 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 online event or a webinar, webcast, online show. The terminology has not been decided, I guess, of what you call us, but whatever it is. We are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. If you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's okay. We do record the show every week and then post that onto our website, and I'll show you where that is and where you can get those recordings at the end of today's show. We post the recording of the show itself onto our YouTube account. If there's any presentations, like the PowerPoints we have here, we post them as well for you to refer to later. Any websites you might have mentioned throughout the show, I grab them put into a delicious account where we save websites for you. So all that will be available to you after the show. We do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, mini training sessions, interviews, basically anything related to libraries. Really, our only criteria is that somehow library-related, something libraries are doing, programs, services they're offering, something that could be useful to libraries, websites, resources, anything. We're very broad in that. So sometimes some of our shows you might look at and say, what, why is this on here? But trust us, it all has to do with libraries in the end. That's our only real criteria. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes come on and do presentations about things we're doing here in Nebraska, things through the Nebraska Library Commission. But we also bring in guest speakers, too. And as we have this morning, to my left here is Vicki Wood, and she is from just up the street. Did you walk down this morning? I did. I did. Just a few blocks away from Lincoln City Libraries, right here in Lincoln, Nebraska. And she, I don't have, what is your title there? Where are you? I am the coordinator of youth services. Youth service. Okay, great. And she did a presentation at our state library conference last October. It was our Nebraska Library Association and School Librarians Association conference on this early literacy program that they did, I thought just a very interesting partnering with some local. And so I had asked her to come on to NCAPUS Live to share it with a broader audience. So I'll hand over to you, Vicki, to take it away and tell us about your program. Great. Well, thanks for having me, Krista. Okay, so the idea for this program actually was incubated over a fairer amount of time, as any of you who know have tried to institute a big program like this. There's a lot of thinking and logistics that go into it, but it came from a family literacy conference that I went to with a bunch of Lincoln public schools people. And I just want to put a plug in that, you know, it's great to go to library conferences, but sometimes it's really good to go to conferences that are closely aligned with the kind of work that you do. So this family literacy conference was not for librarians, it was for educators, but it was a great conference. And one of the programs I went to there was about an organization in Florida that was giving children free books at their well child visits. And it was based on Reach Out and Read, so some of you might be familiar with that, and they have an organization that helps people provide, helps physicians provide books at the well child checks. And so I thought, well, this, we already had a relationship with the health department. They don't do well child checks at the health department here in Lincoln, but they do do immunization. So I met with their people and we figured out a schedule, and we'll get to that later about books for children. And 95% of the families that go to the health department for their immunizations are low income families. And so we knew that we were sort of hitting our target audience, and we also know that sometimes we have trouble getting those families to come into the library for various reasons. It could be transportation, it could be fear of library fines, which we find out is a really huge thing in low income families, and also just a lack of familiarity. Now a lot of the families that go to the health department for their immunizations are also refugees and immigrant families, and so they don't really know their way around. So what we decided to do was to set up a schedule so that if a child got all their immunizations at the health department over the course of time from birth to four years old, they would have seven children's books in their home. And we know some of these kids have siblings, so they're getting books, so we tried to get a variety of different books. And it was funded originally by the Dillon Foundation, which gave us $10,000 to start the program. The next year the health department used some monies to pay for it, and then we are funding it again this year, so I'm hoping it keeps bouncing back and forth so we can keep it going. We're in our third year now. So the basic idea is making sure that kids receive a high quality age-appropriate book when they go to their immunization appointment or their home visit. Now the other group that we work with in this is Healthy Families America, and that is a very intensive sort of home visit program for families that are most at risk in terms of neglect and abuse. And there's about 200 families that are in this program, and we also distribute books to them through the health department through the home visitors. So this is just some numbers for you just so you can sort of see what we're working with. And so the list down here is one month to four months. These were the ages at which we were giving out books, and these were the numbers that they gave us from the year before. So we were basing that on numbers from the year before. And we were purchasing our books through First Book, so if any of you aren't familiar with that the link will be available on one of my slides. But First Book is a wonderful organization that provides children's books at very low cost, and you can even buy them by the crate. You can buy them in 40s and 20s or five books, and they are half price or less. And they really specialize in high quality books. These are not toss-off books or movie tie-in books or something. They're really great high quality picture books, hard covers, board books, and paperbacks. So these were the numbers that we were looking at, and we figured to just serve the kids in the immunization clinic for the first year was going to cost us a little over $6,000. And we had 10 to work with. So Healthy Families