 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event where we have presentations about anything that may be of interest to librarians in the state of Nebraska. We have commission staff that do presentations, and we have guest speakers that come in. Today we have a mixture. Yeah, you're speaking. We do these every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time Live. They are all recorded, so you can watch any of the recordings that you want to afterwards if you're not available to come at during our live sessions, or share the information with any of your colleagues, people you may know that might be interested in a topic that we have. Today we have a session that was kind of created by Laura Johnson, our CE coordinator here. Is your idea? Well, okay, yes it was. We give continuing education grants, and it seems like a really good opportunity to share the wealth to be able to do this. So what we have today, then, is what we're called our fall conference roundup, which does not mean every fall conference that's out there. No, just a couple that some people from Lincoln City Libraries went to. They received continuing education and training grants from the Library Commission and in order to attend a couple of different conferences that were both this fall. Pat Sloan went to a back in circulation again conference, and then Sheila Jacobs, on my left over here, went to a volunteer coordinators conference in South Dakota, actually, and you're using Wisconsin. So out of state conferences, too, this is not just for things like LA, it's really get yourself out there somewhere to get to a conference. And so they both attended these, and they're going to share their experiences, what they saw, what they did, what was cool about it. So, and we're going to start with, there you go. All right, okay, take it away. And I'm Pat Sloan and I'm the circulation librarian for Lincoln City Libraries. So I found out, mostly from the circulation manager at the Omaha Public Library about this conference, it's hosted by the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I said, ooh, going to Madison, sounds good to me. And they do this every maybe two to four years. It kind of varies. I saw on the website it said it was the sixth, so it's not necessarily an annual thing. It's just whenever they do it. It's kind of whenever. Apparently they started out every two years, but maybe not so much lately. But I was really grateful to get the grant to go because the registration fee was a little hefty. I knew that the registration and the hotel things would be on the hefty side. And the Lincoln City Libraries encourages us to get grants to attend these things. But then in talking to the circulation manager at the Omaha Public Libraries, she indicated she would be going and it looked like she could take a couple of her staff from several branches. And so I quickly said, ooh, can I ride with you? So I was able to keep expenses down by sharing the ride and then sharing a room. So that really helped a lot too. Actually riding with the staff from Omaha Public Library, that in itself was a great experience. They were wonderful travel companions if any of them ever listened to this. But we were just sharing stories back and forth because we're all in circulation and working at basically a front desk area, answering all kinds of questions, including a lot of reference questions that you get out of circulation desk. And in some branches, it's all one in the same. So you are just prepared for everything. But we were just definitely sharing stories of the good, the bad and the ugly, as well as right now both Omaha and Lincoln are on the Cersei Dynex Horizon system. So just how that works and just kind of odds and ends of little things, quirky things that may come up and how we handle them and things like that. So we were able to quiet away the hours quite nicely traveling together. And fortunately, the driver knew the way and we didn't even need a navigator. She knew exactly where she was going. She had been before plus her daughter had moved to Madison for a number of years so she could drive it blindfolded. So it was an easy drive. It is an all-day drive though. And then the University of Wisconsin is sort of right downtown, very somewhat similar to Nebraska. And we were staying at, there's a kind of a conference hotel. And then a different building for the conference meetings. The hotel was on the older side. The conference center where the meetings and sessions are held was nice and new with all the high-tech equipment. So that was nice. But easy walking distance, we had nice weather. And we were able to get in. And the area right around there is all just small theaters, boutiques, and a ton of restaurants with every ethnic variety you can imagine. So it was just kind of a nice break sometimes during a conference is to get out and walk and look at something else. Plus I could take advantage of just pairing up with different people or different meals just to talk to people from different areas of the country. As it turned out there were 81 circulation librarians from around the United States. Most of them I noticed were kind of Midwest pretty much within a day's drive. But there were, you know, someone from California, they had Massachusetts, South Carolina, Texas, I mean just a few from others. A number of people had attended before, really enjoyed the conference and were coming back, but there were plenty that were also new to this. And so I was, you know, kind