 Hi, and welcome to our Help I'm an Accidental Government Information Librarian webinar series. Today, the topic is Promoting Government Documents in Your Community with Paula Webb. Paula Webb is the government documents reference and outreach librarian at the University of South Alabama. She obtained her MLIS from the University of Alabama. She is a member of ALA and the Alabama Library Association. She has appeared in college and research library news, college and undergraduate libraries, computers and libraries, DTTP, Mississippi Libraries and Serials Librarian. She wrote the chapter and analysis government issued policies and best practices for microblogging social media tools in a publication titled Web 2.0 Technologies and Democratic Governance. She received the 2011 Movers and Shaker Award and the 2012 CUS Research Award. Okay, great. Hello everybody. I'm so glad that you could attend this webinar. I have a lot of information I'm going to be distributing and talking about when it pertains to government documents outreach. But with every good presentation, you need a good introduction, so thank you so much for giving me that great introduction. Now, what we're going to talk about today is government information, what we know, what we don't know, the different types of environments we have to promote within, and in my world over here in Mobile, Alabama, it's going to be the campus environment, which I include the library, the classroom environment, and the surrounding community environment. And now each are unique and have to be handled as such. I could easily have an hour talk on each one, but today we're going to do an overview of the ways you can promote government documents in each of these communities. Again, these are things I do every day. Little things that I think about and that I've tried and seem to be successful to some degree. I'm also going to talk about things I've tried and have worked and things that have not worked. So this will not be a complete success story. Sorry, but that's just life. But you have to try things to know if they'll work or not. And so that's what I'm going to talk about as well. We all know the value of government information. So let's start with what we know. We know government documents applies to a host of wonderful resources. We know it has the census. We know it has the IRS. We know the congressional records. And we know healthcare. We know NASA, National Park Service. All of these are great, great sources of information. You've got all these wonderful things out there that people can use to make their life better and to just to be informed. So what is it that seems to be between letting people know about government documents? Well, one of the things, and this is just for starters, and I used one great article by Lori Gwynett on promoting government documents while selling information literacy. I used her reference and said some of these things are part of her article, which is a great resource, to talk about things that are issues. Just to start, this is where government documents professionals think differently than subject liathons in our libraries. The campus community and the surrounding community. Government documents tend to be broken down by agencies, not by subjects. This can sometimes be challenging. The crossover can be a challenge for all parties. However, I do think it's necessary to get a full use of what you have available in the library. As an example, when someone is needing housing statistics for 1990s, you can't just say, go to census.gov for your information. They're not going to know what you're talking about, and if they do know or have an understanding, they're going to have a hard time finding it and using it. So everybody needs the knowledge of this type of information. But what are some of the things that are the problem? Let's look at what we know. First, we know that we have a ton of great government information. We know that we have the Federal Depository Library Program, which provides, as a government documents librarian, we know this program and we are very familiar with this program. It's all over the United States. It makes government information available for everyone. We also know that these print resources that are distributed by the SELP, in addition to online resources, can be found all over. SELP has a great map where you can click on that state or that location close to you and you can access this government information. This is the URL. If you're interested in the slides or something like this, there's going to be the copy of the webinar afterwards. You can get the URL from there. But this is how you can find local government information. And what's important to know is that every depository on this map at these locations is unique to its area. So if you're trying to find government information, and I'm in the Gulf Coast area, so we're going to choose things that lean toward our area. So it's really important for people to know about the SELP, where to find their local SELP, and how to access that type of information. In addition, government documents can be found online. Not only is there the U.S. government publications, catalog of U.S. government publications that set the SELP, but you also have some other great resources, like the United States Federal Government Documents Registry that's a partnership with Hasse Trust. Most government document librarians also are familiar with government information outside of the SELP. So don't be afraid to ask your government document librarian for help in this regard. Here's an example of the U.S. Airway Flight 1549 accident. This was where they interviewed Sully from that movie. Sully that came out recently and has done very well. This is a link at Hasse Trust for that event. So you can send this information and make it available to the people. It's there and it's available. Another good thing about government documents is that it's free. Government information is free for everyone to use in any and all formats. Online print DVDs. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I thought maybe there would be some people listening who just wanted to learn more or use the presentation information or use this information beyond their scope. So there's tons of great government information available, free online print, DVD maps, curriculums, et cetera. We've got a lot of great things in our collections. It's a great source of primary resources. The Library of Congress. And this is a sheet, a page of notes from the Rosa Parks primary source gallery. Rosa Parks in this gives an account of her growing up in a rural pine level Alabama farm. So you can access this information. It's government information. It's the information students can use to do their research pertaining to Rosa Parks in this case. And it's primary, which is great. Another great thing about government documents is that it covers all subjects. Government documents has the ability to cover a wide range of subject areas and topics. You can find STEM information in that science, technology, engineering, and math. You can find nature environmental information. You can find historical information. You can find science information. You can find criminal justice information, et cetera. There's just a ton of great resources out there that you can utilize whenever you're talking about government information or you're trying to get other people interested. Okay. So we talked about the good things. Now, what are the bad things or the challenging things with government information that was also mentioned in Lori Gwynnett's article? The collection tends to be separated from the rest of the collection by one location away from the main stacks. It seems that making that crossover from one side of the building to the other side of the building can be very challenging to some people. I don't know why. It's just it's outside a range. They look different. It just seems to be challenging. The other problem tends to be the classification system. It's not the typical classification system that everybody is used to. It's a Pseudox system. So that makes it challenging when somebody's looking for something that's subject-focused and they have to go and translate it to an agency-focused document, which is not always the same, but that's where your government documents library comes in, where we can interpret and transfer that type of information. You can be very useful there and I just wish people would ask us more. Another problem is that government documents are not standard. They have a variety of formats. So whenever you're working with government documents, they don't all look like a book. That's why I love this picture. This is an aerialist. It's an air submarine. So it just doesn't quite fit into the norm because of that. There's a variety of formats. I mean, in our collection, we have puzzles. We have curriculums. We have pictures. We have the things that just doesn't quite fit a standard book on the shelf or something that's just digitized like a book on the shelf. And so sometimes it's very challenging. In addition, they don't fit the usual format sighting. So when somebody has to come in and use government documents for their research and they are having to cite it for their work, they have to do something outside of the typical citation format that they're used to doing. So all these things are definitely issues that we have to be aware of. And they're not all bad issues. It's not that they're bad or they're wrong. It's just that they're different. And so we know and we experience the subdoc librarians, these issues with people, and we understand, but that doesn't make the information and the collection any less valuable. You just have to go beyond that. But anyway, the next thing. Despite all how we feel about it and that we know the collection is wonderful and we know that we have some great things on there, here's the question. What can we do about it? What is it that we can do as government documents librarians to break and to change these issues? Now, I don't claim to be a guru. I don't claim to know every little thing that will work. That's what it is. It's about trial and error and learning as you go. There are some things we can do and there's some things that I have done here that have worked. We're going to go over now some suggestions on getting your collection noticed in all of the environments that I mentioned earlier. And remember, I talked about the campus environment, the classroom environment and the surrounding community environment. So we're going to go over some things that we can do to make this happen. Now, before we get started, realize I don't have a budget. So everything I'm telling you to do or I'm talking about that I have done is things that I have done without a budget are things that I have done by getting donations or things that I have done by partnering with other people. So these are all good things to do in addition to it. But I realize that that's one of the things I don't have and that's what I'm working with here. So anybody can do a lot of the stuff that I'm doing. Okay. Now, the first step I want to talk about is outreach on campus. That is the campus environment. Now, whenever I talk about on campus, I tend to add my library in when I'm addressing that campus environment. It's great that we have a government documents collection. But if they are not going into the stacks and they're not, because we have