 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week as we are doing today, and it is then posted to our website for you to watch at your convenience, and I'll show you the end of today's show where you can access all of our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries here in Nebraska, so similar to your so-and-so state library. And so we provide services to all types of libraries in the state, so you'll find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, anything and everything. Really our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. Something cool libraries are doing, something we think they could be doing. We do book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. Sometimes we have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on to talk about things that we are offering through the Commission or services and events here in locally Nebraska, but we also bring guest speakers, and that is what we have from across the country, and that's what we have this morning. With us today is April 5th, good morning, April. Good morning, Christa, and everyone out there. And she is from the Eureka Springs Carnegie Library in Arkansas. And she is going to talk to us about saving the world with small libraries. Yay, I love that. This is a session that was done at the Association for Rural and Small Libraries conference, correct, last year? Last year. Correct. Yeah. And I invite everybody to share it with even more people here. We here in Nebraska are, most of our state is rural and small libraries, most of them from communities, population, if that, 5,000 or less, except for big cities, Omaha and Lincoln, so definitely anything to do with our small libraries, something close to my heart. And they're always looking to do new things. So I'm just going to hand it over to you, April, to tell us about how we can do this. Perfect. Well, thank you again so much for inviting me here. I love talking about this and sharing these ideas with other people, because I think that's sort of how we make a huge impact is by sharing this and sort of getting it out there. And I want to say thank you to everyone who's joined us today for being here. And I guess I want to start first by telling you my story and how and why we started implementing sustainability at my small library. So to get started, let's see if it'll let me progress to the next one. There we go. So this is going to sound like a meandering story, but I promise I will get to the point. As part of a leadership workshop that the Arkansas State Library sponsored and people had to apply to get into, my cohort read Simon Sinek's book, Start With Why. If you're not familiar with it, it's a wonderful book. And it's part of the task of finding out why you do, why we as librarians were doing what we are doing. We were tasked with completing an exercise for finding our own whys, where we were reviewing some of our personal life stories, meaningful moments in your life that helped shape the person that we had each become. And sort of the stories you sort of recount that are almost just like old, old memories you turn over and you know by heart and they're just part of your foundation. And you sort of collect these stories and then you read them and try to find what links them together to decipher what motivates you. When I was doing this, I realized that a lot of my stories had to do with traveling and going on these sort of various adventures of different sizes and seeing these really awe-inspiring experiences and these amazing views and meeting just some really incredible people. And one of my stories was from doing a semester at sea, which if you don't know about it, it's been a study abroad program that's been going on since the 70s. You live aboard a cruise ship and you go to school every day. You are on board the ship, but it stops at different ports of call around the world. And when you're at those different countries, you travel and the whole curriculum, whatever classes you can take, whatever classes they offer, but they're all centered a little bit themed around the different countries you're visiting to give you more of a global perspective. Let's see. On that trip, I ended up going to India in the February of 2005. And when we were there, I had this experience of sailing into the Bay of Bengal and seeing this beautiful sapphire colored water and just realizing how connected we are as a people on this planet and just how beautiful it was. And it was kind of like a huge juxtaposition when we went to shore and I was on the beach. And what I saw was the aftermath of the 2004 boxing day tsunami, which had displaced a lot of people who were now living on the beach. And there was trash all over the beach that had blown up from the ocean, obviously. That tsunami displaced, let's see, 1.7 million people. It resulted in a quarter million casualties, and it was just pretty terrible. So one of the things that immediately affected me is when I got back from that trip, which changed my life, I switched my major to industrial design with a personal focus on designing environmentally products. But that for me personally was a dead end when I graduated. There wasn't really a market for green design for sustainable design. Imagine the focus on industrial design at that time. And some areas of the profession still is on planned obsolescence, which is when you design something that is kind of designed to break. So consumers will replace it with the newest version, and that really was disheartening. So I took a step back after I graduated and figured out what I wanted to do. And I decided to pursue my MLS with the goal of being able to share information and ideas. So as a result of all these stories and collecting this, this was my wife's statement. I think that I and I think a lot of us are in this profession because we plant the seeds of curiosity in other people's brains that lead to the miracles that are abundant in our world. And I truly believe that when people are aware of all the amazing things that this planet has to offer, that they start to care about it and they start to try and do things to to help sustain it. So, you know, I found for me in the end saving the world isn't about designing the perfect green product. The seeds we plant as librarians have been scientifically proven to work, actually. A 2019 University of Rochester study found that that feeling of awe that people have sometimes, it leads to a greater awareness of the things we don't know, which in turn makes us more likely to seek out a framework such as science to fill in those gaps of the things we don't understand. So I think that librarians help save the world by investing time in people and their community members and helping them make those connections that will strengthen community resiliency. And this this slide here is just a selection of patrons. We had a photographer in Arkansas named Don House. He recently, his book, I think, is coming out this fall, where he he he and his partner Sabine Schmidt did this project where they went around to the most remote libraries in Arkansas, some of the most small and rural libraries and took pictures of community members, pictures of the building, and it's accompanied by essays about what the library means to those patrons. And what I loved about this project was I look at these people and I know each and every one of them. They are my neighbors. They are my friends. And that's why I care about them. And that's sort of one of the things I care about the earth. And I think librarians also care about our community. And I think there's just such a great strength to that. So I was further sort of emboldened to to try and make really big changes at our library when the LA put out this press release in May of 2019, as I'm sure you're all aware, saying that they were adding sustainability to one of their core values. And I think it just was really fitting because I think libraries by their very nature are green and that our resources are shared by a larger community. We're not having a book that we each personally owned. We share it. But I think that there is more work to be done. And I think the LA recognizes this. I think libraries, they extend, they can extend their environmental benefits further through our operations. If we really start examining our buildings and seek to minimize consumption of resources in buildings or operations. And that's that's straight from the LA's statement on sustainable libraries. And so we started doing things like that. So for us at a small library and other small libraries that that makes me think of the make do mindset. When I first moved to Arkansas, I worked at a history museum in the research library, and it was introduced to the Ozark legacy of making do, which was about as early settlers moved into this part of the world. They had to manage with what they had because it was so remote and cash was scarce and stores were few and far between. So when things broke, they fixed them. And when they needed something new, if they needed a new tool or a household item, a lot of times they made up their own from discarded objects, such as quilt made from scraps of worn out clothing. And that that is something that I think really affects a lot of rural communities. And I think it's something that our nation has a legacy of. If we go back to the Great Depression and Calvin Coolidge's motto for Americans about what was it? It was use it up, wear it out, make do or do without. And