America, I talked a little bit about this. They actually start prenatally, and so we also chose some books for the prenatal period, and they give the books out in this schedule that's right here. And the cost to purchase those books we figured was going to be about $1,600. So we had already spent some of our money to purchase the books for the year. And then there were a few other things we wanted to put in with the books. So we have flyers that are about child development, and they go into each bag. This is an example of the one that's for the prenatal period. And it talks about tips for understanding what's happening with your child at that developmental period and ideas for making literacy and books part of your home life. So you can see one suggestion is to try to get books at garage sales or thrift stores, or if you are having a baby shower that you suggest a gift book or a card to a bookstore. And then the importance of reading and talking, the importance of music, you know, not worrying about the child putting the book in their mouth. I like that one. It's okay if they chew on it, because they do. Yeah, we get that question a lot, yeah. And then about, it always comes back to going to the local library. So in each of these sets of flyers that go inside the book bags, we always really emphasize the importance of using the library. And so that's what that looks like. And then we have one for each of the different periods that go in the book bag. So we purchased also just Ziploc bags. And so the book goes in there. And we also have a library card application. We have this flyer, and we put in a preschool storytime or our storytime schedule, which we now call our library learning time. So these are what the flyers look like. You can't read them, obviously. I was taking pictures of them at the health department. We use the read aloud 15 minutes a day logo now. We had a different logo for the first couple years that we used it, but we're really all on board now with the 15 minutes a day program. So that's what that looks like. And like I said, we include a special library card application in our library learning time schedule. So we provide story times for babies, toddlers, preschoolers, and families on a regular basis. We do about 40 per week at all of our library branches. And so we have really tried to shift more to doing more in the evenings and weekends for working families. And so we keep these updated schedules in there. And then the library card applications are a different color than we normally use. And so when those come back to us, we know that that came. And it also says begin with books in the corner. Now this is not a foolproof method. So for anybody who thinks, wow, what a cool way of keeping track. We still have families, of course, who just drop in and get a library card. And we never know that it came from this. Oh, I see. So you make them color when they go into these bags so you can try and track where it's coming from. Exactly. So and you know, one thing we're finding out is that a lot of families have library cards. And so that's kind of cool. And I'll talk a little bit more about that part of the program later. I like how you've changed your story time to call it library learning time. Yes. So it's a little bit more, because I know, we know story time, that's the whole purpose is it's not just coming read a cute story, that there's more to it. Well, and we do a lot of education with our families in our library learning times, too. And that all comes from every child ready to read. So we talk to them a lot about the different principles and what we're trying to do in the story time. And we have amazing storytellers in our system who do a lot of really cool interesting developmental sorts of things. And so we thought it was appropriate to change it to library learning times. I mean, our staff and a lot of our people that bring their kids to story time still of course call it story time and that's a favorite thing, but it's a lot more than stories now. So anybody who does that knows that. And then this is the Healthy Homes America. And we got a couple great pictures of the case workers that work with the families sort of modeling, reading aloud to the baby, so you can see the babies laying on stomach there and the other kids are kind of gathered around. And some of these might seem really second nature. I mean, a lot of us read to our kids and we were read to as children. But if this isn't part of your life and your family tradition, it really does need to be modeled. So the family visitors and for Healthy Homes America were so appreciative when they finally had books that they could give the families because they could bring books in, but then they'd have to take them out of the home. And there's been a lot of research about the importance of having books in the home for early literacy and not just bringing books in occasionally. So actually owning your own book is a big deal. So this is a cool component to that. And it doesn't have to be one or the other owning or going to libraries. I mean, when I was growing up, yeah, it was both. We had books that we got for birthdays or holidays and things. And I do remember every Saturday, my dad would take us to the library. So that was our thing, too, just to supplement what we had on our own. Yeah, exactly. So I love this picture, too. So they sent me some of these pictures of them sharing the books with the families. And so part of the part of the project that we did was also to train all the immunization physicians, assistants and nurses and the Healthy Homes America staff about the principles of every child ready to read. So they gave me a half of a day and we went through the whole every child ready to read curriculum so that they would understand and be able to pass that information on to their families. And it was really interesting because they have all kinds of goals with the families they work with to talk with them about child development and good nutrition and exercise. And they didn't really have a literacy component to it. I mean, they knew books were important and they talked about reading to your kids, but it's become much more a part of what they do with the families now. And because they do have the free books, it's really a nice thing. So I love these pictures because they sort of confirm everything great about this program. All right. This is a picture of one of the health care providers. And you can see here that in the back, she is an immunization nurse and they come in and get their immunization. And I asked her when I took