretty big costume contest. I didn't go into too much about the costume contest, but what you're going to want to do, and if you want any information from me, just send me an email or whatever, I'll send it to you. But you're going to want to have all the costume contest rules posted beforehand, have the participants register first hand to, and then send pictures. And I use jot form for that too. So I say, hey, register for your costume contest. Send me a picture of who you're supposed to be so the judges know how to compare you. So that was all done pretty well this year. I was happy. So if you want that information, I'll give you my email at the end of this. Please don't hesitate to get ahold of me. I'll give you any of this stuff, actually. All right. So this was our logo the first year and the second year actually. So we decided, you know, we need something new, so let's figure out what we're going to do. So luckily, one of our vendors from the second year, Noble Valerian, he's a 2D designer, and he also designs games. He said, you know what? I would love to design your logo this year. I said, great. I go, I don't have really any money budgeted for that. He's like, no, I just want to do it. I want to add it to my portfolio. I said, absolutely. Okay, great. And he was amazing. So here's what our event program looked like. Let's see. I think I put it. I'm going to drag this over here. Hang on. The program. So here's what our online version of our program looked like. I'm going to drag this over real quick. Oops. So here's the PDF version. So you can see there's a nice beautiful cover with the consistent graphic. And then we got all our exhibitors listed. You can see we had a bunch. On the food trucks that we had, we had four. Actually, I think we ended up, this is the older one. We did have five. We added one more at the end. You always want to put some kind of a website link so you can always, because you always, somebody's going to cancel, somebody's going to add on at the end. You wanted to say, hey, you know what? These have already been printed. Here's the link if you want the most up to date. Then we had our schedule like a real generic kind of schedule. I love the maker kind of graphic paper thing here as well. And we had the little robot guy that we kept using. So you scroll through. You can see we've got all our speakers listed. A little map of the UP building where things are. Our Wi-Fi information is there. Some of the maps. Very consistent look. If you can find a graphic designer, then you're golden. And you should be able to find somebody in the area because they're going to get a lot of publicity on this too. And every time I posted something, I always said, hey, this was designed by Noble Valerian, that kind of thing. And we got our sponsors on the back. It's a nice little deal here. So he designed that for us. But what was great is when I was able to work for him, by the way, we are working on an e-book. I'm trying to get a bunch of pictures and just make this into a nice e-book that people can look through instead of having to visit Facebook and that kind of thing. So that's something I'm working on in my spare time, which is never. But it is going to happen eventually. So we created these print and digital posters. He created smaller versions for our social media presence. We formatted an image for our Facebook ad. So that worked on mobile and desktops. We had a various thing here where it didn't really have anything in it where I could fill in the blanks, have a nice little template for the little robot guy. The Tumblr header didn't have anything in it because we used the social media graphic for it. The save the date option, you can see it's all consistent. And then throughout the day, we had a PowerPoint that had all the programs and different things going on highlighting different things throughout the day on different screens. We also had business cards. Very cheap. I think I got $500 or $1,000 for like $9. So I was out and about. I could just say, hey, here's the date and just pass it out to people. As I'm passing out flyers and posters, I would give them a bunch of cards too. And then we also had screen savers. We had a bunch of them designed in different colors. And we're able to put all our screensaver graphics in one central spot on a server. And all of our computers throughout the whole college, multiple campuses get those screensavers. So we were able to promote the event that way too as the screensavers displayed. You're going to want to, you can see in the lower right hand corner, there's my little robot guy again. I like to throw him in everywhere. After a while, people start to see that branding and it makes more sense to them. He's like a little mascot for the event. He is. I love it. I just love him. So you're also going to want to spend some time and write a press release. And that's something that we did. And you got to go in and put a really good description in there. This is not the full on deal here. I don't think I have it open still, but if you want that too, I'd be happy to send it to you. And at the bottom, it has everything. Make sure you put every piece of information you're going to need in there because if you send it to the paper and they don't have the right information, it's going to be printed wrong. And you're going to be upset. So make sure double check everything. So you can see this year, this is just a few. We actually got a lot of press this year, which was great. So