 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns, your host here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is Commission's weekly online event where we do cover any topics that may be of interest to librarians across the state. We do these every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, and they are recorded. So if you are unable to listen to a well-life session, you can always go back and listen to one of our two years worth of recorded sessions. Once a month, we do a tech talk with Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission, and that's what we're doing today. So I am going to pass over control and everything to Michael and have him take over. All right. Thanks, Krista. Hello, and welcome to the January 2011 tech talk. Today we have a special guest from Idaho and lots of technical difficulties that we're working our way around. And then we'll have some news and things to cover kind of at the end of the hour. So with that, I would like to introduce you to Jasmine Dean. Jasmine, are you there? Yes, I am. All right. Great. So why don't we go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and where you're working now. Okay. My name is Jasmine Dean. I was previously an academic science librarian at the Claremont Colleges, specifically working with Harvey Mudd College, which is one of the top engineering institutions for undergraduate engineering in the country. I had a library there until budget cuts led to its closure a little over a year ago. I was heavy in instruction and emerging technologies. I founded the Embedded Librarian Initiative there and worked pretty heavily in getting us integrated into the technology, learning management systems, and classroom instruction. When I lost my library, I no longer had any desire to remain in California. California and I didn't see eye to eye. I'm a rural country girl at heart, and it was imperative once I lost my library that I needed to vacate that area immediately. So I moved to Idaho, and now I am the director of a small, relatively rural library. We are resource thin, so we have to be very creative, which most small public library directors can empathize with. I actually live outside of town on a small farm. We have four horses, a donkey, a garden, chickens, and we're getting goats and a beehive in the spring. So that is a little bit about me. So we can really say you are probably the definition of a rural librarian. Yes, yes. And I can definitely say that this has been quite a change for me because at the Claremont Colleges, I was in a hotbed of technology. I was provided the latest equipment every two years. Claremont paid for my phone. I was expected to do all of the latest tech reference type stuff with chat reference and text messaging and all this kind of stuff. And I'm living in a place where the majority of my users do not have computers. The majority of my users don't even have a smartphone. So I'm definitely experiencing the other side of the digital divide, which has been quite an eye-opening experience for me. Great. So let me ask, how did you find this job or did this job find you? This job found me. Literally, I had had enough of Southern California. I couldn't be there any longer and I just quit my job and left. And everybody thought I was absolutely out of my mind. That was a huge risk to take, especially in this economy. And I just moved to Pocatello. I interviewed for this position within 24 hours of having driven my truck and all of my possessions into the state and was offered this job about an hour and a half after that interview. Well, you are incredibly brave and incredibly lucky. Thank you. Well, you know, I mean, you have to take risks. One of my favorite quotes is that life is a journey, not a guided tour. You know, if you're not happy, you need to make change. So describe, okay, I'll get to the particular library in a second, but describe like your service area. Where are you? What do you cover? What is it? Are you a district? Kind of describe the environment of your library. Okay. I have about 12,000 people in my, actually, let me back up. I got new numbers because we just did our annual statistics. I have 18,000 people in my user area, about 7,000 have cards at my library. I serve a very odd sort of area because I serve all of school district 25, which is most of Bannock County in southeastern southern Idaho, with the exception of Pocatello City Limits covered by the Marshall Public Library. So that means that my area is a big donut. And I sit at the top part of the donut and I have a very large region south of the city of Pocatello that extends almost 10 miles outside of the city that is also my region. So as you can imagine, marketing is a huge issue and concern because I do have people that are quite a distance away and they are essentially my user base. So that is very challenging as well. This is a relatively rural area. There's between Chubbock, which is the little city where my library is, and Pocatello, which is its neighbor. There's about 50,000 people. So we are larger in that regard. However, the majority of the people who come in to the district 25 area live on the periphery of that city. So we get a lot of farmers. We get a lot of rural people who have self-sufficient farms who do live and have acreage, land, things like that. So even though I am close to a larger metropolitan area in the eyes of Idaho, the majority of my people who come in and take advantage of library services do live in a rural environment and in some particular areas, a highly impoverished environment. I also serve a good portion of the Shoshone-Vanik tribe because the majority of the reservation area falls within my district. So I do a lot of outreach to that community as well. Great. So that is a mishmash of things. Yeah. Let me ask you what is probably an easy but short answer question. What is your annual budget? My annual budget is about $500,000. And that is a lot higher than the majority of my libraries. And a lot of that does come off of the property values from two parts of my donuts, which are nestled in foothill environments where you have a much higher income and people who are buying nicer homes, nicer property to take