this picture what kind of impact it had on the kids and she said, well, I always tell them this is going to hurt a little bit, but you're going to get a book when you're done. And I thought, well, that's really sweet. And these immunization nurses are all trained to talk to the parents for a minute or two about reading aloud and saying, do you read aloud to your child? Do you know how important it is? And doing a little bit of education instead of just saying, here's a book. You know, they just don't do that. They do a little education around the importance of early literacy, which is nice because they have the families in there for about between five and 10 minutes, depending on how many children they have and how and how many shots they're getting. So so they have them here. These books are divided by age group. We make sure that we have four or five different selections for each age group because they could have siblings. And we don't want to make we want to make sure that they don't have three copies of the same book. So also the kids will have a little bit of choice then. So we we try to make sure that we have quite a bit in the different age groups for kids to choose from. And this is an example of some of the current titles that we we have. The the Dr. Seuss books are for the three and four year olds. We break it down by the different ages. The baby animals book and any of those big word books have probably been the most popular books for families. And they're also really great for immigrant refugee families because they name things, everyday things. And it really helps the parents learn English too. And I will mention that we do buy books in other languages. We buy Spanish books. We've recently added Arabic, Burmese, Karen, Karen. I've heard it said both ways. French, because there's quite a few. We have quite a few African immigrants who speak French. Yep. And so that was a new one. And Vietnamese. And I think, yeah, that's it. Those are the five languages. So we get those from a different company. We get Spanish ones from first book. And then there's one called Star Bright Books where and and language lizard are the two places that we go to for the books and other other languages. And so here is a picture of first book. You can get on their website. If you get an account with them, you go to what's called the Marketplace. And you'll see a listing of what's available. Books kind of come and go. One of the books that we used for the prenatal period was Tana Hoban's Black and White. And we bought, you know, 150 of them. And when they were gone, we went back and tried to get some more and they were gone. So you kind of don't know the publishers decide. But really amazing what great high quality books you can get. And there's always a very, very good selection. And like I said, you can buy them in boxes and crates of 40 or 52. And so we do buy a lot of them at once just because they'll run out through the year. The day that I was there to take pictures, this little boy had actually arrived. He and his family had arrived from Iraq the day before. And they had just come to the clinic to make sure that they were all up on their shots so that they could start school. And he and his brother came out of the room and they were showing each other. Look, I got a book. So it was great photo opportunity for me. This little boy and his family and his brother, of course, had a different book because he was a year younger than him. And so that was a great introduction, I think, to to coming to America and going home with a great children's book. And getting shots not so bad. Yeah, that's exactly. So OK, the other thing is that this is another component of the program. And this also came from Reach Out and Read. So if any of you are familiar with Reach Out and Read, they also have volunteers who read aloud to kids in the waiting room. And this is a two fold thing. So one is to read to kids because it's a good thing to do. And the kids enjoy it. They usually spend about 15 minutes in the waiting room waiting for their to get their shots. And so it's a great thing for that. But it's also great modeling for the families. And so this particular picture is a volunteer we have named Pearl. And right now we have volunteers from nine to 11 Monday through Thursday, which is their busy time. And we'll see in the pictures coming up a little bit kind of how this is set up. But the health department set up a sort of circular little seating place and Pearl will spread out all of her books with the covers out there and then just sort of invites children to come to her. And depending on how shy they are or how scared they are or how outgoing they are, they come and she she reads to them. And so that is her volunteer job. And so we have four different women right now that read at the health department from nine to 11 in the morning. And it really is awesome to see the parents watch their kids react to the books. And, you know, who knows if they read aloud to their kids already or not. But if they don't, it's just super excellent sort of modeling that behavior. So. And here you get a better a better idea about Pearl's little space there. So this is in the health department waiting room. And she's reading aloud to this little girl who also you can see is holding on to a couple of books that she's waiting to have read to her, which is nice. And usually, you know, you can't see it here, but she does kind of spread the books out. The other nice thing about the waiting room was when we first started came into the health department a few years ago, they didn't have any books in their waiting room. They had a TV and they had a few toys, but they didn't have any books. And so we donate about 30 to 40 children's books every other month to them to have in their waiting room. And of course, some of the books, you know, they disappear. They go home with the families, which is fine. They're mostly things that have been donated to the library that we can't use for one reason or another. So the waiting room has become sort of a little literacy hub where it used to be just a place where people sat and watched TV and waited to get there to get their shot. So and here's another picture of Pearl reading. So the great thing about Pearl and our volunteers is they're super flexible. You know, some kids have really short attention spans. She'll start to read a book and then they'll run and get another one. Or they'll get called in the middle to go, you know, have their shots. Yeah. So it's really nice to have that flexibility. I like the little short benches