we made the cover of the local paper a few times. Our Weekender magazine, we got into that too. So there's all these, you can see Tampa Bay Comic Con got the front page. Huge. I mean, they got, I mean, actual people from The Walking Dead, from Star Wars. Tons of, they had Carrie Fisher here from Princess Leia. I mean, huge guess. But what was nice is we actually got a nice little write up in their main paper that said, hey, these are some other conventions you might want to check out. So we actually got that nice little press write up, which is great. A couple of things too, we actually gamified our website. So I switched our website this year. I used WordPress the first two years. And then I started saying, well, I'm going to try using so I use Drupal this year. And I don't know if I'm going to use it again this coming year. I don't know. But anyway, we ended up gamifying our website. So PCMcon.com is our domain. And then I used Captain Up to add into our little footer a little bit of code. It's pretty simple. And then you can gamify your website. So you can actually have people come in and have challenges and all these different things that they do where they earn badges and that kind of stuff. So I wanted to do more and more contests throughout, you know, from the upcoming months. So starting in like August or actually July, have a little contest each month to kind of gauge interest throughout those months to the event. So that's why we gamified our website. I saw that when I first was looking at the site to set up the session. I thought that popped the first you get the website. And then in a second, this thing pops up about it. And I thought it was so cool. I've never seen that before. Something built in the game of finding other things but not the actual website itself. Yeah. And this website looks live, by the way. So if you actually go to this website, it's right here, you know, one point, I got one point. And if I want, you can see I've got 159, 149 points. There was my branding again for Comicon, PCMC 2018. I can then just click on start. And that's where all the stuff popped up. I can sign in with Facebook, Twitter, Google. And then I just start going in. And there's all kinds. So CaptainUp does all the work for you. It's great. Cool. That looks very fun. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. All right. So let me move this. We also created a token. And this is where I finally started doing 3D printing in two colors. So I'm a tech geek too. So we designed this. There's our little robot guy. And what my plan was, I didn't quite get it. I did one token. I didn't have time to do it because I'm doing it all by myself. I created these little tokens, printed them out on a 3D printer. And then my plan was to use Erasmus to create like a Pokemon Go type of game. So here's Erasmus. And you guys can do this in your library, by the way. You can see how I've got a little plus here. And you can do this on anything in your library. So my plan was to use those 3D printed tokens. So when you put your phone over something, it starts enhancing your digital world. So I was going to have a game set up. So when people found a token, they put their phone over it and it would say, hey, go to this room. Go to the children's area to claim your prize or something like that. But I never had the chance to finish that, which is something I'm going to do next year. But you can see, watch everyday things come to life with graphics, animation, video, audio, and 3D content. So it's something that you might want to think about doing in your library or in some certain events if you want. Promotional videos with Easter eggs. So this first one, I forgot to link that. Well, just believe me that this works. Let me try this one right here. The first one's got an Easter egg in it. So my plan was to have the video and tell people, hey, there's an Easter egg in this. Go ahead and play around and do your thing. And this is where it goes, by the way. So once you figured out where the Easter egg was, I had a little thing on Tumblr that said, hey, so you found the Easter egg in the promotional video. Good job. Here's your challenge. So I was asking people to do the challenge. What stinks is a lot of people, just they don't want to do anything, it seems. So I had very few people do this. Next year, I'm going to spend more time promoting these little contests, these things. But again, it was fun putting the little Easter egg in there. When I send Krista the updated PowerPoint, I'll make sure that that is linked there. So here's an example of one of them here. You probably won't hear it. Nope, it's coming through. And here's the guy from Gamers on the Edge. And there's Noble. So you get an idea. So we did some promotional videos. Now, Krista kind of already touched on this. But our consortium, we have the Tampa Bay Library Consortium, they help you. They help libraries do this type of stuff. So they have a video guy now. And I said, hey, can you do these videos for us? And he said, absolutely. So that's what we did. So we did two promotional videos. The first one had an Easter egg that then linked everybody to this contest on Tumblr. We also had a 3D, we had two 3D printing companies come as vendors. And one of them, this ultimate 3D, they were offering a 3D printer as one of our, I gave them a free table in addition for this 3D printer. But the thing is, nobody won. Because on the raffle policy for this one, you had to be present to win. And