advantage of the view of the Portnif Valley. So my budget is driven off of a levy rate off of the property taxes. So as a result, I do have a healthier budget than many of my counterparts because I have these two areas on each side of my donut that brings in a higher levy for the property values, which is nice because that means that I can take advantage of that and provide services and internet and software and computers and instruction to the parts of my donut district area that do not have any sorts of these resources. So to kind of hint to people why I've got you on the line here is I know you've made a lot of changes to the library since you've gotten there. Can you give us kind of a description of what the library was before you got there? Absolutely. I would be very happy to. The previous director invested the majority of her time building and creating the building I'm currently sitting in. We only had a very, very small building that had been built prior to that, the district library. And I do say that the district library does serve all of the schools. So we are expected to provide additional library resources for the schools because their libraries are very thin. And prior to this building being here, there was just a small section of a strip mall that belonged to the library. So the previous director worked hard to get this building built. She also worked very, very hard to build a consortium. So we are a part of the library consortium Eastern Idaho, which are about 23 small rural libraries. We have one catalog and one catalog server that we share between all 23 of us. So all of our cataloging is done between the 23 of us and our catalog is shared between the 23 of us because none of us would really be able to afford to have a heavy-duty system and server and take advantage of some of the nicer ILSs had it not been for that work that she did. So as a result of her focus and really setting the foundation, there was not a very good technological presence. We still have a lot of work to do as far as getting an adequate computing search center up for the users. And we didn't necessarily have good cohesive policies in place for the building. So my role to come in is to, and I was hired, when I was hired, the board asked that I focus on marketing to make more people aware of the services that we offer to bring in the technological needs that we have and to get us up to speed so that we can build on the foundation that the previous director built. And really make this library shine. So it sounds like you basically have full support of the board. Yes, I do. The board is, you know, they really make sure that they maintain their eyes on the budget and they maintain their eyes on policy. But otherwise, as long as I can justify what I'm doing, they give me a lot of freedoms because they do trust in my expertise to make the decisions about marketing and technology. Great. One of the things I definitely want to give you a chance to do is kind of give us a tour of your website. I know you've done a lot with that. We'll get to that in a moment. We'll give you control to kind of give us a tour. Beyond the website, what other things have you done that... Well, I'll just stop there. What else have you done besides reading the website? And we'll go from there. We'll let you pick. Okay. Well, I'm going to talk first about... There's one thing that I want to cover that I think that is crucial for all small rural libraries to take advantage of, and that's Google Docs, and we'll talk about that in a second. But before I get to that, I want to talk about one of the things that I did that was my favorite change. When I came in, we have a very moderate materials budget. In my opinion, we only have about $50,000 for all of our materials budget, which to me, I wish that we had a little bit more. I don't feel that that is enough. All of that was funneled through one person, through the director. She did all of the buying. She did all of the withdrawing, all of that kind of stuff. I don't necessarily think that that was the best way to use that resource. So what I did is I got to know the staff, and I have 13 people. The majority of my people are part-time. They do not work full-time. I only have five full-time employees. But I got to know what everybody likes, and I found out that Evelyn is an expert zone poor gardener. She has a small, self-sufficient farm. She knows how to raise dairy goats and chickens and ducks. I found out that Penny is the best cook and is constantly spoiling us with cakes and goodies. I found out that Susan has a lot of interest in the medical area because she takes care of family, and that Amanda has high interest in music and musical arts. So what I did is I created subject specialists by taking advantage of what my staff knew. I justify this by thinking that there's a lot of people like Evelyn, myself included, who have a small, self-sufficient spread where we grow our own food. We maintain our own herd animals. And as a result, I gave to her the charge of developing those collections in our library. I let Amanda gut all of the musical stuff and start buying how to teach music to your children in various music books. I told Penny to get rid of all of those 1945 cookbooks and get beautiful, brightly illustrated, and up-to-date cookbooks that also cover a wide variety of diets that we now follow from diabetic to diets to carbohydrate-free diets and so on and so forth. And by doing that, I discovered that it was great for the collection because my staff began to develop quite an affinity and an ownership of their subject areas. And if they didn't like the things that were in those collections, they would withdraw them. And it was wonderful to see these people saying, oh, I can't believe they have this horrible thing about these chicken coops. You don't do this with chickens anymore and throwing these books aside and then buying these wonderful things that are very relevant to the community interests. That not only took the burden of purchasing off of me, but it enabled my staff to be very excited about an area of the library. So our circulation has been up quite a bit in the last six months because we're buying all of these books that are relevant to the community. So that was the biggest change that I'm very happy with because I take great pleasure in seeing my staff get really, really excited about taking care of an area and buying books for it. So that's one of the big changes that I made that makes me happiest. Now I'll talk a little bit about the Google Docs. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, first of all, just to respond to that, getting buy-in. I mean, that's spectacular. Last time we saw each other at conference, and some people may remember when we had the live tech talk from Internet Library and Jasmine was one of our guests. And she was telling me about all this stuff and it's taken me this long to find a good time to talk about. She didn't even tell me about that. I'm like, wow, there's even more. That's just wonderful. Yeah, that's amazing. You know, getting that staff buy-in is great. So yeah, why don't we go ahead and give her... Okay, we have a question. Two questions have come in real quick. Let's throw those in. Okay. Do you have a bookmobile? No, I am drafting a proposal to buy one. All right, then. And I guess the question was, is how did you market all of the updates to the library resources? And maybe that's something you'll address in the other areas. Sure. I would be happy to address that separately. That's been something that has been really challenging, but yes. I will probably guess that that's our marketing person asking that question. Okay, let's go ahead and make Jasmine a presenter here. So what I'm going to do, Jess, is I'm going to hand over control to you. So once we do this, they will see your screen. So you ready? I am ready. You should see the pop-up thing to let you know to accept and show yours. There we go. Okay. So what I'm going to show you first is the Google Docs. And then I'll talk about my website. When I first came in, I have two librarians, and the most active, my superstar of the library, was using a personal hotmail account for her email. And then I found out that my circulation supervisor was using her personal email account to send email correspondence on behalf of the library. And that my administrative assistant was doing the same. So I wanted to change that. I wanted to find a way to give all of my staff a Portnif library email address. The way that I could do this that was easiest for me, because even though I do have some experience playing with toys, like iPhones and smartphones and things like that, I am not a technological wizard. And I needed something that was going to be very, very easy. I also needed something that wasn't going to involve any hardware, because good night, I was not going to be able to manage a server in any way, shape, or form. Well, the solution was Google Apps. If you are a 501C3, you can get up to 50 user accounts through Google that is completely free. The only thing I had to buy was my domain. And I needed to buy that anyway because I needed to provide a website for my library. So I took advantage and I got the Google Apps. And this here is what the Google Apps looks like. Let me see if I can't just get that out of the way. This is what you see when you first log into the Google applications. You get email with it, you get a calendar, you get chat, you get Google Docs, you get websites, and you can get mobile applications for smartphones, which I haven't played with because I am the only person in my library who has a smartphone device. So I didn't need that for my staff. But I did give everybody an email account. So I can look at my organization and users, and this will give me a list of all of the people that are on my payroll, including my two service desks. So I have two circulation stations on a U-shaped desk. And I gave each of these an account because I wanted to take advantage of chat. And even though we live in a very small building, it's very nice for a staff member having a problem with a patron, for example, to immediately send a chat to me in my office or my assistant in the back office or even to the head of circulation stating that they have a problem. They can do this without leaving their station. And also with each of these being logged in permanently, they get all of our email updates. So this is really easy to manage. I can add new users. I can see when they are logged in so I can chastise my payroll person and say, well, you haven't logged in since you gave us our checks on the 24th, for example. But I can kind of keep track of how often people are actually checking their email. And this also gives everybody their own specific work-related emails so that they don't have to use their personal email when doing library business. And this is important because in addition to distributing the collection development, I also distributed other projects. So Penny, for example, is doing our community service with our juvenile justice outreach. Nancy is doing our audio books. And so she talks to our books on tape and our playaway vendors. And all of these people need to have a professional email address that works on behalf of our library. And this was all totally free and it was ridiculously easy to set up. It was just amazing. Go ahead. It also looks like Nancy needs to get more sleep. Yeah, Nancy, I love Nancy to pieces. Nancy is constantly in trouble because she works too much. Sorry, go ahead. No, I mean, it's true because she's a part-timer, but she comes in. She's a wonderful, wonderful person. And all of us in libraries can relate that the majority of us are so dedicated to our libraries that we don't know when to stop. And I definitely try and encourage all of my staff to make sure that they give themselves personal time away from the library and not let the library completely overrun their lives because that way they can stay fresh and happy. And Nancy, yes, Nancy is definitely one of my go-getters. Everybody is. I'm very lucky. I have remarkable people and some of the best people I've ever worked with are in this library. I can also create groups. This was really important. I have senior staff we meet once a week. These are my administrative assistant, my head of circulation, and my two librarians. And we need to talk about different