of hovering in between since I was with people that had been before, but this was a new experience for me. So anyway, it was fun. We had 49 of the people attending work with public libraries and 32 were with academic libraries. It was open to, you know, any system. Yeah, it included a small town, you know, public libraries, some community colleges. Probably not very many of the large universities, but more of a, there were some private colleges, all kinds of things. And just a very nice assortment of people. And when we gathered together, it was interesting. One thing I really had fun kind of watching is, well, I would say the average age was maybe 40s and up of those attending. Well, they were so younger. And so as people were listening to presentations, over half the people were actually taking notes, pen and paper, you know, with notebooks. We did have plenty of people with their laptops, you know, clicking away. And I was really wishing it was one of them, but that just wasn't going to happen. So it was just kind of fun to see, you know, the difference in technology. And then the room was equipped with all the high tech, you know, things for PowerPoint presentations and everything. And it was also fun when one of the presentations, the person is like, how do you run this stuff? It was obviously just a little new to her. But, you know, also not being sure where things were in that particular room. Oh, sure. When it's not your own place and your own laptop or your own computer, yeah. So, but we did have the first presentation was called Difficult Conversations. And it was by Jeffrey Russell, who is a local Madison person. He has Russell consulting firm. And he's worked a lot with the public libraries, the universities there and anywhere else. So, but we had some kind of general group time and then some small group breakout time. But we were talking about, and many of us, and we all, especially at circulation and information desks, deal with some difficult customers. You have people not happy about all kinds of things, not just the fact that they have some fines, but all of a wide variety. And so just kind of sharing experiences. And then Mr. Russell was just trying to give us guided information on how to have those conversations that would not end in a shouting match, that you would somehow, you know, trying to come to an agreement so that you could both feel that something was accomplished. And, you know, everything keeps changing. I know we get customers, well, it didn't used to be this way. And well, yeah, I know. It didn't used to be either. This change this year, something else is going to change next year. And some people don't like the change as well. And this happens, you know, with the colleges and universities as well as public libraries. So it can be challenging to handle the difficult customers. And I know I get my fair share of them because I'm kind of, if it involves fines or their record, it usually ends up with a phone call from me. So that's just the way I've learned to deal with it. We did have another session called Freak Out, Geek Out, or Seek Out, which dealt with transformation and change in the libraries. And the present, the man presenting, giving the presentation was David Lee King from the Tupika, Shawnee County. And he is just, you know, far beyond all belief because he's so animated and so alive. And it's just, it's like it's infectious. He's spoken here in Lincoln several times. He's just, I was delighted when I saw him on the program. And so just kind of, you know, and going through the fact that change is occurring more rapidly now, but used to take 10 years to get into sort of the general mode or 20 years is now six months and things are changing rapidly. You know, libraries kind of got into the whole computer thing. Initially, maybe like OCLC was your first computer in any library. I know that was kind of my first experience. And then, you know, kind of, then maybe you got another couple of computers and then you might be graduated to word processing and the old dialogue, dialogues system that started out at the mind-boggling speed of 300 bought a minute. But you can actually read as it goes across the screen. Of course, now everything is just flash, flash, flash so fast. It's amazing. But now it's not just, you know, computer access or internet access that libraries have to offer the public. It's the Facebook, the Twitter, the, you know, all of that plus customers are not only wanting to maybe be notified by an e-mail or a phone call. They want to be, you know, send a text message and, you know, a voice mail. And they are becoming very demanding and they're electronic needs. And it was interesting to hear some of the libraries are trying to cope with it. I think it's kind of initial stages in many cases. Yeah. Because it's very new and in most cases most of us don't get the newest, latest equipment right away. We're kind of living just a little bit behind. Some of your patrons have the new stuff before you do. And quite often that is the case. I still remember the first day someone came up with their smartphone and, you know, it's like, okay, here's your page on my, where do I go from here? And I'm staring at a little teeny tiny screen out there. Oh my goodness. That was, you know, I was able to guide him through to what he wanted, but it was interesting that he came into the library to figure out how to get to what he needed to. Now, on a smartphone it's a little more challenging because it's so