 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. We are a webinar, a webcast, online show, whatever you like to call us. We're here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. If you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record the show every week and it is then available on our website and I will show you where that is at the end of today's show. I'll show you our website and where you can get all of our archives. We'll post the recording, any websites or anything that our presenters mentioned and presentations, all that will be available to you afterwards. We do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, training sessions, interviews, demos, basically anything library related will be on the show. That's really our only criteria, that it's something to do with libraries, something interesting libraries are doing, some new service might be interested in, some of our things may seem a little out of the box. When you read the title, something might not be sure why it's on there, but trust me, everything comes back to libraries in some way. Public libraries, academic libraries, museums, anything, school libraries, that's really our only criteria on the show. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff sometimes do presentations about services and programs and things we're doing here at a library commission, but we also bring in guest speakers and that's what we have this morning. On the line with us is Denise Davis, who's, good morning Denise. Good morning. And she is from the Morton James Public Library here in Nebraska, City, Nebraska, just a little southeast of here where I am in Lincoln. Denise is the reference librarian there and I saw, she predicted this presentation at our state library conference. Oh gosh, it was just last month, wasn't it October? Yeah, we're still in November for one more day, not December yet. And I attended the session about their Reader of the Week program at our state library conference and I thought it was just a really cool program they had done here and so I invited her to come on the show and share it with our audience. So I'll just hand over to you Denise to go ahead and take it away with your presentation. OK, well thank you very much Kristen. Thank you for this opportunity to share our Reader of the Week program with other people in this format. It was a pleasure to speak at the conference last month. Thank you for attending and again, I'm just grateful to be able to spread the word more for those who cannot attend the conference. So as you can see on your screens, this is about Reader of the Week. Accompanying the materials later will be just a quick one page handout that I distributed at the conference with kind of the basic journalism questions about what this is, you know who, what, why, when, where and how. So you will have that available to you. And so let me just get started with some basic explanation of the origin of this program that took place in our public library here in Nebraska City, the home of Arbor Day. So here are the basics. This is a new initiative for this year. We won't think of it as too new right now, but we were blessed last fall to have a brand new library director. He started September 1st of 2015 and one of the first things he suggested to us as a staff was to try something like this. He was brand new to our community. So at the same time, he was introducing himself to everyone in the city. And so he approached the local newspaper, Nebraska City News Press. It's the oldest still published newspaper in Nebraska. Jay Sterling Morton, the founder of Arbor Day was one of its first editors. And as you can see, Nebraska City was established in 1854, a few years before Nebraska became a state. So anyway, nowadays this paper is still published twice a week. Our city is the county seat of the county. So the circulation is fairly good for a town of our size. The community itself has roughly 7,500 inhabitants and the circulation, as you can see, is roughly 10,000 because it's the main paper for the whole county. The readers that we recruited for this initiative were approached by all library staff to answer questions for a weekly feature. So again, the director approached the newspaper writer as part of his getting to know him as he went around the community introducing himself. And the format was created with art input as a staff. We were all encouraged to recruit readers. And yet one of us needed to be designated as a coordinator. And that wound up being me, which I was very happy to do. I really enjoy this sort of thing. So we talked about it all last fall. The goal was to begin publication in January of this year, which is what happened. So some considerations that we took into account was that essentially this would be free advertisement for the library, not merely sharing a reader of the week. And so each time we had the feature in the paper, we would try to tout something else about the library. You see the example there on your screen. But even more than that, it wound up being driven by the way the reader shaped the answers to the questions we presented. And you'll see those questions in a moment. And then we built on their responses kind of organically. And that allowed us to tout different services. At the same time, we, of course, were naturally creating more awareness of reading for pleasure. And a real concerted effort was made to feature a variety of readers and materials. I have the title of this slide in quotes because this was literally word for word from one of the emails our director sent to all of us as a staff, as we were going back and forth as to what this would look like. As you can see, we were encouraged to approach anyone in the way we were most comfortable. It could be in or out of the library. We wanted essentially just to tap and capture that passion for reading that we know so many of our readers have. And initially, our director, he didn't imagine much more than 200 to 300 words. And of course, we would include the relevant information about our reader. And ideally, with a picture of them, too. So there would be more awareness in the community of who these readers are. I like how he how he was so, as he even said, their passion about grab, call, write, anyone. That's right. And essentially was that, you know, I think sometimes over the course of the year, since I was the coordinator and I was just had at top of mind all the time, you know, I think some people when they saw me in the aisle of the grocery store or downtown on the street, they kind of, oh dear, she's going to ask me about