things. So I created a group for them so that we can have our own personal communication channels. And then I can also create one for all staff so that I can send out an all-staff message. So this is kind of the fun little Google Apps that we did, and it's been really nice. I use the calendar extensively, and I'll show you my calendar here. My calendar also has our events calendar and our meeting room calendar. And everybody who creates any kind of events has access to all the calendars so that they can go ahead and book the room and then book the events calendar, which is pushed and shared to our website. So I don't have to maintain a separate events calendar. I just have this, and then using the calendar share settings was able to link to it on our website. So this is really, really nice. And this way we can turn different calendars off or on just by clicking on them. Of course, my calendar is shared so that my staff can see where I am and what I'm doing at any point in time because it's crucial that they be able to get in touch with me. We also, of course, have our email. All of us use this. And this is really nice for everybody because, again, we have a level of communication that we didn't have prior to me getting here. And I've showed the staff how to use this. They're all very, very good about it now. So there's a lot of different things. Let's see what else can we show you. Oh, I want to go back to our, let me go show you our docs. We use Google Docs so much, and so this is a rhetorical question for you. How many of you have pads of paper and scratch notes and binders that you constantly have to update with various changes? Well, all of this now is being done in Google Docs. So I have a policies folder. And any time that we come up with a policy, we put it here with certain policies. We make these policies publicly available, and then we link to them off of the website. And this way, we have transparency for our users so that our users know what to expect as far as acclaims returned, for example. And then my staff also know where to go whenever they have a question about a particular policy that we have. Our forms are also being put online again so that people can just print stuff off, and they don't have to go and find that particular folder or print form. We also do our book ordering here. I order all of the books, even though my staff does the selection. So as they peruse their areas, they have a Google spreadsheet that is shared to everybody where they will type in the date of the request, the ISBN of the copy, because we will buy audio books, CDs, movies, you name it. And I go through, because we only have $50,000, so we just divided that by 12. First, we subtracted out the databases and subscriptions, divided the remainder by 12, and that's how much we spend per month. And I'll go through, and when I order something, I create that row to be yellow. And when it arrives, my administrative assistant creates that row as red. And then once it is processed and checked in, my head of circulation either puts it on hold or removes it from the list. And this replaced a legal pad that had names and numbers and scratches and writings up the sides of the margins with additional people to put things on hold. This way, we don't have to worry about that. It was a very easy way to manage, and of course we can search. So if somebody comes in and they say, well, I want that new John Les Crote book damaged, we can search it and say, well, it's on the order list and just go ahead and add their information as a request. So this has been a really nice change. Other things that we do in the documents is that I have links to forms I've created to the website. And it populates right here. So I see here that I have a question that came in while I was away, because I took Monday and Tuesdays off. How do I obtain a PIN number so that I can log in with my library code? So I'll just answer her question and email her back. And this is really nice because all of this stuff was really easy to do. It's very easy to create a new form. You just create your form right here. And you can just specify what questions you want and then make that form publicly available. And like I said, this is all very easy. It did not have a steep learning curve at all. And before I knew it, I was up and running managing this technology without any technological expertise whatsoever. So that's Google Apps. Any questions about Google applications before I show the website and how I integrated the Google Apps into that? Yeah, Jess, I actually have a question. Yeah. It just popped in my head as you were talking about the book ordering that it used to be done on a legal pad. Michael and I just have done. But I mean, I wonder, this is a lot of change for people. And we know that's a horrible buzzword that people hate it. How did your staff deal with all these things? I mean, switching from a legal pad to all this online stuff, was there total buy-in and acceptance? I mean, oh, you got the buy-in as far as the selection, which is an easy thing to convince them of that by saying you're going to select the stuff you do. But all this other things, how did that work out? Was there problems? Was there confusion? Yeah, it was chaos. It was absolute chaos at first. We meet monthly. Right now, at first, the all staff met monthly. I think we're going to scale that back now to like four or five times a year. But the all staff meetings, they were paid. So that hour and a half was paid time in addition to their scheduling. So I kind of pushed my budget a little bit, but it was a risk I was willing to take. And I bought food. So we had Thai food one time. We had Mexican food the next time we had pizza the third time. So that I was creating an ambiance of, I appreciated their efforts. I wanted to reward my staff and thank them for these things that they were doing and the changes that they were beginning to adopt. And then I did training. So I stood and showed everybody how to access their Google Docs, how to do a spreadsheet, how to type things in and manipulate. And I did have to steal the legal pad and then the legal pad replacement and the calendar off the wall, which I also recently found again in