tiny, but we figured it out for him. You've gotten the QR code. Yes, we do. And, you know, people still ask this, though, what they are. That's very new, yeah. It's still very new. And as well as some come in and go, wow, you've got a QR code. So it's like, okay, yeah, we're not totally in the dark ages. We're trying to keep up with things. So it's been fun. There were also during this conference, sometimes the public librarians met separately in the academic librarians met. And so they were dealing with some different things. I really wish I'd been able to have a, you know, clone or somebody to go to both meetings. They actually sounded equally interesting. You definitely learned from each other. And you do. So one of our sessions with public libraries was called Special Services Cards for Outreach. And this was the Williamsburg, Virginia, regional library system. And she was promoting their system. It's kind of like a county-wide, or maybe it was multi-county, I can't remember. But they had established kind of special library cards. And they were reaching out to teachers, activity directors at daycare centers, and retirement centers, senior day centers, things like that. She was the outreach librarian, and they had decided to just try, one way to actually increase circulation is find these special groups in your communities. See what you can do for them. You have to quite often do, you know, it can't be the same as an individual customer. You may need longer checkout periods. You may need different kinds of cards, different fines, different all kinds of things. At that particular system, they even did some pickup and delivery of bags of books that would go to daycares or retirement centers. And they had kind of a special, like, cards for the teachers or the activity directors so that I think they weren't really accumulating the fines, like individual people and all, and even have them in different colors. So it's like 9 million city libraries did some similar, but this is something, you know, a librarian in any city could do. See, you know, I'm sure there's daycares in any town, perhaps a special card or service to pay or to daycares, or the retirement centers are certainly growing by leaps and bounds and, you know, making contact with retirement centers. And can we bring you a box or a bag of books every week or something like that, or take requests and deliver them? There's a nice variety of things that can be done, and that can also help increase your circulation. Well, and it's a wonderful way to serve a segment of the community that may have difficulty getting into your building. And I know Lincoln City libraries, we are visited by daycares quite often, but we also know they check out a lot of stuff to, you know, take back, and then that's theirs for the week or three weeks or whatever their schedule is. So very, very nice service. We also had Camilla O'Leary talk about, she titled hers was, Every Voice Makes a Difference Frontline Library Advocacy for Where You Sit. And this actually applies to, you know, public, academic, any kind of library, even special, but really getting to know your customers, particularly key customers, like people that work with your budget or influential, but just anybody getting to know their, either their reading interests, their hobbies, or, you know, maybe a business interest. What's their latest need? What is their need? And then being aware of that and sort of, you know, knowing their name, knowing how to contact them and say, oh, here's an article in the Such and Such Magazine about this topic. I thought you would be interested in it. Maybe like email. Would you like me to email you a copy? Would you like maybe notifying someone about a certain book on a topic they're interested in? Would you like me to hold that for you? You know, very personal service, but boy, that really, you know, sticks hold in their mind. Customers really know that and they will seek you out again or they become more favorable about the library and word of mouth. They spread, you give a good service at the library. I can ask for this and this is what they do for me and they can spread that information to their friends, colleagues, all kinds of people and that can help influence public opinion and support, especially budget support. Absolutely. Bond issue. Yes. Or even if you're having, say, a fundraising campaign, it'd be wonderful. I think that's a great idea. I've heard people talk about that too, about getting them articles being proactive before they even ask. I mean, it's in a good way. Stock them. Find out what the mayor is interested in. What are his interests or something. And say, hey, by the way, here's just something I thought you might like. Let me know if you want to know more. And even with just people, after a while you kind of get to know the people that come in frequently, perhaps what they like. And it's like, well, you know, maybe they've read everything by a certain author now. It's like, well, what else? Now what? Now what? And you know, you'll think, well, what have you read recently or what do you like? And then, you know, we can go to like, read-alike sites and try to find, well, here's authors that write similar to that. Or if you, maybe they like cozy mysteries. Maybe they like things about World War II. Or just getting to know. And then also, keeping in mind if something new comes out, letting them know if, you know, even if it's only when they come in and say, hey, there is a new book out on this