Reader of the Week again. So, but, you know, that's that's part of the joy of being in a smaller community and trying to do something like this. You really can seize those moments that are just part of your day and bring the library, you know, to top of mind. So we had an introduction that we shared with our potential readers, and this then was included in each week's Reader of the Week to kind of reiterate what we were doing in case someone was coming to the feature at midpoint, hadn't seen the first issues. So as you can see, we obviously know a lot about our books, but our focus with this feature indeed was the amazing readers. And essentially, that's really what we captured here, and it was a joy each week to see what people came up with in their in their answers. So, again, that's the word for word text from the introduction that we put to each column. And this is also seen on the questions that we shared with our readers to answer. And I couldn't help but know that Runganathan, Runganathan, different pronunciations, the esteemed Indian librarian, right, that you learn about when you are studying librarianship, he had his five laws, the library science. And I think from up above, he would really be smiling about this initiative because I think in the course of implementing it, we're carrying out all five of the laws of library science. Those being books are for use. Every reader has a her book, which we're obviously touting in this feature. Every book is reader. It also is bringing to bear saving the time of the reader in that it becomes a form of reader's advisory. And it also shows the library as a growing organism. I had to include this dated and yet still very timely cartoon from our beloved cartoonist at the Omaha World Herald, Jeff Katerba. If you can't read the fine print, what is being conveyed here. There is a couple, obviously the woman on the couch, the man is standing and the man is saying, Internet pirates stole my intellectual property. Google is invading my privacy. Facebook changed its format. I'm going to go read a book. And I placed this here because as I was preparing this, it struck me that people might wonder, oh, this is such an analog kind of old school initiative, you know, in this day, why couldn't you just do an online version of this? And, you know, we did promote it on our Facebook page and it was mentioned on the website. However, what we enjoyed about this is that this really gave people an opportunity to reflect and create something about their own reading in a way that wasn't quick and that would evaporate quickly and would stand the test of time as well. I think there's still a place for something like this in our digital world. We have many readers who continue to subscribe to the newspaper, granted, many don't, and this was not available in the online version of the newspaper, the Nebraska City News Press. So we did have some readers who came in to see our version of the newspaper to see the eventual copy that was produced. But again, to my point, I think there was a real place for something like this because we were really pleasantly surprised at the awareness in the community there has been for this and people kind of looking forward each week. Again, there are plenty of digital options out there and ways to learn about things regarding reading and books. But I think this had a great place in the paper and has really had a followership. Yeah. And this isn't that jumped out at me about your, this project is that it was in the newspaper, the actual physical paper newspaper. And as you said earlier, in spite of what the some people think and what people think things are going, people are still buying and reading the newspapers. They still have their audience. It's not going, it's not going away at all. Well, in particular, I think, in smaller community newspapers, such as the one we have in Nebraska City, oftentimes the editors are hungry and seeking more of the local content because we do have columnists from either coast that fill some of the pages and yet people love to see the local connection. That's why many people who still subscribe do subscribe in the first place because they can get world news and other news elsewhere. But the local, you need the local. Yeah. And this really provided that. So it was a lot of fun. I think it has shown that there is definitely an interest in something of this nature in this day and age. Yeah. Now you mentioned that there is an online version of the paper and that they didn't put this in that. Would that possibly be something for the future? I would hope that they also put it in the online one. Right. The online one, as in most, I'm sure, is is always evolving. And so if this is to continue, we could engage in that kind of conversation. We haven't even broached it at this point. And I know subscribers to the newspaper can obviously access a different version online. But if you don't subscribe to the newspaper, as several of our readers don't, they still wouldn't be able to see it. Right. Right. So yes, that is something to to visit going forward. Absolutely. OK. So what were the questions that we asked of our readers? These are the ones we came up with. These can be tweaked, of course, based on your community. Should you like to try this? There are so many we can choose from, right? So we just approached it in this way, had just five questions, we didn't want too many, because we wanted to make it very doable for busy people and not make it seem like a burdensome assignment. And so and it would work for all ages this way, too, because as you'll see later, we had a real range of ages from young children to seasoned adults participate in this. So we wanted something short and sweet that would make it helpful and really doable for everyone. So essentially, we want to know what they'd read recently. Didn't necessarily have to be the very last book, especially if you're a very voracious reader. And then, of course, favorite author or authors, since so many of us have more than one, and why would they be a favorite author? And, you know, essentially, why do you, why do you read? And, of course, that question we all debate with each other about, have you ever had to give a final book? And essentially, this is a different response to that. And then lastly, of course, this is where some readers advice becomes into play as well, a book recommendation and why someone should read that book. And I have here with the asterisk, the library notes, followed the reader's answers. I alluded to that earlier, and that's where my work came in. Once I received a