our government documents collection on the second floor of the library and it's one half of that floor, references on the other side with the reference collection. So if they're not coming from other places in the building and they're not crossing over and experiencing our collection or finding it using the catalog or things like that. So what are some things that we can do to get our collection noticed? What we have done is we put out the slate. So in this case, it's great that we have this collection, but if they're not going into the document stacks, then maybe we need to bring our collection out to them. And that's what we have done in this library. We have a flat display case. Here's an example of the one that Vicki Tate, my supervisor, has done. It looks great. We've got the Everglades poster. All these are government documents, by the way. So she created this display, which has the documents on display, holiday gift ideas from GPO from 2016. She has handouts, if you'll notice, for the people here passing by. And this is right across from the elevators on our side of the building. So people coming in and out of the elevator see this display. That's going to be very important. Now, when we do our displays, we talk about, I like to talk about different things. We have different themes as well. I'm trying to think outside the box in this regard. And so these are two other displays that we currently have up. These are the movie themes that I chose for the end of the semester. I have the one on the left is the street cat named Bob. And it's all about recovery from addictions. So in this display, what I've done, if you'll look closely, I have contacted a couple of agencies, and I got these free handouts for the students. So that's available that they can take with them at that very moment. In addition, I have a sign describing what the whole theme of the display is, which is recovery from addictions. And I have the poster from a street cat named Bob. I don't have a color printer in my office, but I go over to reference, and they're wonderful about printing off-color images for me. And so the whole theme of that box talks about recovery from addiction. And these are government documents we actually have in our collection. The one on the right is the other display that I have up right now. It's the ballad Okinawa based on the movie Hacksaw Ridge. So we actually had a map of Okinawa. So put that up. We had a poster, a smaller poster display. The book is a government document that talks about the actual battle of Okinawa from Hacksaw Ridge time area. And in the display box, you'll see that we had a lithograph that was in our collection that I put back there describing the battle and also government documents. And I also have the gentleman who the movie is about, is right there receiving the Medal of Honor. That's a color printout from the Internet. So I just looked him up, and that was the image from the U.S. government at the Library of Congress. So I just printed that out and placed it there to feature that whole box. So all that was easily done, a collection that I went out into the stacks, pulled the stuff off the shelf, and put that out for students to see. Another display that we have is events. This is Vicky's display from the oil spill and marine life in the Gulf of Mexico. We have this oil spill, as you know, here in the area. And that's what this display is. You can kind of give an idea of how it's arranged, how she does things. It looks very nice and clean. These are really important things. She also had a handout for this for the students because it affected us locally. I have some display tips for the boxes, and we'll go through it real quick. Find at least one dedicated area in your collection or in your library near the entrance, exit, or bathroom. The goal is to put it where they're going to see it. If they are walking by it, that's fine, but watch and see. There's not a lot of foot traffic where you have the display. You need to move it. It just doesn't do any good to have something in a corner where nobody will see it. Update displays on the schedule. We update all displays to at least 10 times a year. I update because I have two boxes. I do 20 because of the two different boxes. But make sure you have all your displays updated. People get bored pretty quickly seeing the same thing. So rotate them out. Have a schedule. Think ahead. It makes a difference. Glass display cases are wonderful. We already had the flat box that DQ uses when I first started working here at South Alabama. But the other two standing display cases, I found at Property. I didn't pay a cent for them. I went over to Property and looked at to see what they had, and it used to be in the bookstore. And I asked them if they would send them over. They sent them over, and they've worked wonderfully in promoting government documents to the campus community. Color catches eyes. Do not have a display box full of white and tan to color documents. I'm not saying don't use white documents, and I'm not saying don't use tan documents. I'm just saying don't have a box full of that. It won't catch the eye of those walking by. So make sure you mix up your media in the box. Name your display. Print it out and have it with display. I have a template of a display name, and every display I have has a name. You know what you're talking about when you have it. Have subject guides. For example, why would you want to do that? Well, EH102 students come here all the time to research their projects or needing an annotated bibliography. What a great primary resource to have right at hand for them to use as they're on the way to the reference test. So they can, and our display boxes are on their way. So they pass