 So our first session of today is from Natalie Bazan, the library director of the Hopkins District Library and Door Township Libraries. She's going to be speaking about non-literary collections why. She has an MA from the University of Kansas in Slavic languages and literatures and an MLIS from the University of Chicago, Illinois, Champaign, Urbana. She's working hard to make these two small rural libraries the centers of their communities and local innovators. Natalie, take it away. All right, wonderful. Well, I am not one for talking constantly non-stop at you, so I will have questions for you and I will ask the staff here to give me your replies back once in a while just to make sure that you're still paying attention and you're still alive out there. I know it's kind of early and I'm the first one and I'm trying not to be boring, so let's get you involved. All right, Hopkins, this project actually took place in Hopkins. I've been here about two and a half years and Hopkins is a small library in the middle of Alligan County, very rural. It serves about 4,700 people over almost 100 square miles. We have a budget just to give you an idea of about $100,000 and there are two part-time employees here besides me. So it's pretty small, but we've been very lucky that our community is very open to change and eager to try new things and very, very willing to tell me if it's a crazy idea. But a lot of times we try them anyway as long as they're cheap or free. So non-literary collections, what in the world am I talking about here? Which would be a great question. First, I'm gonna ask a question for you guys and have you respond in and I'll ask for answers from the moderators here in a few minutes. What sorts of non-literary things do you already have at your library or would you like to have? So here's what we do. Non-literary collections are the term that we use for anything in our collection that obviously you can't read, but it supports our non-fiction or our programs or things that our patrons are very, very interested in. And I have a couple of them listed there, yeah. But we have a jewelry making kit that we loan out, crochet hooks. We have a seed library that we started with heirloom seeds, knitting needles, felting needles, flytine kit, cookie cutters. And we have the are we there yet kits which are really, have been really, really wonderful for anybody who's traveling anywhere. We would like to in the future, to give you ideas of different things, we have a large non-fiction section for sewing, patterns, books, ideas, crochet, knitting, all of that. And we've done the crochet and knitting because they're cheap and frankly they're all donated so it cost us nothing. But we are now looking at possibly adding a sewing machine into our non-literary collections for people. Or adding, we have a lot of people who ride bikes, we're in the middle of the village. So adding a bicycle maintenance kit that people can check out. Things like that. So what sorts of things has anybody responded with what sorts of things they have or they would like to have? We've gotten a few responses, a seed library. One library reports a juicer and puzzles and they love to have garden tools. We've got video cameras and sound equipment, cake pans, always popular. Puzzles, seed library again, art prints. And see here, cookie cutters also is another one. We went with cookie cutters over the cake pans because I have a 1500 square foot building and I only have the use of about 1,000 square feet so we had no room. But we had quite a few people who wanted to donate the cake pans. I was so sad that we couldn't incorporate that in. All right, so the next question there is how do you catalog these things? How do you make them fit into your collection and make them usable for people? So you've got your list of things or you put together your list of things that you would like to see at your library and you figure out how you catalog them. If you have your own software, then you don't have a problem. A lot of the softwares will let you add items without an ISBN. Otherwise you can go with the free cataloging software that's out there or an Excel spreadsheet which is my favorite personally. I'm gonna show you just a quick look at one that I was throwing together for here. Very, very easy to do, very easy to use. You just type in the items barcode number, your patrons barcode and name. A lot of times you can also set this up to where you can scan it and it will just automatically enter in there. If you put the date that it checked out and you have a set number of days for each item to check out, you can just add those two columns together and it will come up and tell you the due date. And the same thing for fines and things like that. And it's very nice because you can put together a parts list which we have run into being the main problem. I have a fly time kit. I don't know what these Bob and Threaders, well I do now but I didn't know what the Bob and Threaders look like or different things like that. So having a parts list and having a picture, we have a binder that we keep that has a picture of all of these items and that way you can see and physically make sure that everything is there because crochet hooks, yes, there are 22 hooks of various sizes. Okay, that's easy enough, we can just count them. But do I know what a round nose pliers is versus a regular pliers in the jewelry making kit? No, I have no idea. But the picture is really, really help. Okay, I'm gonna quick flip back over here. So processing is the next problem. Well, you need to set your late fees and durations of time that you'll check things out. You can see the seeds here. I have checking out for 180 days. Realistically, I know that some people are not gonna bring them back so I have no daily fee on them. But this helps us keep track of who checked them out so we can ask them, are you, did you get a good crop? Did you harvest things? Did you not? Did you just leave them and maybe something terrible happened or there's the drought or something like that? And that's fine, we know that things happen. Okay, so then the processing comes up and processing is probably going to be the most expensive and most time consuming thing. You need to find hard cases or some way to keep these things together, especially you've got crochet hooks that are just tiny little things, right? They're really, really easy to use. So keeping those things together and keeping them very, very visible is your best bet. So we went with clear bags or hard cases that are easy to flip open and you can see what's in there and you can easily take a picture so you can