submission, I combed our catalog to see what we did or didn't have of the reader's books that were mentioned, and then I would follow up with what we had that they mentioned. And if we did indeed have it, what formats it was in. This then was the opportunity to tout overdrive, to tout our large print, if that was the case, or if we didn't have a book, we could get it through ILL. I think I have this in a future slide as well. But the library notes portion really took on a life of its own as well and could be as long, if not longer sometimes than what the reader had actually written. Following the questions, we gave them an opportunity to just kind of open end and share with us whatever might not have been captured in those previous questions. And some opted to answer it, others didn't. And then we broached the topic of including an image, because we respect not everybody is comfortable having their picture in the paper. And there are a couple of times when we did just use a book jacket or we covered a portion of the person's face and yet you could still see a book at play. So it was kind of fun to do this. People were real good sports. But again, we wanted to meet people in their comfort zone and not have them not do it just because they didn't want their picture in the paper. So that's the way we address that. And it gave the column a visual. So the logistics. So essentially, once our library director and the editor basically going forward in January, and I was then tasked to be the coordinator, I got the schedule with him. As I mentioned earlier, our paper published twice a week. So the decision was made to go. Preferably with Friday publication, our paper is published on Tuesdays and Fridays. And I just thought the Friday paper might have more readership in general with the weekend and so on. And people might have more time to glance the paper at end week with the weekend ahead of them. So that's pretty much the schedule we tried to keep to it did have changes every once in a while, depending on the news cycle, but that was our basic approach. That being said, it was then necessary for me to have the copy to the newspaper by Wednesday morning. Today's Wednesday morning, right? So for example, for this week, I made sure I'd submitted everything yesterday because normally at this very time that we're having the M Compass live today, I'm submitting the reader of the week to the paper and. Directly be an email with the photo as an attachment. And it was it was that easy. I always followed it up with a phone call to the newspaper office to make sure the editor saw it in his inbox because we all know people are busy and and get sidetracked. They may not always see an email in a timely fashion. So I always made a point to follow up. They would know that the inbox was there in time for their copy deadline. Big logistic is and why it's in red, constantly recruiting right within the library. Obviously at the circulation desk as you were checking out someone, some books that could be an opportunity beyond the library walls are direct. For example, in January when we were just launching this, he took my card, several of my cards with him to rotary and I'd written a little teaser on the back, you know, saying you two could be a reader of the week and he distributed those and for those of you who are familiar with rotary, many times you could promote something, but you have to pay a little fine and so he did that and out of that we got maybe almost half a dozen readers over time and then any encounter or meeting I might have and other staff members as well were always kind of mindful. So as a staff to track who we had approached was suggested that I keep a spreadsheet so that the left hand would know what the right hand was doing and that we would all be asking the same people and you know not knowing whether they said yes or not and we didn't want to be coming at people from all sides. So I maintain and I'll show you a quick copy of that moment. Readers could answer either an old school long hand or my email, several of our younger children do not yet have emails so it was very convenient for them to be able to simply write out their answers on the question sheet. So we did make both formats available and then I did give updates at our staff meetings. Our staff meets every week so it's very easy to do so and then I would also supplement the ZIN person updates with email who's in the pipeline any photos I might still need if someone waits on one of those individuals they could take the picture at the Cirque Desk etc. I also made a point from the very beginning since this is the library's transform and that of course was the theme of the conference to provide the newspaper with all of ALA's library's transform graphics with the request that they use them on a space available basis and I was very pleased with how they did indeed use them. I didn't want to impose that on them and then so on I just wanted them to be able to have that resource at times when they could use the space in the paper. Well that's nice. Yeah that's a nice connection. It's great that ALA provides for this promotion they're doing all the copy for it and the graphics are already ready to go and just put into somebody's a newspaper or a newsletter wherever. It was so convenient yes. I just sent them the links from ALA and different sizes you know and all the options they would have and I was very very pleased with how they did put them into use. As you'll see Snoopy is there. I also wanted that to be touted during September and they did that as well. The library card sign-up was done with this. They went to town with that. It was really great to see. Okay I mentioned the library notes before. So here is just kind of listed out and in addition to touting services such as the ILL and overdrive I was also able then to highlight special weeks such as National Library Week our book club summer reading programs and you just saw the Snoopy so obviously in September we included National Library Cards sign-up month and so I was always aware of the calendar when we did this you know if there was a special event or date in library land coming up that coincided with the Reader of the Week publication then I made sure to to include that and or even just something specific to our library that was happening like this week's Reader of the Week will give a final shout-out paragraph to our holiday party that will be this Saturday. So that goes back to the Reader of the Week being a free advertisement because since the feature ended each week with this library notes portion I could essentially