that I got there for the kids. It's kind of it. And then the kids like to get in the middle of it. You know, it's just kind of a fun, a fun place for them to be. So here's Pearl reading again in those. So this is a really important part of the of the program. And we've also trained our volunteers to talk to the families about the library and library cards. So they have little library cards that show all the locations of the library and they will approach the families if they speak English and say, you know, do you have a library card? Do you visit the library? Do you know where the closest library is? So in addition to being, you know, a read aloud volunteer, they also are kind of ambassadors for us about the library because we always are trying to bring it back to that and to make families understand it's not just about free books, you know, through the health department, but it's about making the library a regular part of your life and visiting the library regularly. So so these are some of the contacts that that I talked about earlier. So reach out and read if you want to know more about their organization, which is what this is based on. You can go and find out about them. Now, basically reach out and read is an organization that they don't provide the books. They can some didn't provide the books and the funding. They can sometimes help you get discounted books, but they sort of have their the structural program and we decided not to go through them just because they are organized around well child visits as opposed to immunization. So we based it on reach out and read. So to know more about their story, it's an interesting organization. First book is where we get our books, which I just can't say enough about first book. I think they are a great organization. And then the read aloud.org is the 15 minutes a day initiative that's a nationwide initiative, which we have definitely gotten on to in the last year and we're doing a lot of promotion around that. And then that is my contact information if anybody wants to email me or call me or has more questions about how the program is set up or how it's run. And I'm happy to send out handouts to people if they want to see what they look like and I don't care if anybody copies them and uses them. It's fine. Nothing that we did is particularly brilliant or needing to be protected or anything like that. So that's kind of our contact information. So, there we go. Okay, so that is it. And I assume we're gonna have some questions. Sure, yeah. Yes, if anybody does have any questions, just go ahead and type them into the questions section of your go-to webinar interface. I can see that here on my laptop and grab that for you. Like I said, if you have a microphone, let us know. We can unmute you and you can use your microphone to ask a question as well. So this program that you do, this is a year-round thing. This isn't like a certain, like there's the summer reading program. Right, now this is, and we're in our third year now and I'm hoping that every year we just hope that we can get enough funding to keep it going. It costs between $7,000 and $10,000 for this partnership in particular, which is a lot of kids. If you remember the earlier slides, we kind of looked at the numbers. Right, yeah. We are looking actually right now towards expanding it to some other healthcare providers in Lincoln, so one would be the People's City, or is it the People's Health Center, PHC, which is not associated with the People's City mission, but they also provide healthcare to lots of low-income people and have recently expanded into what's called the Health 360 Building. We also are working with the Urban Indian Group and one other group that provides healthcare for low-income kids. And so we have a big grant put out there to basically double what we're doing right now. So in addition to the Health Department, but the Health Department, this was a model that we're using and saying, you know what, we can do this in a bigger, we can do this in the bigger part of the community and we can do it very cheaply. Basically, if it's $3 times seven's books, so for $25, you can assure a child will have enough books to make a decent little library for their, and if they have siblings, then of course they have those books too. So it's a pretty small investment for a big payoff, I think. And it seems like you said you had a new grant that you've gotten or you're going for. Well, we're working on right now, and we haven't heard yet if we got it or not, but if we did get it, it will provide funding for the Health Department for the next year, plus these other groups that we're working with through our Early Literacy Partnership. And because we kind of know how to do it now because we've been doing it for three years at the Health Department, it's gonna be pretty easy to administer as opposed to like trying to start something from the ground up. This is definitely the kind of thing I think a lot of grant providing organizations would be wanting to say yes to this kind of program. Exactly. Yeah, and then the nice thing about it too is that all of the money goes directly to books and to handouts and things, there's no administrative. I mean, it's part of my salary to organize the program. And so that's also nice because a lot of funders they're looking at paying overhead and paying staff people and this really all the money for this would just go directly back into the community. And to putting books in kids' hands, which of course is a wonderful and important thing. And it's good that you're working with lots of different types of groups. That's something I think that would be good to have other people think about is, like you said, you saw this was, you've gotta look at where is this kind of thing being done in your community? So which organizations did you be trying to connect with? That might not be your Health Department or like you said, they didn't, you guys, we didn't have the same setup here as you saw it here at the presentation that you went to, conference you went to, so yeah. And when I did the presentation at NLA, there were several people in smaller communities in Lincoln, I mean, in Nebraska who thought, yeah, we could do this through our main pediatricians office and do it that way. I mean, the community is small enough. Sometimes there's one or two doctors or whatever. And it's really just a matter of getting the pediatrician or the doctor's office or the clinic on board. And it's not that hard to do because there's- That's what I was gonna ask when you reached out to the Lincoln City, how