compare it. It makes things much easier when you're checking things in and also when you're processing things. Now, our reference collection. I have a quick question for all of you. Do you update your reference collection very regularly? Do you have a lot of money to spend on your reference collection? And I'll ask for responses, or I'll ask for all of your responses in a little while but I can tell you we don't. With a budget of about $100,000, we don't have a huge amount to spend on our reference collection. Our reference books tend to be very, very expensive. So we're trying to make the most of what we do have and the donations that we get in and things like that and looking at the donations that come in really helps us see what people in our area are interested in. They obviously purchase these books somewhere and yes, they don't want them anymore but they must have wanted them for some reason at one point in time and that means either one, they tried it, they didn't like it, fine. Or two, they tried it, they loved it and they moved on to something more difficult like easy crochet books or easy knitting books and moved up to harder patterns or more interesting patterns or that amigurri that I can't do to save my life at the moment. But that means that those people probably have some knowledge that you can tap into. They probably know how to do a lot of these things and they'll come back up when I talk about programs here in a few minutes because I don't know how to tie flies or frankly, my crocheting is very, very bad. But on the plus side, I know people here because I've watched who donates things and who checks things out who are really, really good at doing these things. Okay, so how many of you can update your collections regularly? Let's see, we've got quite a few different answers. I've been debating this since being here only a year and the budget is small, we're not used to that much anyway so I guess that makes it okay. Nonfiction isn't updated but this library has about $5,000 per year for all materials, a few hundred dollars another library has. Yes, we update some parts of the collection pretty regularly. One library doesn't really have a reference collection because they're in between two colleges so the colleges cover that for their area. Someone says they're getting rid of reference books. Ouch. And someone else also says we don't have a reference collection anymore. It looks like some more public fake libraries maybe just not going that way. Yeah. Well, we have been very lucky to have a lot of reference books donated and we also took part in the library of Congress's surplus books program where you can go and if you talk to your congressional representative they can use their franking labels to send your books back for you and you can either go to the library of Congress or have somebody there pick out books for you and it turned out that we received almost $10,000 worth of reference books that way and it has been very helpful in updating some of our collections because they were really old and we try but my budget for materials for the entire year is $5,000 as well. So it makes things a little bit difficult. Now we're trying to focus on advertising, advertising our non-literary collections, getting people to walk through our reference aisle. Well, I guess two aisles, one, two sides of the same bookcase which has been pretty successful. We put out, we started displaying book covers out in a couple of our little areas. We have some areas where there's no books or the top of bookcases, we do a little displays and in there we put our non-literary things or we put up a little sign that says, hey, do you want, have you always wanted to try knitting? Have you always wanted to try to learn to crochet but you didn't want to go out and buy these things? Well, that's fine, you can come to the library and check them out. And in with that, we started a craft cabinet, I guess we'll call it craft supply exchange cabinet and I know the door library that I just started at is going to start a room for this but in Hopkins I have a filing cabinet because that's what I have room for. We asked people if you still have stuff left over from one project or another, bring it in. Give it to somebody else who wants to try these things, leave it here, somebody else will pick it up or we'll use it for programs either way. So we've been able to put together kits, which you certainly don't need to do but not only can they check out knitting needles or crochet hooks but they can also grab a ball of yarn or they can check out the fly tying kit and look there's some feathers and some fur to use for fly tying or here's the felting needles and here's some roving. We had a lady who donated 10 pounds of fleece so we've been able to work with that and make that available to our people too and that has helped substantially increase our reference books checking out. We put up the little displays with reference books in each collection, say I have 10 felting books, okay, I can put all of those out along with a display of the needles because they're sharp and pointy and jagged and nicely hooked and I don't really want people to play with them at the library but we put them out and people can take them and bring up a little thing telling us, hey, we want to check one of these out. We have also tried to do, let's see, yes, on top of bookcases, we have one bookcase over by a couch that we have and we put up a monthly display and it rotates out. Next month, April will be our seed library month so we have seed harvesting books, we have organic gardening books, we have peat pots, little tiny starter peat pots that someone donated that people can take if they want and we have organic seeds that have been donated to us or we have asked companies for and people can come in and check those out but in addition to that, we put together how to harvest your own seeds for each different type of thing that they're checking out so if you're gonna check out tomatoes, okay, they're kind of a pain to harvest the seeds but if you're gonna check out watermelons, they're a lot easier and here's how and here's why you wanna do different things just to make them more viable and to make this continue and we try to do that with everything so here is your knitting needles, oh, here's a really, really simple pattern to get you started just using knit and purl and different combinations so you can get a different feel for it or here's your crochet hooks, okay, so here's how to do a chain that's about as far as I know for crochet. Do you all already currently display your nonfiction books in different themes or