we said it, that we were going to announce the winner just before our concert at 4 p.m. And it was unfortunate. There was a lot of people there, but nobody won. So I'm asking this company if they'll actually donate it to us so we can actually maybe use it again next year or figure out a way to use it as a contest. So that's one point I should make. Make sure your raffle policy is in place. We also created t-shirts finally this year. And our team, I gave the team library board a free table. And they wanted to do something. I said, well, sell t-shirts. So they did that. So that was a nice little thing for them to do. And plus we have free branding for next year. I'm going to go through this kind of quick. And this is not in any way an actual full list, which is too bad. So we had costume contests. We had photo ops, that TARDIS I mentioned. We had professional cosplay, photography. We had a bunch of panels and workshops and classes. Tons of prizes. I asked vendors and sponsors to donate prizes. And they did quite a bit actually for mostly the costume contest. We had a flash mob, a belly dancing thing. We had a bunch of costume characters from the 501st Legion, so the Star Wars people. Celebrity guests and artists, a lot of comic book artists. In the children's area of the library, we had face painting and kid crafts. We have our music students. I asked if they wanted to do pop-up concerts. So we had these just concerts outside. So as you walk through our campus, you'd see all these different musicians doing things. We had a bunch of comic book and hobby shops, video game shops, costume and clothing shops, all these crafters, haunting and theme parks since we're so close to fall. And then we did the guest spotlight, too, which is on our website. So when you go to our website, you'll see who's coming and then a guest spotlight. You can see we did quite a few. And then I would share that on Facebook. So I would ask the vendors to send me what I wanted to put on the website and then they did. So that was always nice. So we did a guest spotlight probably every day for the last week of August and the whole month of September. So I'm hoping to keep that going, to keep the buzz going, in other words. So here's just a few pictures. I'm not going to go into all what all these are. But you can see my boy in the lower left-hand corner. That was the first year him hanging out with R2D2. So he was blown away by it. What's really cool is I met these guys, Plug It's Live, at a maker convention that I went to a while back. I brought my lab there and they do really great work. So they set up shop and they do full videos, live streaming videos for us. So here's their site and they don't charge anything. I give them a free booth and what they do is they come in and they just do live, I don't know if you guys can hear that or not, but they do live interviews throughout the day and you can see people walking by. This is the full many, many hours of live footage. As you fast forward, there's other people that they're interviewing. That's from Barnes & Noble. I'm good friends with her. So anyway, if you're into that, you can check it out. So that's a good way to do those guest spotlights throughout the day live. And they actually stream it through various streaming servers too, which is kind of neat. And so if you're interested, the interview segments, they actually break them down by interview too, which is good. All right. So this, I want to, I do want to do a shout out to Greg Plantamora. He's the co-founder. He helped me start the first year and he actually helped me organize actually year one and two. So he actually was very instrumental in helping me with this. He didn't help this last year. He was kind of wanting some compensation and I don't blame him at all. It's a ton of work and I just wasn't able to get, I wasn't able to pay a volunteer. It's kind of hard to justify that because like our friends group, for example, they're all volunteers and they don't get paid. So they were kind of like, no, we can't, we can't let you pay your volunteers. I said, I get it. That's fine. So Greg had to move on and do other things, but he did help me quite a bit the first two years organizing it. So just a couple of things. I borrowed this slide from him. We did a presentation on this a couple of years ago, but the difference from our local comic and maker con, from the big Metro cons, we've kind of already talked about this. It's more local. It's a better family atmosphere and it's really a good way for first time visitors to check it out. Don't have those long lines. I mentioned that TARDIS was free for us compared to $35 to get one picture taken at the big convention. Ours is more relaxed, more family friendly, no weapons or sexy costume hassles to deal with. And people really do like to support a nonprofit. So it makes it easier for us to get publicity and sponsors when they think, wow, they're doing this for an actual good cause. Apologize about my iCloud stuff. It's actually my daughters. Some of the lessons learned. This is from him, but I'm going to probably add a lot too. At first, business and media were skeptical. They're like, yeah, whatever you're going to do in a van. It's going to be stupid. Now that they see, wow, okay, you've got a lot going on here, then you're doing well. I mean, really, if I go back to 2012, so our first event had 3,500 people show up. So we had President Barack Obama on our campus in 2012. So that obviously is the