did that work out? I mean, what did you do? Oh, the Health Department loved the idea. And I think they were kind of already thinking, we're not doing quite enough in this area, but of course they're like all agencies where people feel overburdened too much to do. And so I think they were very happy for us to come in and it's just, it's been a really, really great partnership. Yeah, someone who could have the expertise to help them get something more. And then what happens is when we order the books, the boxes go directly to them and they have a staff person and some volunteers there who then bag everything up and make sure that everything came in and then divvy them up among the immunization rooms. And then they also let me know when they're running low on certain things, that they're running out of four year old books or whatever and then we can purchase some more if we still have money in the account. That's nice, they have staff on their side too so that you're not having to go to their offices to get the logistics of it taken care of. Yeah, so it's, and that's where I think it's easy to expand on something when you've been doing it for a while and you kind of see how it works and then it's easier to put it into other places also. We do have a question of the audience. Someone wants to say, wants to know what one piece of advice would you give a librarian looking to emulate this program? I think that if you're gonna be approaching a doctor's office or a clinic that you wanna make sure that you have some background information about the importance of early literacy. My first meeting. Yeah, my first meeting I brought some things from some slides and some different statistics from every child ready to read about early brain development and literacy and how essential it is and how you have kind of have these windows when kids are young and if the windows, you don't get in there, it's a little late and so, and I think that I've noticed a lot more physicians, at least my friends that have young kids have told me that their pediatricians and the PAs and the nurses talk to them about literacy now, like when my kids who are now in their 20s were growing up, they talked a lot about bike helmets. And so that it's become more of an issue, I think, and I think a lot more pediatricians are actually aware of it. The 15 Minutes a Day program actually has a spoke, their spokesperson is a pediatrician and so it's definitely something that's sort of trending right now that pediatricians are becoming aware of this and that it's more than just reading readiness. There's bonding that goes on between the parent and the child. There's language acquisition. I mean, there's all kinds of things that happen when you read aloud to your kids. And so, and it's cheap and it's easy and it's free. It's all good, you know. So I think that I don't think it's a particularly hard sell, but I think having some of that background information and maybe statistical things behind you would work well. And then also maybe having a little bit of a plan, like, you know, instead of saying, well, we're gonna put this back on you to figure out, saying, we kind of know how we might be able to do this. And then, you know, of course, seeking funding is the same thing. You it's good to have a program put together to know how much everything is gonna cost. And it's relatively cheap. I mean, we feel like we get a lot of bang for our buck in this program, so. Yeah, a lot of these websites, which I've been catching them, as I said, and putting them into our delicious account here, great resources for, like I said, getting books, a lot of them at once. Yes, yes. From all these. Like I said, it's about an average of $3 per book. And you're talking about a really nice, like an Eric Carle board book or something. So yeah, it's a very, and we've been doing the program between $7,000 and $10,000 a year for those, for the kids. That's not bad, yeah, for how many kids, as you said in the beginning, that you're gonna be. Yeah. That you have to work with, yeah, here in Lincoln. And of course, in smaller towns, it'd be less that you'd have to do. Right. You just gotta figure out. So where, so you had gotten the statistics on how many kids from the health department to figure out what to do. Yes, they were very on board. And so when we were setting up the budget, they sent me all their statistics from the year before. Now, I have to tell you that I've been in contact through the 15 minutes a day program with some people who are doing a program called Restaurant Readers, which is another interesting thing that we're looking into. And there's a woman, I believe she lives in North Carolina who has gotten several of her, she lives in a relatively small town and she's gotten several of the restaurant owners to agree, she takes books and she takes them apart and laminates them and then puts them on the tables and then encourages parents to read aloud to their kids while they're waiting for their restaurant meals. So this is another really innovative sort of thing that people are doing around encouraging parents to read aloud to their kids. I know there's a restaurant in town here that gives kids books, just books that they have to read when the kids come in. Oh, which one is it? Stoffers Cafe. Oh, I didn't know that. We take our niece and nephews there pretty often but whenever, I don't know what the age limit is but you'll come in and sit down, they don't ask, they just bring you menus and the kids get a book and it's a random amount of time. They're a little beat up sometimes. Sometimes they're not and I should ask where did they get them from? But that's, some restaurants do have a coloring page or something that they have somehow decided we're gonna collect books and everyone gets a little book to read when you're done, you leave it and then for the next kid. Good deal. And I don't know where they got the idea. Yeah, that's a really great idea. So yeah, I think we'll be seeing more of those kinds of things. So someone does wanna know when you did contact the health department what statistics did you actually ask for from them? Did it say on the slide or what did you do? Yeah, we can go back to that. Let's go back to that. So what I, we wanted to know numbers so we could figure out how much money we needed. And so, so this was the, these were the numbers. So basically that was the 255 kids between the ages of one to four months. So we wanted to add up those numbers and then we figured that was how many books we were gonna need for the year and then the cost at about $3 per