by our display boxes on the way to the reference test. So they can have a ready resource if they're trying to find a good topic you've provided up for them. So things like that can be very, very, very helpful. Have a theme. I try to have a theme with everything, historical events, current popular movies, important people, et cetera. Whenever the Supreme Court justice passed away recently, I had a box about the Supreme Court justice. Just think about things that will affect you locally and have things ready to, like ideas. Some things I want to do in the future. There's government documents for everything, just about. People have asked me, do I have a hard time finding information to match up with events or to match up with movies? And I really haven't ever had a problem. You just have to be aware of that subject-agency difference. If you're aware of that difference and you know how to look the stuff up, which government documents I've reviewed, then you can utilize this collection and bring it out and let people know it's there or know what important pieces are there. The other thing that we have in our library, which is wonderful and not everybody can have this, but we very fortunately have our own website and our own LiveGuides. These are great resources. Now you're going to go, why would this matter for outreach and why would this matter for reaching out to the community? I want to get into that a little bit. The website shows that we are legit. We have a presence and so whenever somebody wants to know, well, what can you tell me more about government documents? I have a website I can give them. And I can say, here you go. This is our collection. This is what we have. It has our contact information. It has how they can reach us. It has our specialties. It has all of that right here, which is wonderful. And in addition, we'll go into LiveGuides and how they can be helpful for outreach. They can really make a difference. Now, our website, again, you can see our URL down there. You're going to see the elements of our website and constructing it, making it useful for people to use. One of the things we have is a featured topic section that we change out at least 10 times a year. I like to base it on the displays. I'm not always consistent with that. Sometimes I deviate, but I'd like to do that as much as I can. In this case, this is the one up right now, and that's about with Okanawa featured topic. I usually have a snippet of information. This is what I got from the National Archives recently. And then if you want to know more, and I'll have three bullet points. We have a batter department section, so whenever somebody wants to contact one of us about resources that it's right there, we have a reference section which is government documents only, so it's quick reference. We have a resources section, and we have a subject area section that covers a variety of subjects. One of the things I'm trying to do is getting live guides or getting subject area sections to match up with the different colleges on campus. I saw that in another webinar, and I thought that was really nice. I'm in the process of that. It's going to take me a lot of time, but it's something to work on to help connect the campus to the collection. And that's what I want to do. I want to connect the campus to the collection, the government document collection specifically, because that's my job. So that's what I'm working for. And that's one avenue that I'm trying. Now, one of the things we have is topic guides. And I'll tell you why go topic guides in creating topic guides is really great for outreach. You're going to go, why? What does it matter? It really does help. Topic guides, you can do a variety of things, but it connects you to the community. And it connects you to the surrounding community in a very unique way. Now, whenever you create topic guides, these are guides based on the events, just like the display cases. They're based on the events, something locally, something important, something that your community would be interested in. That is what's great about these topic guides. So when we get to our topic guides here at the library, I would like to tell you that the best topic guides, the topic guides to get the most hits, the most attention are business live guides and environmental topic guides and academic topic guides that are very popular. I would like to tell you those are the most popular topic guides we have. However, this is not the case. These are the, with our last, we do, we keep track of everything that people get hits on and access to in our live guides, and these are the top live guides from this last year, I mean this last month. Instead of doing the academic and high level ones, we get GovDocs, Trail of Tears. We've gotten GovDocs infectious diseases. Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley is always in the top group of our topic guides that people use a lot. Hurricanes that have impacted Alabama, especially during hurricane season down here. Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day is one that we've been, people have been accessing lately. I think that one, at the Mobile Public Library, and we have a great relationship with the Mobile Public Library, their librarian called me the other day, well, a month ago, and asked me if we had anything about Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, and I told her we already had this great live guide, and I sent the link to her, and she's been using it, so I think, and sharing it with the community, so I think that's how that one has gotten top hits this month. Tuskegee Airmen always gets good hits, because it is a great live guide. These are great resources, and they're all government documents, so it's a great way to connect with, not only your surrounding community, but your academic community, everybody. It's just a great way of showing how good government documents can be for research. There's the Cuba and the Cuban Relationship, the Rosa Parks look guide. These are guides that always get a lot of attention, especially every time there's an event or something pertaining to Rosa Parks that gets quite a bit of attention. Topic guide tips. Whenever you're creating a topic guide, you need to connect your topic guides to your display. This is where it's a challenge. I have some topic guides connected to my displays, but because I'm doing 20 displays a year, at least, I can't make that many topic guides, and they be quality topic guides with valuable resources. I'm just not capable of making that many web guides Now, if you only have one display that you do a month, then it's certainly feasible, but if you have multiple displays like we do in this case, I just can't keep up. I would love to be able to keep up, but I just can't. And this is one of the things that, unfortunately, is not working out. I'm not quite sure what I could do about it at this point, but it's just one of those things. The next thing is something related to your community. Historical events are local interests. I live in Mobile, Alabama, so we have a lot of history that has happened down in this area. With that in mind, you can create live guides pertaining to topic guides, not live guides for me here, but topic guides pertaining to that local community event. And then, once you create that guide, you can share that guide with people that are hosting that event in your community. See? You see how you can make a connection. You have to have the resource to make that connection to the community and bring in that interest, but these are just something things that you can do. Another thing is think about your audience. Who are you creating the guide for? I made guides for senior citizens. Whenever I do guides for senior citizens, I keep it simple, and I think about their need or guide it toward their need. We recently made, we went to Port Creek Indians to visit them and to do a webinar, not a webinar, but did a presentation pertaining to stroke awareness, and we made a live guide for them, and we showed these sort of resources. So we simplified it and made it available for them. We just didn't make it complicated, easy for them to use, click-friendly, not too many levels, basic stuff designed for them. So just think about your audience. The more information you have, the more you need to break it up. For example, if you go to our CUBA and CUBE Relations Lift Guide, we have multiple tabs. We have a home tab, historical tab, gluttona tab, fidocastro tab, we recently passed away, rawcastro tab, and CUBE missile crisis. And then number five, try to think ahead when you make them. I have people in the community asking me for guides we have anticipated. For example, God Doc's Emancipation Proclamation. If somebody contacts me and they want more information about Emancipation Proclamation, I have this guide ready for anyone researching this topic. So I can immediately grab that and send it to them. So these things go across the board on the campus, students needing research. So you see what I mean whenever it's great for campus. In addition to outreach on campus, I share hours at the reference desk with the other librarians. Now if they need a primary resource for their topic, now we've gotten them coming across, coming through government documents. They can see our subject guides and our boxes that we have, the glass cases we have on the floor, promoting government documents. And then if they keep coming through, and I happen to be sitting at that government documents reference desk, I mean I'm sorry, we used to have God Doc's reference desk. As you see me sitting at that reference desk, whenever they need information, and they're asking for some primary resources, I'm going to show them government documents that are available, as well as the book stacks. So I'm going to look for specifically a government document that they can use to do their research. This is another way of bringing them over there into the collection and letting them see what we actually have available. Now outreach in the classroom is a different way of communicating. Whenever I do outreach in the classroom, when I'm teaching any sort of special or unique information literacy class, and I can build my own curriculum from the class, I will use government documents as my example. For example, I may be teaching about some aspect of nature, but I will be sure to add something about the National Park Service and their website. And I will also use those resources. So I use government documents in everything I teach. So if I'm showing anybody anything, I am making sure that I talk about government documents to some degree. Either I'm showing it to the most example on the screen, saying about, you know, what I do, something, so that they're aware that we have this collection. And also the classroom group is a little different. It's not like the other places where it's one-on-one or out of the campus or around the campus. This is the captive audience of like 30 or so people usually. So this is a great group to keep informed and to teach them about what we have. Another thing without reaching the classroom is EH-1 of two classes. I teach EH-1 of two classes with the other reference librarians here at my library. And I make sure that they know my name and my job title. I make sure they know that we are an FDLP and what that means. And if they need help finding any government information, they can contact me. Now, you might think