topic or by this author. We usually have one in our new book display. Or something, or, you know, taking them and walking to the catalog, find the number, make sure it's still in. And getting it into their hand that day. And that impresses people. They think very favorably when it's personal service. So it's a good way to treat your board members. And oh yes, board members. Yeah. So it's just been, you know, I know a lot of our staff try to do that too. You get to know certain people and they get to know you and seek you out then too. So we also had a session about addressing particular concerns, serving individuals with mental illnesses. And again, particularly public libraries may get customers or sometimes just people that come in. They may or may not actually use the library, but with, you know, and sometimes you really don't know exactly what the situation is. But it can be obvious there's some problem. Either sometimes just their ability to communicate. Sometimes they like to talk a lot or sometimes they don't want to talk at all. They don't want any help. They may meander around quite a bit, but just trying to approach them to see what it is they're needing. You know, what is their need? Finding out, you know, are they looking for certain authors for certain kinds of information or are they the kind of person that wants to be left alone? And, you know, you may have all kinds of people and maybe just trying to understand a little bit more what it is they're struggling with. I mean, there, if, you know, any number of mental illnesses, just getting out in public is a struggle for some people. So, and even some physical illnesses. We certainly, like I said, he has a number of customers that either come in or through our home service have a variety of physical and or mental issues to deal with. So, I must say I enjoyed not only the sessions, but in between sessions and meals going out with people from, you know, just finding a group of people and going out for the lunch or the dinner and things and then just having all kinds of fun talking about a variety of things and sharing information. One thing I was sharing with some people that were, I think more of them were actually academic librarians with a dinner and we got to talking about scheduling a little bit, but I did mention that we use Google Docs for our schedules and this is a great way so that staff can access a schedule from home. And we put up, we have weekly schedules and for some of our locations we even have a daily schedule that are available for staff to view which can be really, really great especially for maybe part time staff that don't have a real regular schedule. And it's like, otherwise they were calling it, am I walking today? Or am I walking tonight? Or what's my, what am I supposed to be there tomorrow? And it's just been incredibly helpful as well as it makes a really good, easy record that we just have then as to who was doing what, who was here, we have, if you're attending a meeting everything is on the schedule so it can help your own recall, what was I doing last week or last month. And even getting those last minute changes on the schedule is really helpful. Because then it's on every computer so we just pull it up on all our computers and make it easily available and it's like doing it on paper before and then having to run around and erase and change things and it's like, this is so much better. As long as there's internet access it's great. And now people with the smart phones are like, hey, I can just have my schedule right here. All my smart phones. It's wonderful. You know Pat, you had mentioned too, visiting with people during the breaks and that's one of the great things too about conferences is that networking and you have like people and just what you are doing. I had mentioned just the sharing of information and that's just such a key to not only the sessions but visiting and making those connections with other people in the same position. Well we do a lot now online like this and this is great but you still have to, a lot of people this is the only thing they can do. They can't travel anywhere, they can't get away and that's fine but if you can use this grant to get yourself somewhere in person in front of people it can make a huge difference. And I just particularly enjoy talking with people from other libraries. And then afterwards they set up a, we have a blog now so we all still keep communicating and they gave us of course a list of all the attendees with the phone numbers and email addresses and stuff so we can still keep in contact because maybe something came out, you know I'll get back to you on that. Or you know you can email somebody and say well you talked about this, what more can you tell me about it. It was a wonderful experience. We're good. Sounds cool. Ready for Sheila. Alright next we will switch over from circulation to volunteers. There we go. First I want to thank the Nebraska Library Commission for the grant to attend the third annual Volunteer Coordinators Conference. I just really appreciate the opportunity and thank you for the grant. My name is Sheila Jacobs. I'm the Outreach Services Supervisor with Lincoln City Libraries and part of my duties include overseeing the volunteer program at Lincoln City Libraries. And just to say a few words at first why I was so appreciative of having the opportunity to get this grant to attend the conference, our library system in calendar year 2009 had over a thousand volunteers