plug into that any paragraph any any words that I wanted and they never edited it so I recognize that could change from paper to paper but we're very fortunate that our our newspaper really liked this and they just pretty much copy and pasted everything I sent them there wasn't much editing. Okay so the spreadsheet I mentioned I realized this slide doesn't probably very easy to read but you get the general idea I was just very basic obviously I've left the name column blank but I want to kind of keep track of which staff members had approached who any miscellaneous information that might be useful to know next to that it's kind of cut off but is the word photos for whether or not we still need the photo down towards the bottom you'll see an orange and red square that says need I still needed the photo for that individual and then the week they'd be published and you'll see a couple notations there the person in May it happened to be children's book week so I definitely made sure I was featuring a young reader that week and then if there was a change in publication for example instead of a Friday it wound up being on a Tuesday because of some news cycle event or the paper needing more space for something else I make note of that on the spreadsheet too so this was something just to help me kind of keep track the yellow always you know those are people very close to being ready maybe just needed the photo as you see there the people in white were had been approached but had not followed up in any way or we maybe needed to give them a gentle nudge the people in green have already been published so it gave me a very quick visual and the rest of the staff too because I kept this on the staff shared folder per my colleague suggestions so everyone could look at that at any time to see what the status was of any given reader and today we have about 85 people on the spreadsheet we haven't had that many readers of course but it just shows who we did try to approach and I think that's great right now this week will be at almost number 40 and yes we began in January so a few weeks were missed here and there for different things but it really wound up being a nice critical mass of readers now I'm sure you're all eager to see who are these readers that we've been featuring the whole year long so it didn't get in January so bring on the new year with this new initiative and very appropriately our library director who suggested this initiative started us out with plenty of books in hand he was followed by one of our great library volunteers and she's demonstrating the kind of option to have a book face and then on the same month we had one of our local officials you'll notice it says city commissioner Nebraska city is one of the or the only I think municipality in the state of Nebraska that continues to operate with the city commission form of government rather than just a strict city council so we were very grateful to have her participate as well and you may note that she's holding up a biography of none other than Jay Stirlingmore founder of Arbor Day that brings us then to February a shorter month and we were still kind of spinning our wheels a little bit so we were just published twice in that month both very engaged members of our community who really promote support the library in a number of ways so it's really delighted they came forward once holding up a CD the other a book March really got going which was kind of appropriate a special month for Nebraska right since that's the month we celebrate our state's birthday nice variety in this month from a young homeschooled student college president and a pair of siblings you'll notice there the one book one Nebraska was touted this month one of our readers wanted to really mention it however she did not want her picture in the paper so we put the the cover of the meaning of names and again that's especially appropriate given that it's been the one book one Nebraska for this year and some as a side note the author Karen Shoemaker actually worked on the book or at least a portion of it while she was in Nebraska City we are blessed in our community to have the Kimmel Harding Nelson Art Center it's a place where art artists can come and be in residence from anywhere from two weeks to six weeks and we have an ongoing treasure trove of artists in our community all year long thanks to this beautiful facility and it just happens to be two blocks from our library so we often meet the residents in the library and they can use our resources and so it's again kind of extra need that her book has been featured in our Reader of the Week initiative so April as we all know that is golden to we in library land right for National Library Week so we definitely made mention of this and by this point we're about three months into the project right and the newspaper must have been really noticing some momentum because right around this time they asked if in addition to doing this Reader of the Week when would we be interested in also sharing with their readers more about us they in turn wanted to if you will profile the librarians so that was a nice unexpected outcome of taking this initiative of Reader of the Week so in concert with it being National Library Week they put this in the paper and this photo of all of us was on a page together with many of the library transforms graphics and in this caption below the photo of all of us they mentioned that going forward in the weeks to come there would be a profile about each of us in the paper so this was the beginning of a little series to complement the Reader of the Week highlighting those of us who are in the library meeting all the fantastic readers we also have this on display during National Library Week many of you may recognize the library's transforms statements and the because and the speech bubbles and so on and we did have some things in there I just had taken this image when it first went up and had had anything in it yet and we continued to have the bookmarks and so on on at the circulation desk and the questions circulated throughout the library for people to pick up or at least to read so still yet within the month of April they began the profiles of each of us building on what had started in National Library Week and as you can see on the left below our directors profile they inserted get your library card today and I had not even sent that to them they they took that upon themselves to put that in there so again another example of the newspaper helping promote the library as a result of this project this was April 29th so we're still in