it was it was talking about adopting new strategies to survive in a time of scarcity. And me personally, I saw these habits embodied in my own grandmother who lived through the depression, but she continued a life of frugality and thrift throughout her life, even as I think the majority of the world moved on to. A culture that was more of like a throwaway tradition when people's income started increasing and manufacturing scaled up. People saw a lot of things is this works for now. It's inexpensive. Use it up when I'm done. I throw it away. And this is never how she was. And I think that going forward in the world, especially with small libraries where we don't have the biggest budgets, this is something we already know how to do. And it's something we can just look for more opportunities to do in and how we operate in the community. I think that I saw it first working at a different library. I worked at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, in the library there. And I I saw how we would never throw away a piece of paper that was just printed on one side and we didn't throw away the packages that in our library loans came in. We reused those. And I I think that's that's just because libraries are under resourced and underfunded and understaffed. But despite all that, we accomplish amazing things. That sounds like the same thing. I remember when I worked at my job before you was at a university Pace University back in New York. Yeah, same thing. Piles and piles of boxes and for interlibrary loan. That's what I did and reuse it until it fell apart. Exactly. Because we don't necessarily have a budget to buy new things. But also, there's no point to allocate funding to a budget to buy new boxes if we have a supply of perfectly usable boxes right, you know, in the corner that are arriving daily when I say boxes at home that are useful. Yeah, and so I'm not to trying to glamorize scarcity here, but I think the the mindset it does create a sustainable approach that's appropriate to the times we're living in. There's the if y'all have heard of permaculture. That's a I think a lot of people have certain ideas when they think about permaculture. They think about maybe hippies and communes and things like that. But it's it's really a design framework to think about an approach to be a little bit more sustainable. And in the principles of permaculture, this mindset aligns with the principle of using edges, just finding your little opportunities where they are. So I wanted to tell you about my library's journey here. And I will tell you that we started very, very small. And it started with I'm I'm currently the director of my library. But before I was the director, I was just I was a part time circulation desk clerk because I really wanted to work at this library and library jobs at the time were a little scarce. So I got my foot in the door working at the desk. And something I noticed was that we offered free coffee at the library. And again, this was way before ALA put out the 2019 thing. We just started on this journey with with these things. We offered free coffee. We offered little mini plastic straws. I'm sure you've seen to stir the coffee. And it was just one of those things that bothered me because I'm sure we've all seen it on social media, the videos of the turtles and they've got the the straws and their noses and how it's killing sea life. And it just was one of those things that just seemed kind of unnecessary. And I was I was a little nervous about asking about it. I didn't want to rock the boat and I live in, you know, a state that for the most part, a lot of people don't prioritize things like this. But I at a staff meeting sort of just raised my hand and I asked my director, I said, you know, I've looked and I've done a little research and I see that these bamboo stir sticks, they're just a little less expensive. And I was just wondering when we're done with these, can we make this change? And she said, yeah, sure, that's great. So that was our very first step of switching from plastic straws to bamboo stir sticks, and it I was very proud of that one small step. And so it sort of started kept going from there. One of the next things was that we were doing a teen program and we discovered maybe an hour before the program was supposed to happen that we'd run out of, I think, solo cups, because that's normally what we serve drinks at during these programs. And it was like, OK, one of us needs to run to the store. But then there was just a moment where we looked in the cabinet and realized we had tons and tons of coffee mugs. More we have a staff of eight people here and we probably have, I don't know, 40 coffee mugs, which is just how it goes. And we thought, you know, why don't we just use these mugs for this program? And then we just stopped buying cups for the most part. We just started kept using these mugs. And one of these great things about mugs is if you've worked with teens, you know, that they have the ability to spill pretty much anything. And these mugs are really heavy. They've got a handle. We've had fewer spills using coffee mugs to serve Kool-Aid and juice. And yet another small step, I I'm certain that a lot of you, if you ever do programs with kids with crafts, you're collecting all sorts of things to reuse. That's just part of how we operate. And I had a friend who said, you know, I've got these glass, yogurt, we jars, I've got some of these, would you like any? And I said, oh, sure, we'll find a use for those. And she had a couple hundred of them. And I was just overwhelmed and surprised when she brought them to me. So I was driving around for a little bit in the back of my car for a few days. And my son, who I think was five at the time, looked over and he said, mom, why are all these jars here? And I said, you know, Jana gave them to me. I don't know what to do with them. I'm trying to figure out something to do. And he said, well, and I'm sure he he notices the way I work, but he had this great idea. He said, why don't you use them to serve the goldfish at Lego Club? Because we would always serve them in little disposable Dixie cups. And I thought, that's a great idea. And so that's what we do now. No more little Dixie cups. We serve them out of these glass jars. We have so many that if someone, you know, has to leave Lego Club and has to take their they want to take their snack with them. We say, just go ahead and we can replace that. So interesting sturdiness of them that you don't think that things you wouldn't have thought about the mugs and probably those glassings are they're heavier and they don't get spilled. They don't get crushed or anything by the little little kids little hands. Yeah, exactly. And it just kept going from there. Kept more little choices here and there where we kept finding these options. And if it was something we could do often, if it was less expensive or free, it was something we did. So, for example, if any of y'all order any items from Amazon, I know if I'm looking for an older item, we don't necessarily get our discounts through the jobber. So we will look for it on Amazon if a patron wants it. And we have an Amazon Prime account. You can easily get that two day shipping. But if you choose to set up your Amazon delivery day, you can choose this option. It results in fewer delivery trips and your items and fewer boxes. It means that packages are like so two day shipping. When you click two day shipping, it means that your items, your packages are often delivered on jets that are under loaded to prioritize getting your items to you as fast as you can. But I think as librarians, we often plan ahead and we don't necessarily need our things that quickly. It's not usually in our situation. No, no, not at all. Exactly. So if you choose that Amazon delivery day, often those items go on to trucks, which means the carbon emissions for delivering a package a few days faster is substantially less than if they were delivered to various facilities and the sort of the shipping chain as they're normally done. Or if it's less, if it's delivered via truck versus via an under loaded airplane. Another thing I found out about and when I go to the high schools in the fall and I deliver my information literacy talk to some of these high school students about doing research professionally and looking at peer reviewed resources. I often sometimes will just mention Ecosia, which is a web browser that plants trees when you search. They actually get money from ad clicks. But the estimate they put out is that one tree is planted for every 45 searches. And in 2020, they planted their 100 millionth tree. It's estimated, yeah, that the trees they've planted have removed 1771 tons of CO2 every single day. So I tell people about it. I've also installed the browser on the patron computers. You know, it's not the default one, but it's there. And sometimes I'll tell people if they're asking, what's this little icon here? And I give them a little blurb about Ecosia to, again, spread the word, let them make that choice. Another thing we've done is we buy snacks family size. So we used to buy our chips and a lot of our goldfish, things like that, and the individual little packages that people could take with them. We found that at the end of programs, we had a lot of half empty or almost full open bags of chips, and we'd throw them all away. A lot of food waste, a lot of plastic waste. And we started buying the family size, which is not only less