that's a waste of time, but it's not, I mean, it doesn't happen all the time, but I do have students asking me questions after my presentation or after the EH-1 of two classes. I recently had one student ask me if there was a way that we could find out the rules and laws and regulations on preventing gamers from other countries to come into the United States to do their games. And we looked that up right there in the EH-1 of two classrooms and immediately they were able to find that information. So there's a value to doing that and keeping them informed and sharing that information as well. Also, remember, there are 30 some of students in the EH-1 of two classes. There's 30 people who knew about government documents and the government document collection that did not know about it before. So you've got your class of audience. Now, there's some things that you can try that just don't work out. And here's one of my sad stories. I wish I had worked out. I worked really hard on this, but this happened about five or six years ago now. I tried to do the Money Smart program in the library for the students. I contacted local banks. I put out flyers all around campus, and I shared the information any way I could on Facebook and all kinds of places. Did all this work, but nobody showed up? Yeah, I was disappointed. I think I had a couple of faculty members show up to a couple of the sessions. I just, it wasn't good. And then the last session that I had actually had a bank hosting it, the lady showed up. She had money to give the students and snacks to give the students. She came in. She was ready to teach these students. She had snacks. She had cash. She had all kinds of great free stuff for them, but not a single student showed up. I was embarrassed. Learned, though. What did I do wrong? So here is one of the things. First, you have to have faculty buy-in when you're creating a class like this. If they offer extra credit for attending, it's even better. So I learned that I need to partner with faculty when I'm doing something like this. The students are just not going to show up. They're very busy. They work very hard with school and work. We are commuting college, and so it's hard to get people, but I didn't know that. It's a learning experience. My timing was not good. I tried to make it a lunch and learn, but they choose the food court over me. I wonder why. I completely understand that. I just didn't fully comprehend that at the time. Sometimes the timing is just not the best. It could be the end of the semester, the beginning of the semester. You just don't know. So whenever you want to do a class or something on campus, design your own government documents instruction class, just put those things into consideration. I think the biggest thing for me was faculty buy-in. If I can get a faculty member to partner with me to invite me to come and talk to their class, so it just works out so much better than me trying to host my own classes and teach my own classes. It just turns out to be a better experience. Yeah, that part was short. Now we're going to outreach to the community, which is a whole other can of worms. It's completely different. Now, you can outreach in the community in so many different ways. I've talked about some of them. You can use the topic guides. You can use the website. You can use live guides and share with the community. You can do all kinds of things. You can pay attention to the events going on the community. You can contact those people. There are types of things that you can do. But one of the things you need to know when you're outreaching into the community is that, yes, we have the information and the means to access the information. However, the community must fill a part of the collection for them to use the collection or to know the value of the collection. They need to know the collection is available and how to access that information. There's all kinds of ways to do that, but I'll tell you, presentations are the best way that I've seen. You get the largest amount of people informed about resources at the shortest amount of time. And it's what I'd like to do in the community and these are some things that I'm talking about next is presentation practices. Now, whenever we're talking about the community, I have to say that it's not... the community is not one thing. Whenever you're working with the community, you have to think about the groups you're dealing with. You're dealing with public librarians, which is one of my communities. I'm dealing with the community who is aware of the collection and then the community who is unaware of the collection. Now, I can easily do a webinar on each one of those, but today let's just talk about some overviews of things that I do in regards to presentation practices that I do for all of the groups of the community. Okay, tips for presentations, for presenters. Number one, building a relationship. Network, network, network. Network is so important. Whenever you're going out to an event, collect business cards. Whenever you are going someplace or you've gone to somewhere that's library-related or that's community-related, collect the business cards and email these people. Let them know that you're available. Communicate. Let them know that you're here, that you have things available. Just talk to people. Build that relationship. Number two, offer something they need. With Mobile Public Library, that's one of my groups that I communicate with and I do training with, they needed recently this past year help with the census. They wanted to have their librarians familiar with the U.S. census. So I talked to them and I said, hey, I can teach your class, your librarians about the U.S. census, how to use