the month of April meeting more of the library staff in an April I'd be remiss being from Nebraska City if I didn't mention Arbor Day now mind you this was not a reader of the week however we were able to use another venue another approach with which to publicize Reader of the Week which is why I include this slide here you'll notice all of us holding library well couple of us holding the library transforms because we truly did for one day in April Arbor Day and Nebraska falls on the last Friday of the month there's always a huge celebration here in Nebraska City all weekend long a parade is held on the Saturday this year was April 30th so you see there below the Morton James on main it says April 30th 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. well for those few hours that one day our brick and mortar library two or three blocks away closed for the day so that we could be directly on main on the parade route for Arbor Day and transform our library for a day kind of a pop-up library idea but if you'd like to know more about this in detail myself and another colleague wrote an article in the August issue of Nebraska libraries that gives the whole process of how this came about but for today's purposes I wanted to include it here is another example of how we could tout reader of the week in the course of this initiative and this again was three months in it's kind of on the heels of National Library week in April we had some good momentum the reason it says all book no bite is that the theme of Arbor Day this year created by the local tourism board was all bark no bite so we never miss an opportunity for a pun so we went to work with that and created all book no bite and the beautiful murals you see are on the windows of an empty pharmacy that we were lent for the day free of charge and the murals themselves were painted pro bono by a local very talented artist who's even been featured on TV here in Nebraska and so we just had a ball transforming our library and its services for one day in April I was gonna say I liked that whole that whole theme there the all book no bite you know and it really turned out well if the space was great we were able to put so much in there we had a mini selection of our DVDs our local internet service provider guys hooked up we were able to check out items if people wanted we even open up a new library counter to we had full telescopes there that people could see because we now lent out telescopes but I think one of the greatest things was it wasn't only the library there for the day we had enough space that we invited other local entities such as a church youth group Southeast Community College which was just in the process of opening a learning center across the street and some other folks to have tables and have spaces with us within that building for just the day and this was right on the parade route it was one of the main intersections as you can see a great window space to promote our presence there and we had nearly 400 people come through that day many many more than we would have on a Saturday off the parade route for Arbor Day so it was a success by any measure yeah just a lot of nice to be and you know we had the reader of the week notebook out there and I was able to promote that a little bit so it was all part of the mix but I just want to share that thought was kind of a neat initiative as well so that brings us into May which has children's book week so I tried to have a special promotion for reader a week that month directed to the children and so in the children's library I had this flyer or an image of it to encourage the children to ask the librarian about it and as you can see we featured one of our younger readers second-grader who is a Daisy Meadows fan and so many second-grade girls are and also that month we had a middle schooler and then a substitute teacher also in May it was my turn I guess to be featured so there I am but I also want to show this particular piece because it's a great example of the trifecta that we wound up getting sometimes in the paper I mean on this date between the profile the reader of the week which is cut off but you can see it on the right side together with the new book list that the newspaper continues to publish each month we essentially had a whole page of the newspaper on this particular date previously we would send the newspaper our new book list each month we no longer need to do that because they can simply go to our catalog and download it and so they we never really know when they're going to put it in obviously it's as close to the beginning of a month as possible you see this was May 6th and they put in everything from you know the DVDs and paperbacks and teen fiction that you see there to non-fiction CDs children's books it's all listed title by title in the paper so on this particular day without our knowing it everything was together in one place June I've been wanting from months to to feature one of our homebound patrons because we do continue that service here in our community and everyone gets their Morton James public library book bag delivered to them where they live either in a assisted living facility or private residence so we're very pleased to be able to give that service and have one of them be one of our readers a week also a local high schooler and one of our pastors he's actually one of the individuals who shared the space with us at the Arbor Day pop-up library and in June was kind of good timing because we were on the cusp of beginning the summer reading program the paper placed in June the profiles of the children's librarians and again this was not planned that's just kind of the the neat organic way this has all evolved and Sue Bennett our children's I brain was the only one fortunate to be featured in color as you can see there it was extra appropriate such as Scott Clifford the red dog there in hand as she talks about promoting summer reading and so of course in July everyone is in full throttle for summer reading we were able to feature our summer intern who worked with us all last summer helping not only summer reading but a number of other projects here in the library the fifth grader pictured is showing one of the prizes she won for participating in the summer reading program magic I have to include this there's a great story to this this young man is holding some of you may be familiar with the Tarbell course of magic it's an eight-volume kind of encyclopedia of magic tricks and I know there are a few other libraries in Nebraska and Iowa this summer who had this magician and miss kitty come