book. So that's how we came out with the $6,170. And of course, it varies every year because different kids come in and different groups come in but we figured that the numbers were gonna be fairly consistent. So we rounded them, you know, rounded them up and then bought books in those categories. Right now it seems as if they're, they need books the most for older kids, the two to three and the three to four, which was not such a big number before. So we are buying more of the older kids' picture books now and I don't know if that's just a change in demographics about kids that are coming into the health department for whatever reason, but it's flexible enough. And there's no big age cut-off anyway. I mean, you can give a four-year-old, a three-year-old book if you need to and it's not, you know, they vary a lot along the age spectrum. So they're pretty flexible about that too. So this is, when you went to the health department, this is specifically for the low income. So this isn't necessarily for every child. This is for the, I mean, no, it's for every kid that comes into it. That comes into the clinic, yeah. Because already every kid that comes to the clinic is, like I said, 95% of people who bring their kids to the health department for immunizations are low income families. They don't have their own pediatrician or doctor to go for this, right? Okay, so you asked them for, you know, give us the numbers from previous years so we can figure out what we're talking about here. And then the Healthy Homes America, we had 455, we needed 455, this is the kids that they serve in that program. So there were 54 prenatal, 81 that were in the four to six month age range. So that was how we decided to do the purchasing. And this is just happens to be, this organization is a national organization that happens to work here and may or may not be in other, yeah, you'd have to figure out. And they work with the kids from, they work with the parents prenatally to the third birthday in the immunization clinic we go up to five years. So it was a little bit different numbers. And so once again, we just said, tell us last year how many people you served and it's a federal program and they have a cap. I think they can only take on 200 families or 250 families or something like that. So that would not necessarily be expanding. So that was how we budgeted for that program. So then how many children, do you remember how many children and totally you actually did? I mean, are they keeping track of? They are. Do you give big books to? Yeah, they keep track and they, and we kind of get an annual and annual count. And actually it's quite, it's very close to this. And the books tend to last about a year, sometimes around nine months, they'll say, oh, we're running out of a certain age and they'll kind of be shifting things around. But the numbers have been staying pretty consistent. It's just that the age range has shifted a little bit. So how many in total from each of these different groups? Do you think how many kids have you? I don't know. In each year. I mean, I would have to, we're figuring that we're giving away over 2,000 books a year. And then we're breaking, the age ranges are fairly fluid, but really from birth up to five, that's, you know, then it's spread out, it's spread out in different ways every year. So this is the third year. So if we're giving away about 2,000 books a year, then we've given away six or 7,000 books, probably up till now, so. Nice. Yeah. And getting them at such good prices too, that's just, as you go out to like go to Barnes and Noble yourself to get these books, they're not gonna cost $3 too. No, no, and it's really worth finding out more about the first book organization because it really is a great, a really great organization. And some of these would be then, since you've been doing it for multiple years, the same children coming back again, if the families come back and remember that's nice. Yeah, we figured if they come as infants and they stay and get all their immunizations at the health clinic, they'll have seven books by the time they're five years old. Which is kind of a nice little starter home library. So. And you're only three years into it, so there's still a few more years for the ones that started out as infants to go. Yep. Yeah. All right, that was all the questions that we had typed in so far. We still have time. Anybody have any other questions? Anything else you wanna know about the program, the books, the money, how it's been going? And you said the health department's been very, have they had any feedback from the families about it? That they've done to you? Well, yes, we did it. Well, we did an informal survey with the healthcare providers. And that was very positive. And of course the people that work at the clinic and the people that are the home visitors were are thrilled to have these books because they have had books in the past, but it was very sporadic. Like sometimes they would have 100 books and then they would all be gone for three months. And you know, they would get them in different quantities, but it was never consistent. And people's donations sometimes it's a one-time thing. Yes. Not as an ongoing, as a program like this one is. Exactly. Which is nice, yeah. And then they did an informal survey of some of the families over about a two or three week period. And it's really, really hard because there are language barriers. And the other problem is that this is a very mobile group. And so following up with people is difficult because people don't always stay in Lincoln or they don't stay at the same address. They may not come back, yeah. Or they go and get a physician so they don't come back to the health department. So we're kind of right now just trusting that it is, it's a good thing and that we're having some good results from it. But we also, actually this week I'm meeting with somebody from the university. They got a big bunch of money at the university to study early childhood education. And we're going to have them design some kind of feedback for this particular program, for the grant that we're working on right now to expand it. So if we do expand it, we'll be working in some kind of process for evaluating if this made a difference in kids' lives. And it's kind of like the library learning times. Like we've always known that this is good for kids but it's so hard to measure what that means. To make it concrete, yeah. And there is, but actually the last 10 years there's been a lot of good research about those kinds of things. So it's nice to have that. And