and they contributed over 20,000 hours. So that's just a huge, huge piece. That's awesome. As far as our program goes and with our volunteer program our volunteers can be as young as 6th grade on up and the 6th graders and middle schoolers do help with the summer reading program and we rely a lot on their assistance and then we have teens who volunteer with developing and implementing programs for other teens. We have adults who do shelving, shelving, shelving and check in and just an assortment of other tasks and really the purpose of volunteers with Lincoln City Libraries as I'm sure would be the same as a lot of other agencies but they're really taking care of a lot of behind the scenes tasks that will free up time then for our staff to do what Pat was suggesting before too that personalized service with the customer so we love our volunteers they are terrific and we say it just that daily we don't know where we'd be without our volunteers. As far as the conference in South Dakota was in beautiful downtown Sioux Falls and Sioux Falls really is a cool, cool town it reminds me of Lincoln probably 30 years ago without the waterfall but it's a very cool town and so it took about four hours to drive up there I went solo this year and a lovely drive pleasant travel time. The folks who attended the conference were really primarily from South Dakota but we did have folks from surrounding states in North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska the corner of the states so other states can get there easily exactly and well and actually folks and it is in the southeastern part of the state there were folks from the western part of South Dakota and of course they drove a lot farther than I did so I think it took about three and a half hours or so to get up there so there was a good group of folks represented I'm thinking that probably there were maybe around 75 individuals a lot from non-profit organizations but then there were also for-profits as well the hospitals were in attendance the community blood bank folks from the zoo folks who work with aging services throughout the state so a good mix but primarily non-profit I didn't have an opportunity to meet anyone from a library up there but it's okay too because it's just interesting again to hear those like experiences when it comes to volunteers what I'm planning to say in a couple minutes and sharing information from our keynote address as well as a session that spoke to intergenerational volunteering and the first item I want to share information from is the presentation that was called Selling Up, Down and Sideways and the keynote speaker was Margaret Sumption and she is with a firm in Sioux Falls and she provides services in terms of grant writing leadership training strategic planning so it was really interesting to hear her presentation I'm going to read the description of her presentation that was listed in the booklet that Margaret will present strategies for volunteer managers to get a seat at the table as leaders assign resources for volunteer programs build department buy-in to include volunteers and work teams expand the capacity of volunteers through training and mentoring and to successfully integrate them into the work teams they are so that was her description and she began her presentation by saying that generally her presentation is about a day long and for her keynote address she compressed that information into about a two and a half three hour session I'm now going to compress it in 10 minutes so we're going to we'll miss a few things yeah exactly yeah we'll get them highlighted so how it worked was she had 10 strategies that she addressed and the strategies really combined self-improvement leadership techniques with tips on enhancing and strengthening the visibility of a volunteer program and at the end of each point she offered a grab-and-go strategy that helped people put those ideas into motion so I'm going to highlight six of those strategies and we'll go through these pretty quickly but the first two really are focusing on the person now again as we're thinking about this keynote session she really is looking at ways that volunteer managers can sell their program so even though we're talking about volunteers here this certainly could apply in other areas of a person's job but the first two focused on on ourselves on the individual her first is finding your core strength how do you see yourself if you don't believe in what you're doing if you don't believe in the volunteer program first of all you need to find another another job probably if you don't believe in the program it's really difficult to sell it and that's the main focus that she was presenting is selling the volunteer program and you need to look for that passion do you have that passion or are you needing that passion first grab and go strategy that she offered was for individuals to develop their own strategic plan develop a mission statement goals and objectives for themselves to find their core strength second then was be good at what you do and she was focusing there a lot on the time issue and leveraging your value on the time issue as far as how productively do you use your time at work most of us do a lot of the emails a lot of the memo writing do we do we assess with that do we spend a lot of time in making sure that every sentence is correct the spelling is correct or do we just send it out and know that it's going to be good enough and she's suggesting we just do that just because