it, because it's always changing. So I can bring in a class and I can inform you on how to use the census. And then I let them know that the training was free. So that's always a big plus. You let them know the training is free. Whenever I said that, they were like, oh, yeah, come on in. Come on in. We're glad to let you come in and teach your classes. Even with free training, if you do a good job, you know, they're going to ask you back. Because sometimes even if it's free, it's not quality. And so we'll get into that a little bit. But let them know the training is free. Number four, offer prizes for those to attend. Again, I don't have a budget. So what I do is that all the conventions, the ALLA convention and this, I'm a member of the Southeastern Library Association. So at the Southeastern Library Association convention and any other events, I collect those handouts and those treaties that they give you at these conventions. And I put those things together and I make a little bit of a bag of goodies. And I offer those prizes for those to attend. It's maybe not the best thing possible, but it's what I have. It's what I do. And they love them. It's incentive. So whenever we're doing an active learning activity, and we'll talk a little bit about that in my presentation, it's incentive for them to go and pay attention. Not that they will do it anyway, but it's incentive. And prizes are often a good, good way of doing it. I've gotten donations from the community. I've gotten all kinds of different things like that. So there's all kinds of things that you can do to get prizes for the people who attend your sessions, especially, and everybody likes something for free. So this is a way that really helps out. Be professional. You are providing free training, but treat it as if they paid you to come and speak. That's really, really important. Do the best job you can. I'm not expecting less, but I tried really hard to be articulate and to do my research and be ready and available for them. Remember, you are the expert. They are looking for you to answer their questions. Make notes of your audience and their needs. Modify the presentation to meet their needs. Also, whenever you're doing these presentations, learn from them. So you're not going to have a perfect, right out of the get-go, like your first presentation pertaining to this topic may not be the best one. But look at your audience. Pay attention to your audience and learn from them. Learn what you can use there. Another thing for presenting is have a lesson plan. I would like to thank Jason Ezell for letting me copy his template for his lesson plan. He was a great, great use. He's at another library now, but he was wonderful in helping me understand how to lay out a lesson plan. And then another librarian here named Angela, she taught me about use of GANs, nine events, and here's a list of those. These are, I'm not going to read everyone, but these are things that you need to think about whenever you're creating your curriculum for your class so that it will be a quality presentation. Planning ahead is everything for these presentations. I have a curriculum and a lesson plan for this presentation right now that I'm constantly referring to to make sure that I'm on track. So using lesson plans, developing your stuff in advance is a wonderful thing to do. Plan ahead, plan ahead, plan ahead. It will really, really pay off whenever you're talking with everybody and doing the actual presentation. Tips for the presentation. What's on the screen? I know I'm getting a little detail specific, but these are some things that I've tried that have really worked. They make a difference and people follow me and stay with me through the presentation. I don't lose my audience when I do these little tips and tricks. Color and arrangement. Try to never have a basic black and white slide in your presentation. Use color to draw the eye toward key points in the presentation. Also, break up the arrangement of the slide. You can put words on the left side and then the right side or tilt the images to add interest. I've done the exact same thing I'm talking about. I've switched sides. I've added some interest. Whenever I colored the words on the slide, I was able to draw your eye to the certain things. These things are very important when you're doing a presentation. Here's another thing that I do. I use Google Flies to make all of my presentations. While the place you work might have the latest and greatest of the various software, most places you go will not. Google Flies is the best all around. I've also emailed myself a copy, saved a copy to a flystripe, and printed out a copy. The rule of three, I always have three resources available. I have had time when Google Flies does not work great. Instead, I've gone through the PowerPoint presentation that you can download from Google Flies. Having the different versions is a great thing. Another thing is that your institution may already have a format provided for you to follow. Make sure you check the official guidelines. As you can see at the beginning of this presentation, I had that screen introduction that's following our guidelines, and I have USA at the bottom right corner that's then following with our guidelines. Prepare lesson plan in advance. This is what I have been talking about. It helps to keep you on track when you're doing the session. You can also try to line up the lesson plan with your slides. So the lesson plan is numbered like that. If you wanted a copy of one of my lesson plans, and again, I'd like to thank Jason, for sending me an email. And I will quietly do that. It is an Instagram world right now, and a picture is worth a thousand words. Use images to help your