biggest event having President Obama on our campus. But the second largest event is Pinellas Comic and MakerCon. So it's a nice way to say it to people. Like, oh yeah, our first big event was President Obama. Second is our Comic Con and MakerCon. People are willing to pay, but we're going to keep it free. I'm never going to have a fee involved. I don't want to do that. Signs are very important. You almost need a sign that points to a sign that points to a sign these days. So you've got to have people out there in red shirts that say staff that are actually out there pointing people to things because it helps. And always push that press release. Excuse me. So some things to think about. You're going to have people drop out. Some are going to do it the last minute, and it does happen. Don't worry about it. Take it all and flow. Make sure that the vendors do sign some kind of an agreement so that they know what's expected of them. I'm going to add this to my agreement. This coming in 2017, I'm going to add that I, the college, is not responsible for low sales. I had a vendor that was like, I can't believe it. I only sold like five things. I said, well, that's not my, you know, I can't guarantee you sales, especially when the person next to you sold $1,500 worth of comic books. And that's not, that's, that happened. That's a lot of money for some people. But I'm like, I cannot guarantee sales. So I'm going to have to put that in the agreement because they do sign it to go through it. You have to get a signed release for Children's Costume Contest. I always put video recording disclaimers everywhere because we had a guy come out and I'll show you that in a minute that says, hey, you're going to be videotaped. More than likely, you'll be videotaped and that we're probably going to use it. And then send out an event survey. And that's what we do. Here's what it looked like for the first year. What was your favorite part? What could be improved? That kind of thing. And when you see we've got a nice little survey tool at my college, you could use pretty much Survey Monkey or whatever. You can see there's, we got 48 responses to this first question. What was your favorite part? So we got people a lot of good, here's one, it was free. Go through this and look at what did people not like. I tend to focus on what people didn't like, what could be improved. Gaming should be at the rear of the room to improve traffic flow. Okay, that's a good thing, more space. So this one right here, a bit more space. So our first year we used the main room and then a library room. This year we used pretty much the whole campus. My provost was like use what you need. So we took this, here it is again, larger venue. So we took this and we spread it across the campus. So the flow of our traffic was so much improved this last year and the year before. So we learned a lot from these surveys. So immediately after our first event we started going out and promoting our event at other similar events. And I've been doing this a lot. So we, a lot of times like this downtown Lakeland Zombie Fest, I gave them a free table this year. They gave us a free table. So it's like, you know, it's not about making money in my view. It's about just providing this visibility and having fun. This is a good article. It talks about how libraries are putting out comic-cons and that kind of thing. So if you want this, it's excellent. It's a really good article. So here is, let's see if this is going to run real quick. So I mentioned earlier that we have the Tampa Bay Library Consortium that has a videographer. And so he came out, no charge, and did our video for us. So I'm just going to play a couple minutes of this so you can get an idea of what happened. And by the way, what's great about this interview is he asks all these guests when he interviews them why they value libraries, what they remember about going to libraries and that kind of thing. So I'm going to play just a minute of this. You can see it's 11 minutes long. I love the intro music. Are you guys able to hear this? Yeah, we can hear it. It's a little quiet. Do you have a headset microphone with external speakers? Yeah. If you put your microphone near the speakers, that's how I can grab it. Okay. If you turn the volume all the way up and do that. Let's see. Okay. Once it gets to a part where they're... I'm going to fast forward to Tenny. So you can see we had Mosey come out, Museum of Science and Industry. You can see there's some of our game rooms, 3D printing. So some interviews. Oh, here's the... This guy, Scott Fensterer, was on... forget, some reality show that was based on makeup artists. So he's out there talking about what he's doing and that's the other building we were in. So anyway, if you get a chance... Yeah, we'll post the link to the video afterwards so everybody will be able to watch the whole thing. Yeah, it's definitely cool. A lot going on. You can see what's happening. So future plans. I've got a lot of future plans. My main one though is something that I believe strongly in is I've been doing a lot of the organization by myself. I've got the IT staff and facilities that make the day go well. Obviously there's no way one person can do all moving tables and making sure that... But I told my provost, I said, look, I cannot be the only person planning that this is coming here because it takes a lot of my time. I managed the innovation lab here too, which is... That's a full-time job. Plus, I teach and