she was suggesting we spend about 80% doing those routine things and it doesn't have to be perfect was what she was suggesting however the other 20% like developing brochures or planning presentations for a board or something really do need to be looked at more in detail and presented more thoroughly so she was suggesting to look at how we get our work done and she also had indicated I thought this was interesting and I don't quite know how this would work exactly but she was saying to leverage your value and what she used for an example there was when you get to work don't immediately check your email because that then consumes your time and you're taking care of other people's needs I don't know but she was suggesting that you take the initial time at the first part of your day to take care of what you need to get done and then go into the emails and taking care of those depends on how you organize your work I mean if what you need to get done is in your email you got to go in there but you can pick and choose what emails you pay attention to that's your crisis not mine I got to do this first that's a good point that's a good way of looking at it her grab-and-go strategy for looking into that a little bit more was to write a development plan for yourself and she had suggested to list three things that you want to improve on on any given year or 12 month time frame and two of the improvements would concern work and one would be fun something for fun and so she said identify books training resources to meet this plan and divide the plan into the months to develop that strategy for improvements that you would like to make for yourself then she moved on from looking internally into yourself to selling the volunteer program and selling the program internally and she had suggested to bring volunteers to meetings with you use them as selling agents internally have them help sell sell to others in the house she said look for somebody who definitely is engaged and involved enthusiastic to help sell the volunteer program and she said too that be sure that volunteers are in your department if you're the volunteer coordinator or working with volunteers be sure that they're in your department as well another item was she suggested enlisting champions with credibility what she meant by that was use a happy manager to sell volunteers a volunteer or a manager who is happy with volunteers I think maybe is the way to describe it also employees who have a successful relationship with volunteers use them to sell the volunteer program her grab-and-go strategy was develop a fan file that she was saying ask the supervisors ask the staff to tell you something good about volunteers who work in their setting and then use that information develop a fan file a quote file use that information then in an annual report put it in a memo use it in in an agenda for a meeting just constantly refer back to a quote or two that you have received from a supervisor or staff member about volunteers a positive quote and then continue to use that one of her strategies or one of her items was prep your fluffiest pom-pom and really what she was getting at there I think was more in line with the elevator speeches that we're familiar with you have your 15 second speech we do develop a 60 second commercial outlining the program and features talking about statistics the impact of the program and volunteers and then you would have that available to develop in in whatever setting would be appropriate so elevator speech 60 second commercial but just be prepared practice that information to share with others when the time arises and she also suggested to teach that commercial to the volunteer and then the volunteers can also they can sell it for you exactly another item she was looking into measuring and reporting volunteer programs again looking at identifying two or three key measures of a program impact creating a visual chart something with something a visual that you would use reports use agency why she suggested picking a visual that works and use it a lot so again that repetition you have a visual that you're using to chart the progress of the volunteer program and you're putting that into just about everything that you can it's gonna that will apply to your program and get the word out again selling it both internally and perhaps externally when you're looking at writing grants you can flood those pieces into the grant as well here I think was probably my favorite she was talking about the innovative and we probably all have been working with change and trying to come up with new ways of doing things and I really really like this she had suggested you want to be the very best at failure and I love that I think that's terrific because what she was really getting at was collecting innovative ideas from both staff and volunteers in terms of using volunteers somebody comes up with a great idea give it a try use one department to test it out give it a try and then she said again be the very best at failure so I think that's great it's kind of like do it try it and if it works wonderful and if it doesn't well you try failure is not a bad thing no there's lots of things that conferences are doing now whole tracks or sessions on failure like the whole thing of how we did it wrong screwed up but we tried and here's what we did and here's what we might try and do better next time or can anybody else here tell me how to do it better next time because we couldn't figure it out exactly yeah