you can find it online. So that's another thing if you need to argue your case and you're looking for research, there actually is research now. Whereas before there was not so much. It's just anecdotal and of course we know it's a good idea. Exactly. But certain people, they want to know the numbers and they feel like an official study, yeah. Yeah. And I think every child ready to read most people that work in children's services know all about that. And that's made a huge impact because it's very based on scientific evidence. And there's been a lot of research that's come out of that too. So. You did mention this a little bit earlier but Alson wants to know, do you have any statistics on increased library patronage with this program? No. I wish that we did. I know you had colored. We get the, yes. But we also know that that is not represent all the people who come in and use it. So no, I would love to have that information though. I would love to do follow up with some of the families where we find out, did this influence you to get a library card? Do you use the library more regularly now? One report I got from the women who work at the reading aloud in the mornings is that when they ask the families that about between like 50 and 75% say they already have a library card and they use the library. So that is very good. And they're already doing that. And that's all for self reporting. So, you know, you don't really know but I think they were surprised at that. So and you know, when immigrants and refugees come to town, which is a big portion of the population that uses the health department, one of the first places that they go on their tours is to the public library. And you know, and the public library could also be very much a new concept and a new idea. I've heard that a lot of they don't understand the whole borrowing and that it's free and that they take it, you bring it back, get something else. Exactly. Yeah, so I think that, you know, the families are familiar with the idea of the library, now whether they're thinking about it in terms of their children, that, you know, is what we're trying to accomplish really at the health department so that families are like, oh, this is where you get children's books and this is how you read aloud to families and those kinds of things. So I'm hoping that we will be able to follow some families. The ultimate greatest thing would be if we could follow families over a long period of time and see about their kids readiness then when they go to school. Oh yeah. But of course, all that kind of testing is confidential and you know, it would be difficult for us to actually gauge that kind of thing but we have to think that when families have books in their home, they read more and when they read more, their children do better when they go to school. I mean, those things are probably done about that. Yeah, exactly. So following up on those studies that have already been done, here's, we're doing this and we know it will help from these but it'd be nice to see if ours helped as well. Exactly, and I'm hoping that the university people who know how to do research, which of course, I don't, will have some good suggestions for us about following the families and getting feedback from them, so. They should, yeah, of how you're supposed to do, not human trials, but you know, testing with people and following up on that and like you said, privacy and all of those issues. Right, and also a really mobile group of people who don't always stay in the same place for a long time or move or change phone numbers and those kinds of things that the follow-up can be difficult, so. Yeah, trying to keep track of them all. I think part of that would be potentially at the very beginning, reaching out to the families, saying we want to see if this is working, would you be willing to, since they might move, keep in touch with us and let us know where you've gone so that we can keep up with tracking what's going on and how it's been affecting you. The other thing is that for partnerships, you have to figure out ways to make, you have what you want to accomplish and you have to make sure that it's easy for the partners to do it and it's beneficial to them in the same way. So what we would have to get at that point is kind of buy-in from them that they would do some of this follow-through for us because they're the ones that have the contact with the families. Right, and the health department. Right, so that's the other thing that we'll have to structure in there is a way to have the people that are working one-on-one with the families, whether it's in the immunization clinic or the Healthy Families America, buy-in enough to get us some good feedback. So that's the hard part. Yeah, you think they want it for themselves too. Yes, definitely. Because they're involved in it. All right. Nothing else is coming while we were chatting. Any other last-minute questions you guys wanna ask? We have a few more minutes left in our hour. Any other last-minute things you wanna wrap up and let people know about it? Well, I kind of started out by saying that I think it's really great for people to go to conferences that are closely aligned to what they do, but maybe not. They can't sign the box, yeah. Yeah, because that's kind of where the idea for this program came from. And another thing is that if you wanna get something like this set up, it's really great to think ahead about three to five years because there's lots of programs that people will fund for one year and then you're kind of like, like you'd like to keep it going, but there's, yeah. So thinking a little bit farther ahead in terms of funding is sometimes good. So if you can divide it up over several years to make sure that the program has a bigger impact, that's also a good thing. And then like we were just talking about Krista, the whole balance with partnerships where we want, the library wants to reach these families, the health department, yeah, it's all good. How do you set it up so that they could administer the program for you without too much burden on their staff and their time? Right now we seem to have the perfect mix. They're very happy for us to order the books, take care of the money part of it, to do the printing and provide it. They are happy to pack all the books and get them all out. Which is that's something that libraries know how to do is finding out where to get all these organizations, that's what they're there for. Exactly. That's something good that, this is our expertise and we'll combine with you to, yeah. Exactly, so