expensive, it reduces the waste. We would portion it out in little reasonable bowls or plates. I say to people too, like when you start looking at your snack options, you can get bonus points if you start looking at the ingredients and purchasing things without palm oil. That's a long explanation. If you don't know why palm oil isn't a great choice, I will just tell you it's in so many different things. And there's a further explanation of the deal about palm oil and the deal about palm oil in my resource handout. But it's devastating to the environment, the rate at which palm oil is being consumed. And it's common to find that one brand versus the other, like the generic brand, does not contain palm oil. Whereas the brand name and the generic brand is going to be a little less expensive. Whereas the brand name will. So for example, townhouse crackers versus rich crackers. Townhouse doesn't have palm oil. Rich crackers do or Lay's potato chips do have it. Kettle brand doesn't. Goldfish crackers definitely don't have palm oil, which I was thrilled to see. Oh, nice. And I'll mention your resources handout on the, for everyone who's sitting on the session page for today's show where you went to register or login or anything, I've already posted the resources handout that April provided with lots of information. And just now, her slides as well are there. So if you wanted to pop over to the session page for today, you can grab those documents right now while we're doing the show. Okay. Thank you, Krista. And so that helped us work up to bigger changes. Some of the things we've changed so far is we've replaced all of our disposable paper products with ones that are recycled, which maybe requires more information. So our paper towels and our toilet paper, we switched to a brand called Who Gives a Crap? And it's a tongue-in-cheek name, but it ended up being less expensive. Oh, it's telling me I have a slow network connection. I'm going to turn off my webcam for now. Sure. Okay. You still sound and look good from my side, but yeah, every now and then you go to a webinar we'll warn you about things like that. Yeah. I just, I don't want to be dropped off. It's happened before. Again, rural area, sometimes the internet's not great. But so we switched to a brand called Who Gives a Crap? It was actually less expensive than the brand we were using. And it wasn't a brand name. It was, again, we ordered in bulk. It wasn't the nicest TP. This toilet paper is actually pretty nice. It ends up just costing a dollar a roll. We were paying a dollar 25 a roll. And this company donates 50% of its profits to water, sanitation, and hygiene products like, or projects like building toilets, advancing disability inclusion, and providing soap and hand washing stations and developing countries. We changed our tissues as well to a brand that uses, recycled one. It's called Marcal. It was less expensive than the box tissues we were buying previously. The Marcal brand was rated by the National Resource Defense Council scorecard, which you may have seen as a B, the Who Gives a Crap gets an A plus. And if you look at all the big name brands, they get really bad ratings. And the reason it's kind of a big deal is a lot of these big brand name toilet paper companies and tissue companies are using virgin paper pulp. But a lot of times this is sourced from virgin boreal forests in Canada that are being chopped down and they're losing both that CO2 sink, but they're also, it's fresh trees that are being turned into something that we use for just half a second and gets thrown away. So that's why that is kind of pretty important. And again, even bigger changes. I had heard about a program. Well, I had in my own home with my own energy provider, my electric company. They came and did an audit of my house to tell me how I could make my house a little bit more energy efficient. And I tried to do something similar with the electric company that services our library here in town because it's a different company. And I couldn't get a hold of anyone for a long time. I think it's because we were considered industrial, but we're very small and we just weren't a huge priority for them. But based on what I learned from the one done in my home, I did our own informal building energy assessment. And we did things like very small changes that have had a significant impact, like repairing the seals around the doors. We installed weather stripping where our old building has shifted and I could see daylight around windows and around doors. We received a small grant from our library foundation and use those funds to make energy efficient improvements in our library, including the installation of solar shades because we here at my lovely beautiful old Carnegie library building, which is over 100 years old, have single pane, century old glass windows, which are terribly energy efficient. And I noticed when comparing my budgets to the other libraries in our system that our overhead for energy costs was huge in comparison. And a lot of it was just because our HVAC system couldn't keep up with our leaky drafty building. So the installation of those last year has helped quite a bit. We also replaced our very old refrigerator. Over a few years, we're able to ship some money in our budget to replace our HVAC system. And those two are a big deal. The refrigerator in the HVAC system sounds very like something that's innocuous. But if you read the book, Draw Down, which is, again, referenced in my notes, it talks about the most impactful ways to adjust your carbon footprint or your organization's carbon footprint. And strangely, oddly enough, the number one thing that people can do to make a difference is to make sure that the appliances, they're running with coolant in them. The, I think, they're hydrochlorochlorocarbons. I might be saying that wrong, chlorochlorocarbons are really terrible for the environment. So if they can update those or if they're operating with newer energy-efficient ones and get those older appliances disposed of in a proper way, if you order a new refrigerator, the company will take out the old one and they will properly dispose of the coolant in it. That has the biggest impact, which really surprised me, but it was something I was glad to be able to do. And again, we couldn't do this all right away. This has been a very slow journey towards sustainability because we do have such a limited budget. It was just where we could do it. And I think that's something important. So another thing that, for people watching this, that like, oh my gosh, there's so many different things and how are we going to do it? You don't do this all at once. One at a time. Not at all. Yeah. And then move on to the next. Yeah. The first thing. Yeah. And I wanted to point out too that, so this is something that's taken place over several years, but then when I looked back at our energy bills from, you know, after we had made all these changes versus several years before we had saved like around $800 in one year as to previous years, just from making these small changes, which is substantial for us. You know, that's money that can go to buy new books or put on different programs. I was thrilled to find that. And again, the initial investment might seem like a little bit much. You know, those solar shades, I think were a couple of thousand dollars, which thankfully enough, we were able to get a grant from. But if that helps reach that $800 a year in saving, quickly pay. So another thing we've been doing is we have an amazing volunteer who has been fixing our broken appliances. And I was surprised after stepping into my role as director to learn how many times or how often things break down. We have an industrial coffee maker. We have a popcorn popper that's broken. Both of our microwaves are dehumidifier. All of these things have broken down. And in state of replacing those things, we asked this volunteer if he would be willing to help us out. And you know, oftentimes it was, I think he said one time it was a thermal fuse. It was a power switch. It was very small things. Each were around $10 or less. And when I added up the cost of replacing all of those things, it was over a thousand dollars. So you might not have this person right away, but I would say you might consider who you have coming to your library or if there's, I'd say a lot of these skills are harnessed by some older people, older generations. And start chatting them up. See if you have anyone in your community who knows how to repair things or even if there's just a repair store that you can take your items to instead of just quickly replacing them. And you know, as our coffee maker or industrial coffee maker was being replaced, I did bring in a smaller one from home so we could keep serving coffee in the meantime. But it wasn't too big of a deal to do that in the meantime and get that repaired instead of replacing it. So those leave to even bigger changes. I mentioned before we replaced our refrigerator with an energy star appliance that saved us some money. We replaced our HVAC system. And eventually we even replaced our lights, our fluorescent lights with all LED lightings with a retrofit. I would say I guess I wanted to segue from things being fixing that not everything can be fixed. So that refrigerator we had that was literally rattling around and it sounded like a band was going around and just wasn't keeping things in the freezer frozen. It we couldn't keep it. So sometimes you do