somebody's work area. But it was a process. And then I met with everybody individually and I sat down and we worked through things. I brought my laptop and I would ask them to do something. And then I would respond in the same spreadsheet or in the same chat or in the same calendar so that I was meeting one on one with people. I also have an open door policy so that at any point in time my staff have questions. They can come in and they can sit and we will work it out. So it was a slow process, but the most important things were to communicate why I felt this needed to happen. How I felt it was going to improve their work performance. And once I was able to explain that we did a lot of training before we hit the ground running with you have to do this type stuff. And the whole time telling them how much I appreciated their efforts and thanking them for the adoption. So as different people came on board I also did a monthly award and I still do this. In a month I choose a staff member and I give them just a small $20 gift card or a grocery card or a game stop card or a book or something like that. Some sort of a reward and the reward is an exemplary job, an exemplary execution of a menial task. Some kind of flip comment thing like that that just says hey you did something you have to do. Really, really well and thank you. I appreciate that. And those kinds of things really helped get the staff to do the buy-in because I was telling them why it was important and I was telling them at the same time that I really appreciated their efforts and their buy-in. That's great that you did all that. I think part of that also is for you coming in as a new supervisor to a group of people that it's important to have that kind of communication and what you do. Leadership and appreciation is showing them you're new to being in charge of them. So being that way to start with is just awesome. The best way to go about doing it and get everything starting off smoothly to begin with. I try and I also ask them because I don't know everything. I know where to look stuff up. That's pretty much as much as I know. So I need their expertise. And a lot of these people have worked in this library for much longer than other staff members. And so I ask them well how do you think that we ought to do this? What are your ideas? And I definitely involve the staff and a lot of the decisions that are made. I also have for all the policies that we're creating for the library not only are all the senior staff involved but I have a representative from the clerks. And they come in and that representative from the clerk tells us well this is what's going to be good for the services desk or this is typically what happens on a Saturday or this is typically what happens at 8 o'clock at night so that we do have communication and transparency all the way around. Great. So we do have a question which I think will actually lead us directly into where you wanted to go next and Sarah is saying that you mentioned you link to policies from you link your website to your policies at your dock. And she's saying is there a way to do this in a read-only format so that patrons don't have to really modify them? Yes. So let me show you because I have not yet, you saw my calendar I meet with the board today. So I have not yet actually made the policies page publicly accessible on the website but the way that you do this let's go into the policies let's go into the claims return policy. Under share you can choose your settings and so all staff can edit or I can say you know what all staff can just view and save those changes. Let's close this window. I can also when I publish this to the web I can just it's not editable at all if it's published as a web page. So I have this is the link in my published document I'm going to copy this close this window let's paste this URL in and here is this uneditable web page I can't edit it I can't do anything to it I just can view the information. So once you turn anything into a web page you there's no way for anybody to edit it and the only way that you go back and edit it is go back to the document itself and make the change. So I can say here uh-huh go ahead. And just to clarify that all staff was because you set up an all staff group you could set it so that like just everybody can view but your assistant could edit. Exactly absolutely you're absolutely right so let's let's do that. So let's go share and I have it all staff can view and I'm going to add people. Susan King is my assistant and I'm going to make it so that she can edit and then I'll share that with her. And so now my administrative assistant can edit the document the all staff can view the document and I'm the owner of the document. So that's very easy you can set it up this way I can also set it up so that my head of circulation can also edit it and that way I have two administrative assistants or you know two senior staff who have the ability to edit this document. Uh so if I'm on vacation or I'm at a conference I can say oh my god you have to update the policy blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They could do it. All staff would see it right away. The public would see it right away. But nobody else can edit it. So, let me show you how this web page here, which we can't edit. I can't click into it. I can't type. I can't do anything like that. But from the document policy itself, let's say that we just want to make this bold and larger, and then I save it, click over to my web page and reload it, and that change should be reflected or not, so it might take a minute or two. This is how you actually update the different web pages. Yeah, going out to a public version I think isn't exactly instantaneous, but pretty darn close. But this is where you would make those edits, so the web pages, no. Nobody can edit those. The person who asks says, thank you, very cool. Good, you're welcome. OK, so let me go over to, I'm going to close. Well, let's just minimize this. You never know when you might need it. This is my website, and when I first got here, we had a menial website that was provided by the state of Idaho. The state of Idaho, like the state of Nebraska, has a library commission