presentation. There are great places to get the stuff for free. The Library of Congress, the United Kingdom of National Archives, the Flickr Commons, these are great places that have these free images. So they help make your presentation unique. It gives variants. It gives depth. It helps you with the words you're saying. It really makes a difference. During your presentation, make eye contact. It's a really big thing. Look at people, communicate with them. Whenever they ask you a question, look at them. Number two, let people ask you questions during the presentation, but do not let them steal your time. If it takes you longer than 30 seconds to answer the question, then tell them you will need them after the class. This has happened over and over and over again, and that 30-second rule is great to follow. Add a learning activity to your presentation. That means active learning activity. Try to make it fun and interesting. With the census class, I tried to find the weirdest census information possible, and then I would make a game out of that for the librarians to try and find that information. And then when they found it, they giggled, because I would find towns that had three people in it, or I would have towns with unique demographics in the census class. It really does help. Hint up about a follow-up activity. Now, I have to thank another librarian here who taught me about follow-ups. What you can do is have two classes. You can have your initial class, which would be the census, but then the census has multi-layers. Like, there can be a more intensive, more researching-specific class that you can call a follow-up. You can come back and teach the same group of people if they want to know how to use even more census information and how to control the data a bit differently. That has worked really, really well, and you start building a relationship with them. That's really, really important, building that relationship. Get out from behind the podium. Don't be stuck behind the podium if you can walk amongst the people and talk to them. Whenever they're doing their learning activity, I don't stay in the front. I walk around. I'm available to help them because I'm the instructor at this moment. I get out there and I look and I ask them questions and I see what they're struggling with, and I remember that information so that when I do this presentation again, it's something I'm going to address. Encourage people to attend, attending to work together. I have had people do activities and to do the presentations and to do everything by themselves. And I've had them do them in a group, like group together with two or three people and then every time, if I get them to do it in a group, they remember. If I get them there individually, they don't retain it as well as if they do it with three other two or three other people. So encouraging the people to work together is a wonderful thing. And then incorporating those prizes into the lesson. So if they complete the lesson, if they're the first one to complete the lesson, if they're the last one to complete the lesson, if they were the first one to answer the question, all of that is very, very useful and helpful. Now, after the presentation, have a survey for them to fill out. We have a survey. If you want an example of it, I can send it to you. There's no time for me to go over a survey as a whole other class. But we can, we provide the survey for them to fill out so that they know, we can be informed and learn what's going on. Give time for them to ask questions about what you just taught them. So stay afterward and answer their questions. Sometimes it's 30 minutes, sometimes it's 45 minutes. If you do your job right, they will ask you at least two or three questions by the end of it because they want to know more. They were interested and they were captivated. Pay attention to the questions they ask. If it's important, make sure to address it in the follow-up sessions. That's another great thing about follow-up sessions is that if it's really important and everybody had a hard time with it, then that follow-up, you can address it and not leave them hanging. They've learned it. You can make sure they've learned that lesson. Do not leave right after your presentation. Take time to talk to the people who attended the class and spend time to talk to the host. It's imperative that you work on that relationship with the people that are there. They were nice enough to have you there. Yes, it was free, but they paid the light bill. They provided the facilities. They kicked out community people at the public library. They asked they closed off a special room. They had to put forth effort as well. So make sure you take time to talk to that host and let them know you appreciate what they did and that you're willing to come back and do more. Also do a quick glance of the survey results with the host while you're there and talk about future planning. The best time to plan the next session that you're going to do for them because you want to be a returning presenter. To do that, go ahead and introduce the idea. Say, hey, what can we do in six months? What is something that your people are interested in doing? You can build that relationship right there at that moment. Also follow-up with an email. I don't have that up here, but follow-up with an email and let them know that you appreciated having you there and start planning that next session. If you'd like more information, please feel free to contact me. It's Paula L. Webb, a government documents reference and outreach librarian at the Marks Library at the University of South Alabama. This is my number, 251-461-1993, and it's pweb at southalabama.edu. And thank you for your time. Thank you.