have to replace it with something better but just look for those ones that you can and sometimes those appliances will be a little bit more expensive but it's definitely worth it. Let's see, we ended up getting a hold of our energy company after a while and one of the things they did offer to do was to come and do an assessment of our lighting. And I found out they offered incentives for upgrading to more energy efficient lighting systems or HVACs. We had already replaced our HVAC system so we didn't get to have that incentive. I wished I'd known about it or gotten them to call me back and I wish I'd sort of been a bit more persistent so we could have gotten that incentive but we were able to get it with our LED lighting retrofit. The energy company actually paid for more than half of the change and I was able to move some of the donations we'd received to pay for the other half of that which again, we have three library buildings. We have our main library. We have an annex building next door and for all three of those, it cost us around a couple of thousand dollars to replace all the lights but we've already started seeing energy savings from that as well. And I'd say that it's worth it to keep calling the people who provide your energy. I would say even if they don't have these sort of programs, you can ask them if they do RECs, if they have a renewable energy credit program. Those are where they purchase renewable energy credits from other electric companies that do have renewable energy streams and sort of it's a credit base. So it's a way to support renewable energy even if it's not something that your electric company is offering. And even if you can't afford it, if you could put it in their mind when I first spoke to my energy company, they hadn't heard about it but this person I spoke with was pretty excited and said he was gonna look into it and bring it up to his boss. So again, sometimes it's just spreading that information, spreading the word and planting the ideas in people's minds. So the next thing besides some of those changes, we started looking at our procedures and our operations. And one thing I noticed was that for whatever reason, as part of our protocols, we'd always left our computers on all the time. We'd restart them at the end of the day like when we were closing down but then they stayed on all night long. So my first thing was to just look around and say, you know what, we're gonna start turning them off. But what was great about that, and this is gonna sound strange, was a different librarian approached me and said, listen, there's a reason we leave them on and it's because when we get them started in the morning, our ILS takes several minutes to load up and we've got patrons calling and people walking through the door wanting their stuff right then and there. I'm sure you all have people who are there maybe waiting at the library door or before you are ready, before you're in the door and unlocking the door, ready to get what they need. And she said, and it just slows things down and that's why we keep it up. We keep them on because it just, everything takes a long to start up. And so it was great to think about that. And I worked with her and we came up with a different solution which was to adjust the energy settings on our computer so that they go to sleep a little bit more quickly, but that also means they can wake up more quickly than if you're just starting them from scratch. So like our main patron computers, we shut those down, but our operating computers, our Cirque desk computers, we have them go to sleep after they haven't been used for about 15 minutes because waking up from sleep mode versus restarting them is a much more rapid process, but it also enables us to save some more energy when they're not in use. So then we also started doing a laundry rotation, and this happened again before I was director. My director at the time brought up to us that she'd noticed that our paper towel bill had gotten really high. You know, we were just ordering a lot and going through them very quickly and that's definitely not a sustainable thing to do. And this was before we switched to a recycled, less expensive brand. I shouldn't say cheaper, less expensive, but it made me think of something I'd done at a different place. When I worked at that history museum, everyone rotated doing the laundry. If you had to do a Saturday shift, which we all did one every three or four months, one of our duties was to take home the historical costumes that were in the exhibit hall and just give them a wash, bring them home, hang them back up on the pegs. And so when she said that, like we're going through a lot of paper towels, which I should say was probably partially my fault, we started doing cooking programs with the teenagers here and again, lots of spills, lots of stuff to pick up. I thought back to that and I said, well, what if we do a laundry rotation? I'm not saying completely replace the paper towels, but you know, if something spilled, it's going to take, you know, a lot of paper towels versus one kitchen towel. But I know we don't have the facilities to have a washing machine here. And I said, but this was something we did here and if it was just by volunteer, how many people could we get able to volunteer? And you know, because it was optional, I think that was a good approach we had. Some people opted not to be part of the laundry rotation, but we had at least six staff members who were willing to step in and be part of a weekly laundry rotation. And it was set up such that we don't go through just tons of towels and aprons, you know, that quickly. So we set the window of opportunity for someone's turn to be two weeks. And I think I end up only having a turn every once, every three months. So it's not that big of a burden, but it does make a huge difference on our bottom line for costs and just our waste and our impact in general. Another thing we did was I looked at the discs, looked at CDs and DVDs. So thankfully, I'm very grateful. In our town, we do have recycling, but it's pretty basic. They accept paper, cardboard, metal, glass. And for plastics, only ones and twos, which is, what do you call it? PET and or HDPE, but only in bottle forms. It has to be in bottle form for whatever reason. And that leaves a lot of items that could be thrown away. So one of the things we've done in an attempt to reduce our waste is we've looked into specialty recycling for a few different things. So one of the things we ended up throwing a lot out of was scratched DVDs and CDs. So for Earth Day in 2019, we offered a promotional program to collect these from patrons who had these that they needed to dispose of. And also just you see Christmas lights in that picture. They also collect Christmas lights and as part of that program, we were also accepting dried out markers because we were going through a lot of those and we found a lot in our programming closet and we had read that Crayola accepts these any brand name of dried out markers. So we started collecting these. We were able to ship our scratch. Yeah. So we shipped our scratched CDs to the CD Recycling Center of America which I will say I've checked on recently is temporarily closed because of COVID but I started doing preliminary research and I found a different place that collects them as well. But so if you have any of those, you might just sit on them a little bit while longer and keep checking back and you can sign up for their email when they get operations going again. They're going to email people to let them know that they are accepting scratched discs again. But so when I tried to go to recycle the Crayola ones, I found that you had to be a school teacher. So I contacted our local high school art teacher and I found out she was actually already collecting them for the school. And but through that connection, this teacher and I, the art teacher at the high school, we're now coordinating with our community center with the school representing the school and the library and the community center to try and form drop-off stations for various recycled goods in our community. There's other items. If you look at the company TerraCycle, they collect all sorts of difficult to recycle items. And even thinking back to plastic, there's the number fives, a really hard recycle and most municipal recycling programs. And give me five projects. We'll collect your number fives. That's polypropylene. That's yogurt, traditional yogurt jars, all sorts of stuff. And they make them into toothbrushes and razor handles. So there's just all sorts of options there. TerraCycle is linked in the resource handout. And I think it's important to point out too that we are lucky and that we can use reusable dishes. And again, after we started using the mugs, then we got plates and we got silverware and we've been doing that and we've built in time at the end of our programming to wash up. And we sort of get our teens to come and help us do some dishes. Because I think that's sort of an important thing to pass along as well, is we ate off this, now we're going to clean it. And usually we always have a teen who's really excited to help and volunteer. So we're lucky for that. But we are lucky just to have a sink. I know a lot of rural and small libraries don't necessarily have those facilities. So if you end up having to stick with those solo cups, definitely check out TerraCycle because they have a solo cup recycling program. So this is a lot