no kidding yeah so really those were the highlights from from her presentation I think if we can go to the next slide there are just several items some titles that you may want to take a look at Mojo is a fairly well it came out I think this year and a fairly good book it looks like I haven't had a chance to read it but I just read blurbs about it on leadership and there again we have some other titles regarding leadership and the workplace and then at the bottom is the website for assumption and Weiland it is an agency as I mentioned in Sioux Falls and the group provides training on grant writing, strategic planning leadership training and skills so it was a very interesting presentation and like she had indicated initially she did pack a lot in a short amount of time so those were the highlights with that presentation and then one other presentation I just wanted to touch on was there was a session regarding generational diversity and it was tips for engaging volunteers of all ages and here are some websites that you may want to take a look at and the individual who presented this session is Sarah Carruthers and she is just really sharp she is a sharp young professional in Sioux Falls and she works with the 2-on-1 wine and she she did a great job with this presentation she had a panel for individuals and the individuals were the 4 different age groups and I'll touch on just a couple of things here it was really interesting a fun presentation she talked about the silent generation and that generally covers the ages 65 to 85 and again, generalities she was looking at values and characteristics of the various age groups looking at tips for recruiting placing, engaging supervising and recognizing these different age groups and seeing the tendencies for a variety of life and choices but with the silent generation she had indicated that they are dedicated to doing the right thing I think that probably applies to a lot of folks boomers I really enjoyed all the panel members I enjoyed the boomer individual and that generally is the age from 48 to 64 the person I think maybe when we think of the boomers too we think of the hippie era and she felt strongly she needed to remind people that she really had not lived that particular down that path at any rate but not everybody did that but as far as boomers go some generalities and tendencies are that boomers have a desire to change the world and that they more than other groups may have a sense of entitlement it also is the highest volunteer rate of any group so that's interesting to keep in mind as well as far as the statistics at Sarah who others was presenting and again you'll find those statistics at some of the websites that are listed on the screen the Gen X group covers the ages 30 to 47 and they generally are more independent thinkers they're more results based and have a tendency to volunteer for a shorter term than others the Gen Y, Gen Ad group the ages 10 and that just sounds odd to say somebody is the ages 10 to 29 they also are exhibiting high rates of volunteerism and they really have a tendency they enjoy teamwork and they also enjoy challenges and they also appreciate having mentors as well so those were some of the highlights it was just fun to listen to them and hear their experiences and again I want to thank the library commission for providing the opportunity and the grant to attend the conference it was an exceptional conference great thank you Sheila and do you want now we're going to go over to Laura who's going to tell us a little bit about how these guys got to go with it hi this is Laura Johnson first off I have to thank Pat and Sheila for going to these conferences and bringing this material back to us this is one of the things that we hope the CE grant can do is to spread the wealth the individual who goes to the conference we hope gets a lot out of it in terms of interacting with people from other places seeing how other folks are doing it come on let's face it how many circulation librarians are there in Nebraska I mean we deal with circulation but how many people are actually circulation librarians so to be able to go find a peer group is pretty cool yes there are volunteer coordinators but how many people are volunteer so we think that's wonderful that we can get out and hear what other people are doing yes you can interact with people electronically and that's wonderful because it's an opportunity that we didn't used to have it used to be very difficult to find out what other people in other parts of the country were doing and now we can electronically so we can in some ways continue the relationships that we may start at some of these conferences but it's also true that being able to go in person is a wonderful thing and so we're really pleased to be able to underwrite that kind of opportunity because we feel it's not only benefiting the individual but of course we do it because we think it benefits the library users and that's really the important thing the bottom line for us eventually is that we want to help you to improve your library service and we think this is one way to do that we all get so involved in our day to day tasks and our community and that's really good but it's also good to get outside of that every so often so we have the Continuing Education and Training grants they are meant to help people go beyond the usual therefore they are not appropriate we will not fund say attendance at the Nebraska Library Association annual conference it's not