and a library association, and the commission does so much for the public libraries here, and one of the things that they did was provide a Drupal installation on an Idaho server for a web page. It was ridiculously difficult to do anything with it. There was no structure. There was no, I couldn't tell what I was doing. There was insufficient materials. It was just very, very hard to do. So the first thing I did was go out and buy my own domain. And I bought my domain from GoDaddy, and then I talked to Blake Carver, and he does ILS host, and ILS hosting does blogs. They do websites. They do all kinds of stuff for the library community. And Blake is hosting a WordPress installation. This website is WordPress. It's blogging software. I don't know the first thing about making a web page. I don't know the first thing about putting together any kind of stuff to do these neat things. I needed to have something that was extremely easy, and WordPress is extremely easy. So this is a WordPress installation. And I was able to use all of the things, these little widgets in WordPress, to come up with this. But before we get too far away from the Google Docs, these links here, my events calendar, is my Google Doc calendar for my staff. So you can see here, all of the things that we have reserved in our events calendar is online. So when the users click this link, it's automatically updated because if the mommy and me play group is meeting at 10 instead of 1030, users are going to be able to see that. And then if they mouse over anything, they can see a description if it's available about the event. We do share our meeting room with the public, so this Pokemon League and our Dungeons and Dragons League are actually community members that make their events public. And then we list it in the event's calendar. So which is kind of cool. We're definitely becoming the gaming library in town. We do have gaming several times a week. Let's also look at this. I have a request materials form. This is the same form I created in Google Docs that populates a spreadsheet that I can see. So my users can recommend a book for purchase. They can go to the website and they can fill in this form and we will order their book and we will let them know when it comes in. And this is a Google Docs form that I just then shared and linked to. It's very easy. Same thing with the have a question. This is also a Google Docs form. So that one question I showed you, this is the form that that user filled out. So these are all Google Docs over here. Like I said, this is WordPress. So let's go look at the back end of WordPress. This is what it looks like. So I can see right now that I have 51 posts. I have some pages that I'm creating. And if I look at the pages, I have a policies draft. And I'm working on a databases page draft. Because right now we don't really have a good place for all of our databases to be listed. And then once the policies are approved by the board, this page will be made live. And the policies as they're written will be linked here so that users can see them. Let's take a look at the posts. Posts are very easy to make. I just click Add New Post. I can title my post and put any kind of content in here. If I have an image, I can upload an image directly from my computer. I can add video. Right now Idaho is doing a book trailers event. We are taking advantage of our very creative teens to use flip cameras and J-Cut, which is a video editing software to create book trailers. So we're actually going to be linking those to our website and doing posts. And so I can easily just upload a video or just link to a video by using these typical WYSIWYG icons. I can make things bold. If I felt like trying to play with HTML, I could use the HTML tab. And then I don't even know what you would do. But if you wanted to, you could. I just work in the visual editor. Because like I said, I have absolutely no experience whatsoever creating websites. But it's very, very easy to type in copy and paste information. I created categories for events, frequently asked questions, internet resources, news reviews, so on and so forth. And I categorize in one or more categories each of the posts that I made. These categories are in a widget that populates and then click over these categories right here. So that my users can say, oh, well, I have a question. Let's look at the frequently asked questions. Here is information about our board. And those all come from those categories that I created. So I'm going to click back over to the administrative. I can also add tags. So anytime that we do a gaming event, I definitely put gaming in there. So it's pretty easy under categories. I can create new categories. This is all really pretty easy for me to do. Because again, I don't have very much technological expertise. I can just kind of muddle around. In WordPress, it's pretty easy. Let me show you the widgets. The widgets are a lot of fun. This is where you have your widgets here. I have my sidebar 1. And this is where I have a Flickr widget and my Twitter widget. So any pictures that we take of any of our events, we upload to our Flickr. So let me go over here. I'll show you if we just click on this. Flickr is only $24 a year. So it was easy for me to put that into our marketing budget. And all of the pictures that we take, we just upload into Flickr. We have a Yahoo account that's Portnif Library. So it relates to our name. But you can see this is a lot of fun just using a widget. And I can just search widgets for Flickr. I could easily just add in this particular widget that gave me all of the pictures that we take. And the same with Twitter. We do have a Twitter. I don't use the Twitter very often. Because again, the majority of my people don't even have smartphones, don't use Twitter. But I do have it linked to our Facebook fan page. And so anytime that I pushed up to our Facebook fan page, because people definitely use Facebook here, then it goes out to Twitter and the few people that follow me, mostly other Idaho entities. In the sidebar too, I have in the text boxes, let's see if I can. Here we go. This is that Google Calendar link. And so I had to look up how to make an HTML link. And I'm