of changes, obviously. And I think that it's sometimes when you're working with people and you've always done things kind of the same way, it's daunting to try and change things. I know that firsthand it's kind of scary to say, okay, we've done it this way, but we're going to do it this way. And it's not that these things are going to be easier. When we wash up after a program, if all the kids have to go and the program ran long, then you are washing the dishes. And it would be a lot easier to just throw away those plastic utensils, throw away things. I wanted to point out that I'm not saying that all of this is just so much easier, but I have found a very effective way to communicate with my coworkers and staff. About these changes is quoting Harry Potter. Because I think a lot of people love Harry Potter and talking about Albus Dumbledore and his quote that dark and difficult times lie ahead and soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy. What is easy is to use those disposables and throw them away as though we don't have to worry about them tomorrow, but we do. And the right thing to do is to try and care and try and think about a better, more sustainable way to do things. So I would definitely recommend leaning on the wisdom of Albus Dumbledore when you're trying to talk about making changes to your staff members and coworkers. And also, again, all of these small changes, as Kristen mentioned earlier, it was slow. It was small. It was progress. We did not do all of this all at once. And it's easy to make a change and then look at all the things you haven't changed than to see all of your waste and get discouraged. And it's not a great feeling. But I like this idea of thinking about... You know, this lady did this quote about Ann Marie Bonneau about zero waste. And I think rather thinking about that, another way of looking at it is we need millions of people and businesses and organizations doing sustainability imperfectly and starting their journeys. And I think that libraries are really positioned to help lead the way because we are trusted organizations in our community. I think we are just well positioned to be leaders for other organizations and businesses. And as I said, we've started coordinating with other organizations and other nonprofits in our area, and they start to get interested in what we're doing and saying like, oh, I see you're doing things a little bit differently. And I said, yeah, you know, it's been slow. It's something we're doing. But I think it makes a big impact. And I think that for me, it's really important because one of the reasons I do do these things, I love programming. That's one of my loves as a librarian and working with people and helping serve the community, especially kids. I love doing story time. And I think it's one of those ways that it sends a subtle message to our youngest patrons that we care about them, but we care about them in like the deepest level and about their future here in our community and what their lives are going to be like. So I think it's also, it's actions speak louder than words and that's a big part of it. So talking about programming, we also started looking about offering more educational programs on sustainability and ecology and community resilience. And a part of that is we had some representatives from the local native plant projects and they have these native plant organizations and groups worldwide. And I put a link into where you can find your local chapter of it and invited them to come talk about why native plants are so important. A lot of people, myself included, love ornamental plants. You know, I love my hydrangeas and I didn't know this, but they originally came from Asia. There's all these lovely plants that the bugs just won't really mess with because they haven't evolved to eat them. They haven't evolved to lay their eggs on them with caterpillars and things, consuming them. But they're so important because regardless of your feeling about insects, a lot of people really like birds, a lot of people like frogs. You like your bigger, furry, more glamorous creatures. April, it looks like we might have lost your sound or she just went offline. Oh, she was worried that she might get bumped potentially due to her internet connection. That's okay. We will wait for her to come back. All right, about that. As she mentioned, the risk of being new. The things you'd have to deal with being in a rural area and rural library. It looks like she lost her internet connection. That's okay. She should be able to get logged back in. So we'll wait for her. While she's doing that, I'll just remind everyone too in case you weren't here earlier than here. The resources she's been talking about, the handout is available on the session page for today's show. You can go there and grab that right now as a PDF. It is available with all of her links to all of the different programs and resources she's been talking about. And her slides as well. That's the other thing I was going to say. Her slides are also available there as a PDF if you want to have them as a reference or resource as well. We can see if she gets reconnected. I'm keeping an eye on it. If anybody has any questions, comments, or thoughts, anything, you can type into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface. You can go ahead and do that at any time. And I can pass them on to her to answer when she gets back connected again. Or if you have anything that you've done in these ways at your libraries, any of the things that she's mentioning or any ideas you have for people, what they can do for sustainability, for saving energy, any thoughts or ideas, go ahead and type into your questions, the questions section. And I can share that with everyone. Keeping an eye on it. Please, you'll get back in here. I'm watching to see if she comes. Actually, I'm going to do this here. I'm going to pull while we're waiting for people to get reconnected. I am going to, if you can get that back up again here. This is the page for today's show. And I'll share the link into the questions as well. Just watching to see if she comes this big. Actually, you don't want to miss it. So, this is off of our main Encompass Live page right now, the show, because it's still happening. But this specific page, we've got a link to her presentation slides here and resource links handout here, which she keeps talking about the resources that she's provided. You can click on that and it opens it up into our slide share that we use. And you can see here all the links. This is something you can download and save for yourself. And you have all these links to all the different resources that April has been discussing this morning. And she did have, I was actually going to mention, so I did actually ask about seed libraries that was on that most recent slide that we were just looking at there before April lost her connection. And the question we have, as far as seed libraries go, how can you make sure you're not introducing an invasive species? That's a good question, since considering she was talking about issues with, is trying to do more local things. I would, I'm sure when she comes back, she may have some thoughts on this, but I would recommend checking in with your local, maybe your Master Gardener program here in Nebraska through the Nebraska Extension Offices. They will talk to you about anything going on agricultural-wise and can help you with figuring those things out. So check with something like that and see your university or Master Gardener to see what should I be growing, what should we be sharing. And I know we do have here in Nebraska multiple libraries that are doing seed libraries. We've had quite a few of them on end cup of slide in the past. So if you wanted to hear more about that specific project or program, you can do a search in our archives for seed or seeds. And you should be able to, you can watch any of our recordings. Waiting for April to get reconnected again. I'm sure she's realizing that she lost her connection. We'll see if, and what I will do now while we're waiting for that too, I will show you here, so I did mention this, I was going to do this at the end of the show, but I'll do it right now while we are waiting for people to get back with us. This is our main end cup of slide page. In our archives links are right here. These are upcoming shows. Feel free to please do register for any of those if you're interested in any of our topics we have coming up. But the archives link is right here underneath, so you can click there. And this will be all of our archives today show. We'll be at the top of the list. Most recent one is first. And it will have a link to what was already in there. It's the same session page here will be used. So you have a link to the presentation and the handouts. And there'll be another link that will be added here that will be to watch the recording. And everyone who attended today and registered for today's show will get an email from me letting you know when the recording is available so you can go here and access it. And I'll also mention while we're here, you can, and this is where you can do search. And I'm going to do a search here. Let's see, seed, see, there we go. Seed saving for libraries, engaging your community and feeding American garden seeds, exchange summer meals, and more. There's April is back. I'm going to pop you back over again to panelist April. All right. Hello, you're back. April, you are