that's kind of the secret to any partnership is figuring out how to have both sides sort of have their needs met with the least amount of impact in terms of their resources and what they can do in terms of their workflow. So for me, I have to say personally, this is one of my, I've worked in libraries for 25 years. This is one of my greatest loves program because we've tried so many traditional ways to bring families, lots of low income families into the library and haven't always been successful. And so the idea of going where families are makes so much sense. Yeah, that's the thing that a lot of libraries are doing is it's not just in your building, go where the people are, do more outreach. Physically bring the stuff, the books, the whatever your program you're doing to where they need it and that's what the library can be too. It doesn't have to just be, you've got to come to us where we are and yeah. And the other reason this program made so much sense to me is because your pediatrician or the person that you go to for healthcare is often a trusted person that you would listen to. Oh, yeah. And so that's- Rather than just some strange librarians telling you to do this. Exactly, like librarians are always gonna say you should read to your kids, but when your healthcare worker or pediatrician says, this is to you, this is important for your child's development, you're gonna listen a little bit more. And then like with the Healthy Families America where they've been to the every child ready to read training and they know how to do reading aloud and dialectic reading and they can model some of these things for the families and then the modeling that happens in the waiting room, like all those things together, I think could make a powerful difference. So yeah, so of the things that I do in my job and that I do all the time, this is one of the most satisfying to me because I feel like it really can make a huge difference. You can see it, yeah. And yeah, and like I said, the day I went to go take the pictures and those kids came out of the waiting room and excitedly showing each other their books. And I thought, oh, it was like they did that just for me here today. So I could take these photos, but it is exciting and I think that it also shows the sort of the importance of the library and the community beyond just our buildings and out in the community, which is where we are a lot too. And people don't recognize that. They think we're kind of in our buildings and not out there in the community as much. So it's important from that perspective too. We are a lot more, even more and more, absolutely. Yeah. So I welcome anybody if they want to, from my contact slide, if they want to send me an email or follow up with a phone call, I'm happy to share any more information that I have. You can go back to that last slide if you want. Okay. Yeah. Just wrap up with that. And these slides, it's okay if we grab these slides and we'll put them on our, yeah we'll post these slides available to you guys as well. So you'll be able to see all the links and the contact info will be available afterwards as well. So it doesn't look like anything else came in while we were just wrapping up here. So I think we'll wrap up the show for today. Yeah, we're almost at the top of the hour again. Perfect timing. Great. So thank you very much Vicki. That was really great. Like I said, I had seen this presentation at our conference and thought it was really cool programs getting in, especially the partnership part. I always like, like you said, libraries reaching out to do something new and different in some different areas. So thank you very much. Thank you everyone for attending. The show is being recorded, as I said, and will be posted to our website. Probably this afternoon, depends on how everything goes. When we get things processing and uploading and whatnot. I'll let you all know. I'll send you an email, let you know when it is available and it'll be available on our Encompass Live website. And I'll bring that up now here. Let's see, there we go. This is our library commission website. Grab this, use the right keyboard. And you can either search for Encompass Live here on our site or if you also just search for Encompass Live online anywhere with your search engine of choice. So far, we are the only thing calling ourselves that, yay. So we come up first still. On our Encompass Live site, our archives are upcoming shows and our archives are right here underneath our upcoming ones. And let's see, last week we had best team books. And this is just from last week's. We'll have the recording available. The slides will be here and I actually have links to the websites that Vicki mentioned throughout the show, all the different places to get books and everything. All the different other programs out there and a delicious account all collected together. They will all be there. So that will be wrap it up for today's show. And next week's show actually could be helpful for you if you're thinking about doing this yourself. Library Improvement Grants for 2017. Here at the Nebraska Library Commission, we do give grants to libraries in the state. So if you are in Nebraska Library, interested in, I wanna do any sort of program, like the Begin With Books or anything else, tune in next week to find out from Richard Miller, our Library Development Director. He's gonna talk about the upcoming season of grants for this that will be coming available. As you can see how to apply, what they're for, get tips and tricks on how to get yourself a Library Improvement Grant from the Library Commission. So definitely sign up for that one and any of our other shows that we have coming up. I've got other ones in the works. You're always adding to the schedule. So you'll see more added here each month. This is not the only, this is not like the end because it's all that's up there. So keep an eye on our webpage and you'll see which new shows we have added to the schedule. And Gubba Slive is also on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, do pop over there and give us a like. We post reminders of what new shows are coming up. See here, I don't wanna slide in right now. When our recordings are available, here I posted a reminder to log in for today's show. So if you are a big Facebook user, do like us over there and you'll get reminders about what we're doing each week. And then that wraps up for this morning. Thank you again, everyone, for attending. Thank you for being here with us. This is great. And we will see you next time on EndCup This Live. Bye-bye.