sure that Michael and Krista could help you with that if you don't know the tagging for that. But I was able to just figure out how to make the events calendar be a tag. So each of these little guys has its own text box. And that's what creates these links right here. And then in my sidebar here, you can also see I've got my categories. I've got my tag cloud, which shows all of our tags. And then I also have delicious, because I do still use delicious for social bookmarking for the libraries. We are heavy, heavy web junction users in Idaho. And every week we have a liaison send out web junction links. And so oftentimes I'll put many of those links in delicious. And it's posted to the library's website so that people can learn more about some of the things that is going on. You guys probably all remember the bed bug scare. And that was a really important and quite a talked about post when the bed bug information came out. So this is kind of how I drive our web page. I absolutely had to do something like this, because I don't know the first thing about web publishing. But we definitely needed to have something better than this awful page that was provided by the state of Idaho. So any questions about the website? Well, I'll just throw in here, Jasmine, that we're doing the Nebraska libraries on the web project here in Nebraska. We've had a couple of test groups. Hopefully, come February or March, we'll be opening it up to everybody in the state. But we're running WordPress. So actually if you're interested in anything that she was seeing there, it would be contact me. And I'm sure we'll be doing an Encompass Live specifically on our program coming up. But yeah, I can't stress enough how easy WordPress is to use. And to use specifically, Jasmine, I would just, as a side note point out it, notice that there was an upgrade to WordPress there. You do want to get that installed soon. It's a major security fix. So you might want to have some time in the 24 hours. So anyways, so I got one other question for you, which I want you to address before we kind of all wrap this up. Has anything not worked? Is there anything that you kind of tried and went, OK, that's not going to work, or didn't catch, or you tried one thing and then you had to completely change it? And now you've figured out what to do. Basically, it's the failure question. Has anything not worked, or have you done? Yeah, a lot of things have failed. Pretty much every day something fails, and we have to adjust. Whoever brings me the fail, we talk about it, and then we talk about how we could probably make it better. And then if it is a significant enough change, we take it to the entire group to brainstorm for positive solutions, or to a wider audience. The most recent fail was the holiday policy that I recently created. And the structure for how I determined whether or not you earned policy didn't actually work once we implemented it. And now I have to go back to the board and say, yes, I know that you have a tentative draft. Now I have another subsequent draft based on the last four days that I actually need you to have to look at. So yeah, we are definitely trying and failing and assessing. We've also discovered that there is no sense in any of us doing any kind of activity after six o'clock with the exception of the gaming activities. Every event that we've done after six has failed miserably. So we just assess it, and then we determine, well, how could we do it better? What could we change? Is it valuable at all? And ask these questions. We are not afraid of failure. If somebody comes up with an issue, I address it as an issue. I don't use the word failure as much as I use the word learning opportunity, because we do need to learn from whatever failures we do have. So I know that there's also still the marketing question. I don't know if you want me to mention a few things about what I'm doing to market. Why don't you do that kind of short a little bit? And I do one other question for you. But go ahead and talk about the marketing bit. OK. So what I'm doing, I'm taking advantage of the fact that we don't have a lot of news. And I write press releases and articles about stuff that end up getting in the paper. And because I'm doing that, they're beginning to pay a particular attention to us. I do buy advertising in the paper as well. We are doing flyers. Idaho is huge for flyers and bulletin boards. There is a bulletin board at every grocery store. There's a bulletin board by every entrance and exit to just about every retail place and community place around here. So I made flyers just in. I used actually pages on my Macintosh, my personal machine, and just made a flyer. And I just printed up like 50. And I went to every store and just put up flyers about gaming and that kind of stuff. Because everybody looks at the community bulletin boards. I've also joined Rotary. And I've also joined a leadership Pocatello initiative, which is part of the Chamber of Commerce. And in doing so, I can really get some guerrilla marketing out there by saying, oh, well, Justine, we can help you with your dictionary project because we're the library and we have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah resources. So a lot of that guerrilla marketing just by getting involved in the community, which is something that comes from the embedded librarian initiative in academic libraries. So I have told all of my people that they can have a certain amount of paid time, a couple hours a week, where they go get involved in the community as long as they try very hard to make sure that the library is the presence in that initiative. So that has been really huge with a lot of that guerrilla marketing. Great. Yeah, that's wonderful. I've given people an opportunity to get out and participate in the larger community. OK, so the only other question I have to ask is, and I have to ask it only because we kind of put it in the description, what's the story about cataloging the pets? The turtles. OK, so we are Idaho. We love our animals here. And many people have chickens and rabbits and things like that. Somebody gave us a couple of turtles. And they were a donation. And a lot of kids wanted to look at the