unmuted. You should be able to talk. I'm not hearing anything just yet, though. All right. I'm so sorry about that. And so I'm not sure where I got lost or where I stopped transmitting. Sure, I can, I can, I can give you a presidential back. We were just talking about ACM sharing my slides here because I was, people were asking about seed libraries because that was up on the screen when you had your slides up at last and I was just showing and I was just showing here in our archives. Perfect. A few previous shows discussed seed libraries and seed exchanges that people can watch. And I'll just mention while I'm running the slides so that you know this is our full archives for Encompass Live too. You can see you can search all the whole archives which I did, but you can just search most recent 12 months about something really current. That's because this is our full show archives and I'm not going to scroll all the way down, but when we first started broadcasting the show which was, we premiered in January 2009. So there's a lot of shows here. But just pay attention to the original broadcast date of anything when you are looking at our archives to know when it actually first went out. Some of the shows may stand the test of time, reading lists, certain things. Oh, but some things may become old and outdated. Resources might have changed drastically. Some things might not exist anymore. Links might be broken. You never know. So just pay attention to that when you are watching any of the archives from our show. So, April, I'm going to give you presenter control again so you can get your slides back up. You should see that pop up again. Okay. It has about the seed libraries. Okay. All right. And you hadn't gotten to that part of it yet though. Oh, I hadn't gotten to it. Well, we're talking about the plants and hydrangeas and... Oh, okay. Man, oh, I've been talking for a while to myself. I'm so sorry. Let's see. I was talking about native plants and why they're important to ecology. Well, I'll try to summarize really quick and basically say that regardless of your feeling it's about insects. These native plants are super important for your local ecology. So even the more furry, glamorous animals like rabbits and foxes depend on those native plants because it's part of their important food chain. And a lot of them are getting displaced by ornamentals that are imported from Asia because they're so hardy and the insects won't attack them. But those insects attacking some of the native plants are incredibly necessary for pollinators. But also just for insects to lay their eggs and so that their babies can be food for bigger animals. The next thing I was talking about was the Climate Reality Project. We had a climate reality leader who was a professor from the University of Arkansas come and give a talk about the hard science behind climate change and the effects specifically on our region and what we can expect in the coming decades. But it wasn't all doom and gloom. She also talked about the solutions for how people can work to mitigate these changes through their own actions. There are presenters from this group that are located all over the country. There's a link to how you can find them and request a presentation at your library. They're happy to come and give that presentation. They just want to share information and they tailor the information to your area so people can make connections with how climate change will affect them living wherever they're at. The next thing I talked about was we started a seed library and it sounds like something you spoke of. I feel like we premiered ours just in time in February of 2020 is when we started to offer it. Yeah, and that's right. When seed suppliers started experiencing shortages during the pandemic, everyone was at home planting a garden. They were concerned about food security but also they had a lot of time on their hands and they couldn't get seeds from those seed catalogs. So we were able to provide our patrons with seeds through our seed library. We put them out on our curbside pickup tables and we mailed them. I said that ideally that seed libraries are self-sustaining resources because participants who check out seeds or borrow seeds return them when they harvest seeds from the things that they grow. But that doesn't always work and you sometimes need to replenish them. And a lot of seed companies will actually offer donations to help libraries get started. I recommend, and I think I link to it in my resource page, checking out the Kent District Libraries seed library website. They have a wonderful page full of resources, ideas, seed companies that might donate to help you get started at your library. And we do have a question about the seed libraries that did come in while you were off. So once now, as far as seed libraries go, how can you make sure you're not introducing an invasive species? So we order from specific companies. We order from, and that's a thing too, if patrons just say like, oh, this is growing in my garden and I brought it in and here you go. We do some research before we offer them out there. So a lot of our seeds we get from Baker Creek, which only does like heirloom plants and vegetables and fruits. And then we order a lot from our local native plant seed distribution, which is out of Southern Missouri actually, is because I'm in very Northern Arkansas, to get natives. And that's what we offer. We don't often take seeds that people have just harvested from their own garden because... Yeah. Yeah. So when we do lend seeds or we give people seeds, we have a form and we keep track of what they've borrowed and what they're bringing back and we say, please, like please, if you can, if you're able to grow this successfully, harvest some seeds, bring them back because you often get a lot more seeds coming back. And that's just an easier way to avoid invasive species. Yeah. And I did mention too, to help answer the question of checking in with your local extension office or master gardeners, if you're wondering, they would know the kind of things that should and shouldn't be grown in your area. As the experts in your area, definitely look to local people. Yes, they're great resources. We've worked with our master gardeners as well for programs in addition to the native plant project folks. And of course, using your old card catalogs are the perfect... This is Pikachu. Yeah. They're so pretty. You don't have to. Some people do it in a binder and that's very efficient as well. It's just a binder with, I think, those little laminated sleeves for baseball cards. But we just happened to have one of these. Why are they so nicely in there? Wouldn't they? Yes. All right. So, oh goodness. All right. So the next thing I was talking about was other programs. So we do a lot of vegetarian cooking programs. We don't necessarily market it as vegetarian cooking. We do a lot of cooking with teens. And it sort of is that sustainable edge that we take advantage of. I'd say besides the fact that there's kind of an ick factor of dealing with raw meat being handled by teenagers, it's a great opportunity to introduce young people. It's an easy and tasty plant-based dishes. And I think it's important because, according to the research, studies show that methane, which is the gas produced by cow burps, is 84 percent more potent than CO2 and it's thus much more devastating in its impact on the climate. The special report on climate change and land by the intergovernmental panel on climate change describes plant-based diets as a major opportunity for mitigating and adapting to climate change. But our experience here is that people just don't know that much about it. A lot of what they're doing at home and a lot of the traditions for cooking that's been passed down to people is including myself involve a lot of meat. So this is just a way to educate and show people how easy it is and how tasty it can be. And there's resources, I believe, in my handout about some websites you can go to to find vegetarian options and meal plans. Another thing we do, and this is one of the easiest programs I've ever done, is our Slow Stitch Club. So there's this national movement called the Slow Stitch Movement, which includes visibly mending damaged clothes. And it's all about fighting the fast fashion industry, which, according to the organization, seven billion for seven Cs is second, only to oil as the world's largest polluter. The fast fashion industry emits 1.