I'm a librarian. That's a full-time job. So this planning of this conference is a part-time job throughout the year, but when it gets five or four or five months away, it becomes a full-time job and I've got to keep up with all my other stuff. So my plan now, and I told the provost, I have to have a committee and he supports it. So I'm going to have... I'm going to read all this to you because I'm going to be the program director so I can oversee all this stuff. I'm going to find people that I trust that are going to take control over certain parts of the organization of this convention. So I'm going to have somebody that deals just with vendors. Just make sure all the vendors pay and make sure they all have their setups and all that stuff because dealing with that and the entertainment and the costume contest and all the kid events and all this stuff, it becomes insane and you will go crazy. And the day of you're going to get hit with all kinds of stuff. So if you have different contact people, you can enjoy the event and that's my plan for 2017. And what's interesting is... Look at this. I'm already getting... This was about two weeks ago. Our last Comic-Con was on September 10th and so a little over a month ago. I got this from a guy the other day that he wants to start booking celebrities for next year. And so here's the huge list of celebrities. So it's interesting... I'm going to try to get more money to bring in more celebrities but again, I do not want to charge admission. So for me, it's not about celebrities. I mean, it's great. It's a draw. But people will come regardless. If you have a bunch of cool vendors for them to see all this different stuff, 3D printers, robotics, comic book artists, craft people. I mean, we had it all. But if you have a celebrity, then that's a plus. So here we go. That's me with the zombie under the end of the day. If you get a chance, please go to our Facebook page. We've got so much stuff on there. I'm just going to show you one example. I know my time is running out but I do want to pull this in. This is daring of me, by the way. So here's just some pictures from the event. So here's a full house. The TARDIS right out front. You can see we had birds. This is a comic convention. We had hawks and stuff there too. They even brought snakes. Comic book artists, comic book vendors. Let's see. We had a weird dancing guy. Star Wars people were there. Those are used in my favorite people in costume. There's our robots. So we had huge robots running around and doing stuff. An R2-D2 car. More Star Wars people. Mosey science. You can see we had a variety. There's my kid as a little grown-up now. You saw the picture of him earlier. There he is last year with R2-D2. So if you get a chance, definitely check out our Facebook page. We've got a lot of really cool stuff there. And there's my contact info. Thanks for listening. I know I rambled on and on and went quickly but there's still probably an hour's worth of stuff for me to talk about. Yeah. That was so much that you did in their event. I read it somewhere online or something else you had done about how many people you got your first year of this when nobody knew what it was going to be. Was it going to be fun or not? Was it going to be big or not? The first year was $2,000-$3,000? The first year was $3,400. The original was the actual estimate. And that's the kind of the extra people would be like, oh, what have we gotten ourselves into? Yeah. You know what I will say though? I will say the first year and even the second year my college didn't really support. I mean, I had support on my campus, right? But the whole college didn't really help too much. Well, this year, they finally realized like, wow, this is big. It's been consistently big. It's a recruiting tool. That's what I was thinking too. You said the college getting involved and giving you, and the Pope was saying use whatever you need. You get those kids on the campus and they're going to remember that when they decide, hey, Mom, Dad, I want to go to school there. Yeah, exactly. And so the college finally gets that. And so it's been great now because this year, they actually, I did the press release, but they also did the press release too. So coming from the big college marketing department looks better than from Chad, you know what I mean? Sure. So I'm happy that they're finally getting it and that it is quite the recruiting tool. And they do have a college representative at the entrance that kind of just says, hey, here's some of the programs we do because if a kid comes in and sees all these comic book artists making a living, you know, doing comic books and can then say, well, if I want to learn the skills, I could actually take a couple classes at the college if I want. So yeah, it's kind of neat. Link it all together. We do have a few questions that came in. Not exactly when you're talking about these things. So I just kind of waited until now. I saw you did, I don't know if you mentioned the beginning, but you did have it on that sheet of the different staff that you want to have, you know, be more organized with. But someone does have a question about, does the library have to pay for security or police staff? So for security. So I see you did have it listed on. Yeah. So how does that work out with security and safety and that kind of thing? See, we have a security already on campus. And so the way I understand it is, you know, normally like on a Saturday they have one