and give a magic show as part of the summer reading programming and he did indeed come to Nebraska City and this young man was already ready if you will to be a reader of the week I had his submission I'd already talked with him I already knew him and he came to the magic show and I learned of his interest in magic so I went to the stacks and grabbed all of these books and he showed them to the magician and the magician was just amazed I tell you it was priceless to see the reaction of the magician that a library of our size would have the full set of this magic course well almost full I'll explain that a moment however he said to his knowledge very few public libraries of our size had all these and this young budding magician our reader of the week had been using them we've had seven out of the eight volumes and as a result of learning all this and so on we this very summer we're able to acquire the eighth and final volume of the tarbell course of magic so I put magic there because it was truly magical how I was able to build on my awareness of the interest of this year the week because of the summer reading program and also mainly because of doing the reader of the week initiative in the first place had that not been ongoing I might not have seen the possibility to create this opportunity and they have been in touch now the young reader sent the magician a thank you the magician in turn sent him a letter back saying I'm available any time you would need some advice so again the magic of connecting readers and that was an outcome of the reader of the week so I wanted to share that little antidote with all of you so August getting kind of into back to school mode so we've got all younger readers shown here the ones on the left and writer avid readers who were also prize winners in the summer reading program happy September so very fitting that we have an academic librarian as a reader of the week the high school freshman who's also a Boy Scout is actually holding up a title he found in our used book sale we have as so many public libraries do we have an ongoing use book sale now we have a regular use book store plus a few tables spread out throughout the library that people can always find new readings from and he happened to find one and then that was the photo published in the newspaper and we finally had the opportunity to also include one of our library board members as a reader September of course we all know is national library card sign-up month so we touted that obviously we were also present at our local farmers market in September we've been doing that for a couple of years now it usually is the last or next to last rendition of the farmers market for the for the year and we make ourselves present there and have a whole table for people can learn more about the library and we usually have some books there for people to take as our giveaway and it's just another opportunity to be out in the community outside the library promoting what we do October you saw in January we featured our library director and October we featured another staff member as well as a high schooler and one of our local business women Jean has a great bed and breakfast if you have visited Nebraska City you may recognize this this talented and keeper we also had our own October surprise now that was a phrase of news a lot this fall with presidential election in our community the local tourism launched their own initiative this fall have a scarecrow contest and so we as a library staff thought we should participate as well and we did and you'll see a rather muted image of our scarecrow in a moment however what occurred was that we needed to use the scarecrow as a reader when we kind of a substitute reader the week and this was our October surprise we didn't see this coming and so the editor's note I've placed here verbatim and they mentioned how we have been providing a reader the week each each week on Friday and that this week was a bit of a departure because our director talks about some vandalism now I don't have the whole column here but essentially what happened was we had an entry in this scarecrow contest I apologize that the image didn't scan better but on the far left you can see the lightness of a library and if you will that's our library and scarecrow on the far left we had a mannequin for her head and she was surrounded by books and our entry was called storytime in the pumpkin patch because the Halloween or because what she was holding in her hands and then pumpkins you can see just kind of the top of the pumpkins barely there at her feet the painted pumpkins were her children were the readers attending storytime in the pumpkin patch so it was really cute and that he was underneath a tree in front of our library we laminated the covers of Halloween books it had them hanging from the tree you know kind of descending upon the pumpkins in the library and it was really really well done and so we had that out a couple of weeks in October this would have been also two during the Nebraska library association conference when I present an October 20th well lo and behold a week or so later we unfortunately discovered that the library had been beheaded someone vandalized and taken her head over the weekend so Rasmus our director wrote a piece for the library and that's what the editor was referring to that it was departure that week for read of the week we kind of had a missing reader of the week if y'all so that was our October surprise and it must have garnered a little bit of sympathy vote although I think she was a great entry to begin with and so the library got second place in the whole community there probably were about 30 scare crows all around the city and we're pictured here with the representatives from the tourism office all holding books and kind of covering up where the missing head would be bad that that happened but again you know it was we kind of tried to leverage it and turn it into a promotion but in a good way to I mean what our director wrote was not it was kind of in a humorous vein of saying please just just like our books just just bring it back we're not going to scold or judge you know we just like things return we never did see the head again but I do think there was a lot of appreciation and out of all the scarecrows we did get second place and very fittingly today on our director's last day here in Nebraska City we're enjoying our prize they're bringing us some apple donuts and some some coffee and cider so it'll be appropriate way to send off our our director as you know the new adventure and also kind of