that we don't think that conference is worthwhile because we do but it's something we feel is within reach of many librarians most librarians or we want to put these things that maybe aren't really within reach we want to help people with those things so these kinds of reach these two were kind of regional conferences but regional and national conferences are one of the things the other thing that the CE and Training grants will pay for is training in your library or among a group of librarians in your area that you would not ordinarily be able to do so one of the things to get a grant you may want to go to our web page and this is the main page this explains all of our grants libdev slash grant.html the easiest thing really is just to go to our website and search it's the little glasses isn't it our main web page you just click on search and ask it about the grants and it'll bring you right to this page we do want you to realize the CE grant is a hot topic right now because it is due applications are due December 17 so you still have time that's two weeks and that's plenty of time but we need to get on it we were talking here today we've tried different schedules for this and if this isn't working for people we can change it again but the fact of the matter is there are conferences all year long and so it's really hard for us to schedule it in such a way that we can help people get to the conferences they need to get to we've put it this way so that people can think about midwinter and about ALA or PLA but yes there's internet librarian there's computers and libraries there's MPLA there are really a lot of conferences out there what you just need to do is be based on the schedule just think it's due December what's coming up in that whole year after that that I would want to go to so look ahead and start with December of 2011 what's available the name of the game is plan ahead the grants will be awarded on January 21 what happens is we get the applications we have a committee of people who read them several people from here in the commission and then a couple of people from outside the commission we read them we have a discussion about them it's always kind of painful because we want everyone to have the money basically this is one of the things we'd really like to emphasize is if you've never written a grant Pat was telling me this is the first time she's done this um this may seem a little scary it may seem oh they want to know so much but honestly this is a fairly easy grant application as these things go um it's to a place that wants to give you the money we want you to have the money we want you to be able to do this stuff so we're rooting for you um if you have trouble with your application let us know we'll try to help you with it and think about it grant writing is not something that's going to go away when we did our CE survey the kind of CE they were interested in grant writing was like the top thing that they wanted to know more about well there is no better way to learn something than by doing it and this is a great way to get your feet wet because you are never going to have a more sympathetic bunch to send a grant application to so you know get out there um we have to because of the way our accounting works we need to disperse the funds by June 17 that means if you have a conference say in August you still have to get the money from us by the middle of June we need your projects complete by September 30 but as Pat was saying if your project didn't quite hit those dates talk to us we can maybe work it out the simulation conference in the beginning of October you know and then final reports yes we do have to have a final report what can we say and we are interested in what you did honestly we are interested in how well this process worked for you we are interested in what you learned what your experience was like and yes we do actually this is part of your agreement with these grants is that you are going to share and so Sheila and Pat came to share with us today we've had other people do this earlier this year we did it when people went to PLA PLA and the same thing they got the grant and this was not a terrible experience let's go this was fun well they had to say that but no but sharing is not a bad thing because it is helping a lot of other people too so we really hope we're going to hear from you we really hope we're going to get a CE application and if you're not ready to do it this year then put this on your calendar start thinking about this next summer as soon as you get done with summer reading start thinking about this because this is a great opportunity and one we'd really love to see you take advantage of in fact we do give preference to people to libraries who have not received a CE grant before or have not received one for some time so get out there okay okay well thank you everybody I think this is a great session I'm just going to go to thank you Pat, Sheila and Laura for sharing with us today I think it was very useful very interesting for everyone Laura, thanks to everyone too she's Chad and I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is a clever title with a pun involving the word graphic I mean graphic novels and manga a couple of young adults and teen librarians from Bellevue and Levis there are going to share information about using those in your library with your teens so hope you'll join us next time and thank you very much for tuning this week, that will wrap it up thanks a lot, bye bye bye