security guard, you know, managing, you know, driving on the campus. So what they usually do is they end up saying, okay, we're gonna let, you know, we're gonna have four campus security guards. So I don't know if they pay them time and a half, or they just give them cop time. Right. So they'll, you know, they'll work. And a lot of them want to work the event. Like they will say, you know what, I'll work eight hours Saturday if I can leave early, you know, leave two hours early on Monday or Tuesday. And they usually do it that way. And sometimes they just budget it. They just budget, you know, one or two extra people. The same is true with our, the guys that clean up after the fact. They, we have two guys that come in and clean up after. You know, throughout the day I'm actually trying to help and throw stuff away just to make it a little bit easier for them. Sure. But yeah, that's a good question. But, you know, for the sheriff and all that, as far as I know, we don't have to pay them to come out because it's a big event. Like they almost have to come out. Right. If it was like 60 people or 100 people and we're like, Hey, we really want a cop to be there. We'd have to pay for that. Yeah, that's a little different. Yeah. That's good. The campus, the university itself, the college itself has something arranged for this. That's not something extra that you have to figure out. Oh gosh, who do we hire? It's well, just make sure they know this thing's happening so they're aware of it. Yeah. And, and when I have the big meetings, we had a couple, you know, before the event, I meet with the provost, the IT, the lead of IT, the lead of security, the lead of facilities. I also, the sheriff is there, the fire marshal is there. It's really, it's wild. The first time I met with all those people, I was like, this is like, this is just weird to me. I'm meeting with all these, you know, the heads of all these departments, but they're all really great. They all believe in the event. They have fun at it. They get to go and hang out and, you know, they have way more fun than I do. Like I have to go crazy, which is why I'm doing that planning committee, so I can actually really enjoy it. I mean, I do enjoy it, but I don't get to hang out too much, you know. And participate in as many of the things. You're actually trying to make sure everything's working correctly. Yeah. It's happening when it's supposed to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that'd be something that's interesting to see because this is obviously at a college campus of how public libraries was handled event like this. We'll have to Yeah. Clearwater. If you look up Clearwater Public Library System, they do a Comic-Con. Their next one's in March of 2017. They do a really good one. So you might want to, if you're only public library, you might want to check, look out Clearwater Public Library's Comic-Con. They just do Comic-Con. And they do some great stuff. And I think, I'm trying to remember the guy's name now. I forget his name. That does it. And they've been doing it for quite a few years now. Cool. We're really lucky. I mean, I got to college and the public library site and the city. The city of Seminole's very helpful too. So it's a good collaboration. We did have one other question that came in. If anybody else has questions, feel free, you know, go ahead and type them in. We're about ready to wrap up here probably because it's about five after 11 now. But we, you know, guys said we can go as long as needed. If you have any other questions or anything else you want to ask, Chad. So I did have a question about the weapons requirement. And I know this is a thing at some comic, some traditional Comic-Cons. They do have information about what you can and can't have for weapons that they can't be, their rules I've seen in some is they cannot be actual edged weapons or with actual ammunition in them or something. So it's all, you know, if it's fake, it's okay. And I see yours says they can't even have real or fakes or anything, even looks like it. Did any of, do you have any issues with any of the questions? Did any of the cosplayers complain about that if that was something inherent to their character? Was that something that? No, you know, it's funny. When they mentioned weapons, real or fake. I remember I talked to the one attorney. I said, look, man, you know, this is, if somebody comes in with a lightsaber, that's fantasy. Right. That's clearly, people aren't walking around with lightsabers really. I mean, some do, but actual ones that will actually cut anything. Right, right. And he's like, yeah, some of them are so obviously fake. And, you know, and they were like, well, just post this. And as long as there's security there that can pull people aside. And, you know, there was people, I mean, we had a guy selling swords, you know, okay. Yeah. And it's like, he's allowed to sell them, you know, I mean, he's, you know, but, so yeah, we didn't have really any problems with this at all. Primarily because as people walk in, they see the weapons policy. And if they're walking in and it's part of their costume, and they'll, they go up and, you know, the sheriff or whomever was there would say, Hey, let me see what you got here. And they'd look at it and go, you know, see, it's made it a foam. It's not actually anything. Yeah. Exactly. And some, and there was, I think, I think there was a couple of times when somebody would come in and the sheriff would say, Hey