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent per year, which is about 5% of global emissions. And that's more than those created by air travel and international shipping combined. So our Slow Stitch Club, we meet out in the garden during the winter months we met virtually. It's open to menders. Knitters, quilters, crochet artists, etc., anyone doing sort of needle or fiber arts. And it's really intended to bring people together safely to help foster that community and some creativity and mindfulness all at once. So I think there's a lot of good factors for doing a Slow Stitch Club. If nothing else, it helps people give them that time and that space to work on something with their hands. And then repair cafes. We haven't had our repair cafe yet. We had planned to do one in the spring of 2020. But it has been postponed for reasons that we have not been able to really both to safely come together in a space with a lot of power and one-on-one. But repair cafes are something that a lot of libraries have started doing. It's where you have these repair expert coaches and people bring in broken items like bicycles or sometimes things that need a zipper repaired or appliances. And I had recruited some volunteers who are expert coaches at each of those. And it's about sharing that knowledge of how to repair and mend items with other people. During COVID times, if you're looking for alternatives to do a repair cafe, there's a really great website listed in the resource list called Repair Cafe. And they're doing Repair Cafe TV, which kind of like what you have here where you have all these past documented webinars, they focus on a certain type of item and how to repair it, and they've aired it and saved it. So you can share those with your community, with your patrons, if they're looking to fix something and need advice or just would like to know how it's done and how people approach it. And I think a big part of sustainability comes in the form of community partnerships. Again, we share our resources, we share our audiences, and we have a greater impact and can help act as a leader on sustainability when we work together. And so for us, that came in the form of first book delivery. I don't know about y'all, but we live in this rural area and we have had people request us to deliver books, which was not something we were able to do before just because of a lack of resources and protocols. But we learned that the local Methodist church was delivering meals to free for anyone in Western Carroll County, which is the county we are located in. Regardless of the need, they didn't have to justify why they needed free meals. It was during the pandemic, people wanted to make sure that no one was getting forgotten or left behind as people's wages were suddenly not necessarily coming in and people were quarantining so they couldn't get out. So when I heard about that and I thought about, I've worked with the Methodist church before I came and did a program for a different group for them. I reached back out to my contact there and asked if their core of volunteers would be willing to donate books as well. And I found out that the answer was yes, because they had volunteers who wanted to deliver more food but were only doing a few meals and so wanted to have a greater impact and for me this meant fewer cars driving around town delivering food and library materials to those who needed to stay home. So it was a win-win situation. Several years ago, we asked if we could do a story time program at the Summer Farmers Market and again, they said, yes, we'd love to have you. It sort of helps create a family atmosphere at the Farmers Market and it's been a wonderfully successful collaboration. It's resulted in us having a tent where we could have a pop-up used book sale. Also, while we were doing our story time, we could promote library programming. We've signed people up for cards in summer reading and we often do a craft as well. But I would just say before warned if you get really involved and suddenly you will find yourself like me asked to join the board of the Farmers Market. But I did and it was again, a very successful experience. But just the more you get involved the more people want to get you involved. So it's yes, yeah. We also, we started our collaboration with our community center. The first thing we did was a thing called the Lights On After School Rally. I know some other libraries sometimes participate in that just because a lot of libraries offer after school programs. So we did something with them and had this wonderfully huge event for the community. And it's just our partnership has grown from there. Most recently, we participated in earlier this year, a great big outdoor Earth Day celebration. Allowing us to place, they've also allowed us to place an auxiliary book return drop at the community center because our library is a little bit outside of town and we often, or it's in a hard to get to part of town for some people, so they say. And we've heard, well, I just haven't gone by that part of town. That's why my books are late. So this new Dropbox is a much more convenient location right off the highway that allows people to return items there. And we have volunteers bring items from that return box to us. So it's just been a really good partnership. We also did some outreach with their summer after their summer school program. They had a summer camp and the library came and brought books and we did some craft. So a lot of these partnerships gives us edges to other organizational other organizations, audiences, and just lets us share resources. Don't have to do it all on your own. It's true. And there's, I was going to say, another really wonderful resource that I would encourage you to take a look at is and it's got ideas for partnerships and programs. It can be found in the American Library Association's public programming offices, resilient communities, libraries, respond to climate change. Free programming guide. Again, see that in the resource guide for link. I was one of the project advisors who ended up working on that and I really wanted to represent rural and smaller libraries to make sure that those, the realities we face are addressed in that programming guide, but I'm just very proud of what we created. It was myself, another public librarian and two academic librarians and there's all sorts of wonderful programs and again, project ideas in there. There's stuff on mindfulness. There's just, please check it out. It's a great resource, but it's a whole other thing. So there's a link to it in my handout. Let's see. Oh man, was that my last slide? I went through it pretty quickly, I think. Usually I feel like I'm still talking much later, but again, I just sort of want to wrap up with the fact that I encourage everyone to get started on a journey and to start small so that they don't get overwhelmed. There's a concept from the book of Field Guide to Climate Anxiety by Sarah Jacquet-Ray. This concept of pseudo inefficacies, this idea that these small things, these small changes don't have any impact and it's a very big part of climate change about sustainability, about the impact it has on you mentally that again, you just don't feel like this is doing any good and it can sort of lead to you just giving up and stopping any efforts. And I just want to tell everyone to not be discouraged by the idea that you're not doing everything right or if someone does come up and tell you that individual actions make no difference because first of all, individual actions do add up. We have seen that. The history has shown it. And furthermore, these aren't individual actions you're taking at your library. These actions are on a bigger scale because they're at an organization and they affect your whole community and your community sees what you're doing. You're not only buying more sustainable toilet paper, more people are being exposed to these actions and that ripple effect has, I'd say, limitless potential. So what I've given you here and talked about is sort of like a hodgepodge approach to sustainability. But if you are a more organized person and you want a more formal approach or you want to make it part of your long-term goals at your library, I'd recommend the book Ecology, Economy, Equity, The Path to a Carbon Neutral Library by Mandy Hank. It has a sustainability assessment worksheet in it that can help you create your own plan. You can also check out the American Library Association's Additions, Sustainability in Libraries, or yeah, Sustainability and Libraries. That's coming out this fall and there's a link to it. I was lucky enough to get to contribute a chapter and I sort of tried to reorganize how we approach sustainability and I looked at it from the framework of permaculture design and just all those principles and how you can use those to approach and look at your library operations to do things more sustainably. And again, it's much more formal, it's a little bit more organized than what I've said here. I think it's important that everyone recognize that progress isn't linear and you got to celebrate every step you take and your path towards sustainability and know that you are planting the seeds for a better future. Absolutely. That's what I got. Wholeheartedly. Someone does want to know if you could repeat that, well, I don't know, the last book title maybe? I want to repeat that book title again. Are these also in your handout or? Yes, all of the books I've mentioned are the last thing listed on the last page of all the handout. I think I included every title and the author. Right. Okay, so yeah, so here I pulled up back at the presenter control of my screen here. On the resources link's handout here that you'll get, did you scroll down here? There we go, there are all the books that she was talking about. So I'm not sure which one of these you're asking about Megan, but yeah, there. And so you all will have a link to this. Well, it's out there right now. You can go to the session page. But when the recording is done, I'll email everyone who attended today and registered today and it will include the link directly to the recording page that will have a link to this handout too, along with the presentations already there. And then as I mentioned earlier, the link to the recording. So thank you so much, April. This was awesome. So many things that you think about doing and I think it's good of libraries but you're just talking about the end there. Demonstrating and that