celebrate what we what we did together here that was a reader of the week there was not a human being that particular week today being the last day of November we we have had several in November as you'll notice pictured here we have plethora of teachers as many communities right retired teachers current teachers they're usually avid readers and it just this kind of a natural they would be amenable to participating in this initiative and the upper left we have a retired English teacher she's holding some selections from the Nebraska 150 list for those of you attending outside Nebraska next year is Nebraska's 150th birthday our sequo centennial and so one of the initiatives is Nebraska 150 books a committee of librarians and teachers and others selected 150 titles that either were written by someone from Nebraska or are set in Nebraska there has to be a Nebraska connection in some way and so our libraries made it a real effort to acquire a great majority of those books I think we're up to about 130 now and so this retired teachers shown with some of those books and bookmark read Nebraska books there's a reading challenge that goes with that so we'll be really promoting that the new year Nebraska's 150th is on March 1st and then you see the other teachers here from November and that brings us already to December which these are forthcoming these obviously haven't been published yet but these are some that I have in the pipeline for next month and then near the circulation desk I always keep a readers of the week portion of a bulletin board so that people coming into the library just casually can kind of see previous examples and it's an additional incitement to encourage them to be considered the example on the right you'll notice was another time that the reader of the week coincided with the publication of some of our new titles where it says more change library list on the bottom right and you'll notice we also books in Spanish that first category says leaders in Espanol so that's neat to see and the placement of reader of the week was never the same in the paper you know sometimes it was on page 2 other times it might have been below the fold on section B one time I think I have it here we actually had it on the front page and it had a more prominent another thing I did I had a notebook which showed at and Elaine people were welcome to look through it I've just taken an image for today's purposes because I obviously can't show you the whole notebook but this is another way we tried to entice people to consider being a reader of the week themselves so this is what we have kept behind the readers rather the circulation desk this whole year this is the binder that I have that contains photocopies of all previous readers of the week as well as the equivalent of that week's column in News Bank that's what you see on the right so this particular example is the one that was actually on the front page of our paper so as I mentioned earlier the newspaper really didn't ever edit whatever I sent them and you may recall in our director's initial email to us he said maybe two to three hundred words max you know not a novel but the average as you'll see in a later slide of most of these once I added my library notes portion was usually over 500 words and maybe more many times and again the the newspaper was most generous in and pretty much putting anything I sent them into the paper okay so this speaks to what I just showed you this was an unexpected bonus that I hadn't really considered how all this would be indexed in News Bank as a result of doing this so if you were to simply go into News Bank and select the Nebraska City News Press as your publication and enter Reader of the Week as your headline you would see I think it's up to about 40 results now and then you get an idea of the word count which is where I came up with my averages as well as the readability. This might be slightly different now they have not yet indexed my latest submissions I think that right now it's going through November 4th so I don't have the the most recent Reader of the Weeks incorporated here but I wouldn't expect to change a great deal and this is just another visual way to to see how the breakdown was so there was a ponderance of you know being on the higher reading level the majority of them are more than half some other bonuses and I know we're getting short on time here but again as you've kind of heard examples already it's been a catalyst for promotion it was in March or April I had a call from a woman in California in her 80s born and raised here in Nebraska City hasn't lived here for years nonetheless she continues to subscribe to the newspaper and this is one thing I think that we should be mindful of that there are people in other parts of the country for whom this may be the main way they can keep in touch with what's going on in their hometown that they've been gone for a long time and she has wound up donating some things to us and who knows where else that may lead and who knows who who knows who else is out there across the country reading our paper in analog in print form and seeing all this extra content that's library driven and library what ramifications could that have going forward for additional donations or interest you just never know right the Boy Scout reader that you saw picture is considering the library as one of his or is his Eagle Scout project I don't know where that is right now but at least we're on his radar for being a strong candidate for his Eagle Scout project you heard about the budding magician and just in general then you know the increased conversations about reading throughout the community so that's all I have for today I'd be happy to entertain questions Christopher or any that have come forward and as I mentioned in the beginning I'll be making my my quick handout available to and the things you sent out later thank you so much it's been a real joy to talk about this and I hope people do consider doing I know at least one example so far since the conference of a librarian in a small Nebraska who's already approached her editor and they will start doing this very same initiative in January so I'm pleased to know that it's you know going to take off somewhere else as well yeah thank you Denise anyone have any questions types them into your question section of your go to webinar interface and I can pass them on nobody had any questions while you were talking no but that's okay if you do have any put them in now I was to say I especially liked with your different readers the older woman in the wheelchair the homebound