man, that's really a little bit. It's a little kind of sketchy, you know, I think. And the sheriff told me that that one particular person was like, Okay, that's no problem. I'll put it in the car. So, you know, we've been lucky. And I'm sure one of these days, someone's going to throw a fit over it, you know, and I'm not going to have to deal with it. I hope I think it'll be more of the security people dealing with it, not me. Yeah. But it's good to have that safety issue. And I think anyone who is doing actual cosplay or entering a costume contest, they're going to know, Okay, I'm going to have to think about, I may or may not be able to bring this with me when I enter the contest. So yeah. And as long as you post it, and like, I think I post on our Facebook page like, Hey, here's our weapons policy. Just kind of use common sense, you know, like, don't bring a real gun, you know, I mean, have common sense and just know that the sheriff has every right to look at what you have before you actually come in. And like I said, we have not had really any issues at all yet, except that one guy that, but he was fine and put it in his car. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. All right. Well, nobody else has typed in any other questions, anything urgent they need to know right now. But you do have at the end here, Chad's got his info. Yeah. And I'll send you the updated version of this within the next day or so. Well, if you just put it, you had a slide share link that you had sent me. Yeah. And that's kind of all these pop-ups. Yeah. That's you can use that. I'll update that for sure. That'll be, but for now, it's good. I mean, it's a placeholder. Yeah. Cool. The link won't change. Right. All right. So yes, just a few thank yous. Very impressed. You're definitely an expert at this comments coming through. And thank you for your presentation. It was really enjoyable. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, definitely even more that could be said about it. But at least this gives you idea of what you could do at your library, your college, or your public library to pull off one of these things. And be aware that you might get more that you bargained for in the beginning. It would be more popular than you expect. But that's okay. Go roll with it. Absolutely. And the bottom line is it brings more visibility of what your library is offering. Exactly. Yeah. Library, if it's a college university there, or just your community, people coming in to your town to see what's going on with this event you're hosting. Yeah, exactly. All right. So thank you very much, Chad. Thank you everyone for attending. I'm going to pull back presenter control to my screen now here. There we are. Should see. There's the website for the con. You can see here. Do I have no points on this thing, I guess? Or I need to get 100 points to level up? I don't know. That's the gaming patient thing. Yeah. This is the website. And then there is the Facebook page, too. I have also been collecting the links in my delicious account here for the library commission. And I know I missed some as we were just, you know, I got distracted paying attention and stuff. So I'll be going through the recording and the slides and adding more to here as well. But here's some of the main ones here, gamers on the edge and the website itself. So that will all be gathered there for everyone afterwards. So thank you very much everyone for attending this morning. The show is being recorded and will be available on our website. Our recordings, our archives go right here. Now nobody panic. This is our list of upcoming sessions, which as you can see is just got one. Things are not ending. I'm in the middle of discussions and finalizing dates for a bunch of them right now so they're not officially on the calendar. But they will be up there over the next day or so. You'll have some ideas of what's coming up in November and December. But our archives go here, right underneath here, Archive and Compass Live Sessions. Here's last week's show, was circulating the internet. Like I said, it links the recording, links the presentation, and links to our, we'll have just the links to the delicious links there. So that will be up there probably by later this afternoon. I'll have all that up available for you. I'll email everyone to let you know when it's available. I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is our Nebraska Library Internship Grant Program. We've been doing this for a few years here. A few years we took off, but we're back for the last couple of years. If you want to have an intern in your library and get money to help pay them some sort of stipend for it, you can attend this session and see how we do it here. How you can get a grant from us if you're in Nebraska and just see what we're doing here. We'll have our grant program people and some staff from libraries who've actually done this in the past so you can see how it's actually happened. Encompass Live is also on Facebook. We have a Facebook page. So if you are big on Facebook, give us a like over there. You'll get a notification of when sessions are starting up. Here's the one advertised today's show. When our recordings are available, all of that will be posted on here. So other than that, that wraps up for today's show. Thank you very much everyone for attending and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye bye. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you, Chad. Sure thing.