turtles and see the turtles and play with the turtles. And so when we first got them, we had a lot of staff having to take staff time to go and work with children and the turtles. So as a result, I cataloged the turtles. And we did in-house use counts on the turtles. So any time I had a staff member doing anything with the turtles for a community member, we did a use scan. I wanted those statistics, so yeah, that's what we did with the turtles. I think when you told me that story, that was when I was convinced we had to get you on the show. Well, you know, I mean, I need those statistics. I'm sure every single person who's listening to this understands the statistics that you have to send to the state at the end of the year. I wanted those statistics because that meant that a staff member was doing something with a library held item. So it made perfect sense. Yeah, well, so the expected question came in. Did you actually barcode the turtles? No. We have a barcode behind the desk. Gotcha. OK. We're just about out of time. We started late, so we run a little late. That's good. Jesmyn, I want to thank you so much for doing this. I know we had a little back and forth trying to find a time where we could all get together at the same time and do this. It was absolutely wonderful. I appreciate it. The three of us definitely are going to stay in touch anyways. I want to hear how things go as time goes on. It sounds like you're doing an amazing job out there and successfully making a lot of changes. And I think that right there is kind of the amazing bit of the whole thing. Well, thank you. I want to thank you for the opportunity. It's huge to be able to share what we're doing. And my last parting words would be that I come in every day and I tell the staff that we're here to have fun because that's what we do. And that it's just a library. Nobody's going to die if we don't do it right. And those are the two things my staff hears all the time. Because it isn't rocket science. It isn't neuroscience. Nobody's going to die if we make a mistake. We don't have to be perfect. We just have to try. And we just have to have fun because the more fun we have the more fun the community is going to have. Absolutely. That's awesome sentiment. All right, Jesmit, thanks again very much. We're going to go ahead and take presentation back from you and just do a little bit of a wrap up here. So again, thank you very much. Thank you. All right, folks. Because of the time limit, I'm not going to spend too much time on the links. I didn't have a lot of links anyways. We'll obviously be posting the delicious URL for this session along with the recording. I just wanted to point out a couple of things real quick on this list without spending too much time on them. One, right now the library day in the life project is going on. If you're interested in either reading about what different librarians do in their day, it's a great resource. Also, they're looking for a lot of people to contribute. I did plan on doing that. I did it last time around. I've got to find the right day to do it. I've had interesting days this week, but I've been too busy to write about them. It's a conflict. Some new things going on with some new browsers coming up. Libra Office, this is like open office. It's an open source, completely free competitor to Microsoft Office. It just came out. And it is getting a lot of really good press. So if you're looking for a free office alternative, maybe something to look at, I'll probably put this off until next month. Mention this again about World IPv6 Day. Super geeky if you want to get into that. Also, if you're interested, I found a great article on the differences of audio formats. There's Wave, and there's MP3, and there's AAC, and all these others. It kind of explains those. PDFZilla is a piece of software. I specifically want to mention this today because it's good through the end of the month, which is like next week sometime. It will allow you to actually take most PDFs and turn them into something you can actually edit. Yes, so if that's something you're finding you want to do, you might want to check out PDFZilla. And then if any of you- After that, then you have to pay, I assume is what you mean. No, no, no, no. It's free as long as you download it and register it before February. Oh, I'm glad. Yeah, it's free. No, no, no. Yeah, it's downloadable software. Grab the software before the end of the month. Grab it before the end of the month if you want that. Yes, thank you for clarifying that. It will continue to be free to use after it. You won't get updates for free, but you'll have functioning software. And then if any of you are Dropbox users, I'm a big Dropbox user for sharing documents with other people and for sharing documents across multiple computers, which I'm constantly dealing with, some tips, tricks, and tools for advanced and intermediate use for Dropbox. So those are just the quick things I wanted to point out in today's session. You can take a look at those. They're provided in the descriptions. If you've got any questions, drop me an email as always. Possibly next month, if some of them need more. Some of them might come back. Yeah, I might talk about IPv6 a little more next month. That's coming up. That thing actually, the day is in June. So we've got some time, but it's starting to get impressed. All right, that's my stick. OK, great. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Jess. That was an awesome show, I think. Just want to encourage everybody to sign up. Register for next week's Encompass Live, which is on collections for your community. Tools, cake pans, toys. Turtles. Turtles. I don't know if I talk about turtles. This is a couple librarians. We have Blair Public Library here in Nebraska, and we talk about what they've done to do special collections. And the kind of collections are out there in other libraries, you might be interested in. So you can please feel that will be our topic next week, and this is our topics for the next couple months. So thank you very much for attending. We've got some applause. I think that was applause for Jess earlier. Thank you very much, and we will see you next week. Bye-bye.