this is something that can be done. Look, we're doing it. And then yes, the community sees it happening. People coming in and may do it in their own businesses or places where they do or at home. And just kind of a subtle under in backdoor way of spreading the word. You have the sessions that the programming of talking about how to do all this but also just having that recyclable that recyclable toilet paper in the bathroom. Someone's going to see that and say, I could buy that. We have literally had someone say that saying like, I saw that you use this and I went and looked it up and I found it and now I've got it. And I think, great. That's exactly what I was hoping that would happen. Yeah. And again, I know this time that we are living in is very divisive and there's a lot of people with a lot of different feelings about things. And unfortunately sometimes the idea of climate change and therefore because it's linked to sustainability becomes politicized and we definitely live in a very conservative state. And so that sometimes is questioned by people and often I find that what I talk about is a focus on kids. And I say, for us this isn't about politics. This is about our community. And when you bring the focus back to the community into children, how we're just trying to do things that we think is best for them. And again, don't focus on pundits or any of that. I think we usually connect with people over that. That farmer's market I go to, there is a lot of very conservative farmers. But you know what, we have so much in common over the fact that we care about plants and we care about nature. And so that's where I'm always looking for common ground to connect with people. And make that personal connection with them. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say one other thing, because I've had this question before, some people say, okay, what about staff members who are very resistant? And another thing that I found that's really useful is involving people, involving people on all levels of library operations to help come up ideas for these changes. Because again, when we started using reusable cups, we did have some people saying, I don't want to do this. Like I don't want to have to do dishes. And I said, okay, well, let's think about what we can do. Let's like, please, you help me. I understand that is not very fun. So the lady in question did some research. She found a countertop dishwasher that could help us do dishes a lot quickly. More quickly, it wasn't too expensive. We got it from Walmart. We set aside, again, certain donations asked for people to help us get this. And she also found there was some, we do coffee cups. We do some disposable recycled paper copy cups and compostable lids. Because we had Styrofoam cups before, which is awful for other reasons. And it was a good thing because she got involved. It helped get her buy-in on the concept because she was part of creating it. But it also gave us, I think, multiple avenues. So if something happens and we run out of, which has never happened, but if we do run out of reusable cups or during the pandemic, things happen. People were concerned about hygiene. We had these compostable cups and lids as an option that people can take. And it was still maybe a sanitary hygienic option, but it was still a better option than the Styrofoam cups. So it's good to have multiple avenues towards success in case something fails. And they're really helpful. It's not just the one way to do it. And there's going to be other things that may work for you in your library. I mean, you might not have a stash of 40 coffee mugs, like April's does, but figure out what you do have or what you cannot get as for donations. I know I have at home personally way too many coffee mugs that I know I don't and will never use. I would be wanting to donate them to the library if they had some purpose for them, of course. That's exactly right. And I think we've kind of come to be known in our community as a place where people, if they have something that they think is useful and they don't want to throw out, they'll ask us first. And we don't always say yes, but there's a lot of things we have been able to use. And I think that's, I mean, beyond sustainability, I think that's just true of libraries. Anyway, we're doing take and make kits for some of our craft programs. Again, last year when people were really concerned and the library was completely shut down and closed to the public. And I remember we, oh, what were we doing? We were making these ornaments out of bird seed to hang in trees for a Christmas program. And we needed to be able to send home a small amount of corn syrup for this craft. And it was like, okay, well, how do we partition this out? And I remembered I was like, someone donated a bunch of bottles, a little sealed bottles, I think, from their prescriptions, but they sealed completely. And we went and pulled those out of the closet. And that's how we were able to distribute like two tablespoons worth of corn syrup to a couple dozen children in a kit. Yeah, you never know what you can use. Absolutely. All right. Okay. I think I just like anybody had any other questions. I did encourage people to ask questions. And they did ask about the book title and the seed library. You guys can always reach, you all can always reach out to April if you want to at her library for more information. Look at the slides. Look at the handouts. Got so many resources there that you can use. So thank you, everybody, for attending this morning. Thank you for sharing this with us today. April, this is some great information, great resources. And I'm glad to have it out there for everybody. Thank you for having me. Yeah. The recording for today, I showed you all earlier how to access our archives. Should be ready by the end of the day tomorrow, as long as GoToWebinar and YouTube cooperate with me. Everybody will get an email from me letting you know when it's available. So I did ask about receiving the certificate of attendance or confirmation of attending today. Our GoToWebinar system will automatically generate an email to everyone who attended today's show live. And it will say, so if you need some sort of confirmation for any of your continuing education credits or whatever for attending, it will say, this email is sent from the system to anyone who attended live this particular session. And there is an attached PDF certificate if you want something certificate-like to print out rather than just the email. So everybody will get that email automatically sent to them from today's session, everybody who attended live. We also do have a Facebook page for Encompass Live. If you'd like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. We send reminders out. Here's your reminder to log in to today's show. What about our speakers? We post when the recording is ready. So definitely if you like to use Facebook, you can do that. We also use the hashtag Encompass Live on other social media, Twitter and Instagram. So if you want to look for that there, that's where we've had talk about everything that we're doing as well, promote the show. So that will wrap it up for today's show. Next week we actually have something that kind of a lead off of this one we were talking about. You've talked to mentioned April doing grants to do some of the work. Next week's show, you can sign up for any of our upcoming shows, but next week's is about the Croix Bennett Donor Advice Fund. This is a grant specifically here in Nebraska for our small and rural libraries. You need a population server, 3,000 or less. And this is for things that you can do to repair, renovate, update your facility. So if you're looking to get some of those whether the LED lights, LED lights or anything in terms of what our construction work done on your building that you might want to do to upgrade or update anything. This is a grant you could definitely apply for. So if you're in Nebraska, this is specifically just for Nebraska libraries, sign up for next week's show, learn all about the grant. I will warn you, this is probably the last time this grant will be available. It was a limited amount of money that was available and there's been so much given out where they're almost done. They're almost given away all of the funding that was in this program. So it's been such a success. So this is the most likely to be the last year to do it. So if you're a small library in Nebraska, this is your year to apply for a Croy's Bennett grant. So please do join us for that or any of our other upcoming shows. I've got August dates. You can see I'm filling in September and October. So keep an eye on our calendar as we get more sessions confirmed. You'll see the dates filling here. And you'll notice here, we have one week of the year that we do not do in Compass Live. It's the week of our annual library association conference. So for the Nebraska library association conference, it's being held the week of October 13th. We will be off that week because everybody will be attending conference. Our conference is having, as you can see here, a mixture of virtual and in-person days. So if you're in Nebraska library, go ahead and get registered for that. But then that will see you on a future episode of in Compass Live. Thank you, everybody. Oh, someone says thank you. Thank you. Great session. Lots of wonderful resources, April. All right. So thank you, everybody. And we'll see you next time in Compass Live. Bye-bye.