service love how is the way I mean you think about this mainly is showing you know promoting the books we have promoting you know showing all the different people that that use the library but also a sly way also of the huge services that we offer that you might not be aware of that this is a thing that you know if you are one of those people getting just the newspaper at home locally of course that this might be something you want to look into for yourself if the homebound delivery service right and the interlibrary loan too because obviously sometimes the titles people mention we didn't have right and so I would do my usual okay well you can get this book you know that we have two copies in print we have the DVDs sometimes I couldn't say that so then I would say well we can get this for you through our interlibrary loan service so I just tried to leverage their responses anyway I could and still promote something about the library and that's a just as good a way of getting these books is as having the the ones you actually own that's a service the library offers is being able to get books that aren't there absolutely people have to understand that that's a thing and it's okay one thing I would like to add we are when our director promoted this he said let's try this for a year and as you know we're approaching that year period and so and we will be getting a new director as well so we probably won't continue this and we've already let the newspaper know on a weekly basis however we've enjoyed it so much that what we might try is is a adaptation of that and it wouldn't need to be called rear the week it could be called for example meet a reader and that way you're not tied to happen to do it each week and also with the approaching Nebraska 150 and all the books we have oh yeah that thought is that we could promote people who are reading different titles and promote that collection through meet a reader so that will likely be the the future rendition of this initiative for 2017 but reader of the week was certainly a great way to start for oh yeah I'm good that it was such a popular such success because they said going to something brand new like this and that's a good a good lesson to learn from this as well you know try something new and it might be a huge success who knows this other town doing it whether it will be as popular there I can't imagine it's a bad thing finding out you know what people are reading I think the hardest part probably convincing the people to become one of your readers and as you can see we tried to encourage people every week we put they were we honestly didn't have anybody come up to us and say oh can I be a reader of the week it essentially was we had to approach them yeah but having those pre-made questions and the things I know I saw that when the handouts that you had at the conference was you know very easy oh just fill in the blank answer these questions boom yeah the suggestion was that you know we could have done it on the street we could have interviewed people with a microphone and so on however what we liked about this was the the pause for reflection right I think I think about a lot of this day yeah definitely all right well it doesn't look like anybody's got any urgent questions to ask you right away um but that's fine if anybody does have any questions of course you can contact Denise at the Martin James Public Library and with anything else and as you said she'll have a handout that she did have at the session that will be available as well so thank you so much Denise I was glad to have you on the show like I said I did attended this session at our state conference I just thought it was a really just a great way of promoting the library and and getting that just using your own using use your your readers to promote what you do that's that's the best thing like a word of mouth hats that's those are your best you know ways of spreading the word is word of mouth sometimes that's right library is very much for this opportunity I really have enjoyed it and I again encourage anyone any time could be months from now doesn't need to be immediate use that email and let me know how I can be of assistance and say you know bye to Rasmus the library director as you mentioned is you know he's on his way he's well he's still going to be here in Nebraska but working in Iowa now I didn't realize today was his last day how well it's kind of a book they got his last day we're able to further tout reader of the week yeah I'm glad yes definitely all right so thank you very much these I'm going to pull back presenter control to my screen now from yours thank you everyone and wrap up for today so as I said we do record the show and the show is being recorded right now this is our Encompass live website what's great is you can just go to Google any of your search engines of choice and type in Encompass live and we come up first these are upcoming shows but I'll show you first here's where our archive sessions are as a link right beneath the list of all of the upcoming shows and this just has all of our previous ones where we will have a link to the recording and the handouts or presentations or if there's any on this one he just had two different presentation handouts that went along with last week's recording so later today this recording could be ready and ready to go just take depends on how long it takes YouTube to process everything and you'll be able to go watch it over here let y'all know when it's ready hope you'll also that will wrap will wrap it up for today show hope you join us next week when our topic is technology classes at your library this is a session also one that I attended at a different library conference Iowa Library Association in conference last last month Jenny Eilers at the Iowa City Public Library has done a great job in promoting their technology classes that they teach it's been a huge success there and so I've invited her to come on the show remotely to tell us about how she's done that there so definitely do sign up for that class next week and any of our other ones you see coming up here we are on a Facebook Encompass live just a Facebook page if you click on that you'll get our Facebook page over here or I post reminders of what's coming up here's a reminder to log in for today's show when the recordings are available I post on here so if you are a big Facebook user definitely give us a like over there to keep up with what we're doing other than that that wraps it up for today thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next time on Encompass live bye bye