monthly display or something like that, something like that? Okay, and I'm gonna talk about funding while we wait for your answers to come in here so obviously I have no money for this or very little money for this, we have that $5,000 for our materials budget for all of our books for the year and I have $600 for programs for the year besides any grants that I receive so what we had to do when we started doing this is make a very, very cost effective list, I guess. What things can be used for multiple, can we use for programs plus patrons can check out plus our good for display if we wanna put together displays at different events, what things are durable and cost effective and how are we gonna have to, are we gonna have to buy cases for these things, are we gonna have to buy additional materials, are we gonna have to maintain these things which is our great fear with a sewing machine or someone suggested a CNC machine that they might wanna donate, well that's wonderful and we'd love to have them except for the space requirements but we're worried about how much it's gonna cost to maintain and that's something that you're gonna wanna make sure that you check out in your list so when we put together our list we decided how much we can spend per year and how many of these things that we can double dip with those were two of our main reasons for buying or not buying these items so cookie cutters ended up being high on our list of things to do just because we had, we asked, we put out a comment and asked people, hey, are you willing to donate cookie cutters? We emailed it out, we put it out in newsletters, things like that and we ended up with boxes of cookie cutters and boxes and boxes and they are still coming in which is wonderful and most of them it turned out are metal which is great up to a certain point. We wanted to make sure that none of them were rusty so we had to go through and call some of these things out and we had to make sure that people clean them before they return them to us but if I'm looking at cookie cutters, okay so do they fit into my double dipping or multiple dipping category? I wanted to make sure they could be checked out, yes, we had to go through and put them into different categories so you can check out, there's five cookie cutters per bag and they're themed so we have animals or we have letters or the letters have more than five but or we have Christmas or birthdays or different things like that. Okay, I'm gonna stop for a second so how many of you guys actually already do displays of your nonfiction books? We have quite a few cool answers a whole bunch of just yeses but then some local community events they do monthly themes about some more, someone's, we'll not be starting to do some more gorilla displays throughout the library so just maybe in places you wouldn't expect to see a display up in a corner somewhere. Some theme displays of nonfiction materials gardening, yoga, they're hoping to get some yoga mats for the library. Community interest, program topics, upcoming holidays. The library says they also do always try to include the nonfiction and reference type materials in their monthly displays. That's what other ones are coming in. Ah, books that have movies coming out. That is always a wonderful one. We just started a Tai Chi program at the door library and we've been asked to do yoga as well so we were looking at getting yoga mats too. It is a great thing for people. Those mats can be very expensive or if you don't know, if you want to try these things, you don't know if you want to invest the money into it. This is a great way for people to try things out just like going to your regular programs or checking out a reference book in the first place. Okay, so back to- Can we do have one more comment that I got? Do my cookie cutters fit into them? Oh yes. Sorry, just one more last comment that came in after we had said before that I've seen a lot of libraries doing this and I wanted to make sure I mentioned the read box display, going off the theme of the red box movies. Yes. Lots of libraries do that where they put up. They make a red box that looks like those ones you can get the movies from, but it's books instead. Yes, I saw that all over Pinterest. I'm so excited. I just haven't had time to try to put it together yet but we are going to try to do something like that for a winter reading program and it didn't happen so we're trying to do it for summer instead. They are just exciting. And by the way, if you haven't signed up for a Pinterest account for your library yet or for yourself that you use for programs and different things like that, it is a really good idea. It is wonderful to be able to exchange ideas like that and you can follow other libraries to make sure you see what they're pinning or what they're thinking about doing. And a lot of times they'll put comments on these pins like this worked out really well or I wish I'd had more chocolate for that program or maybe I shouldn't have melted chocolate and small children. It's a bad combination sometimes. Things like that that are really fun and some of the comments are very, very helpful if you're gonna do programs on your own. Okay, so the cookie cutters. Yes, you can check them out. Okay, that's not a problem. We put barcodes on each bag and we numbered them and we put a list of which cookie cutters were in each bag. So what else can I do with these things? We have, like I said, we have roving. We had fleece that was donated to us so we have a substantial amount of roving here which is before felt after fleece. That's the way this goes. And we have the felting needles. So you can felt Christmas ornaments inside of these cookie cutters which keeps you from stabbing yourself. Like I said, they were needles, they're very sharp. So we have done felt to Christmas ornaments. We've made bird feeders inside of our cookie cutters to just spray the inside of the mold with Pam or whatever. We have molded soaps inside of them. So it's definitely double dipped there and it didn't cost us anything. We did, we reused the bags. They were actually from our books on tape, actual tapes. We purged our tapes, we kept the books and we just integrated them into the collection but we kept the bags and we use those for these, for our cookie cutters, which was great because they fit on all those little stands that we already have anyway. But how else can you fund these things? Okay, so say I can't get everything donated, fine. We'll talk about different ways to get donations here in a minute, but what about grants? How many of you write grants for programs right now? I have written quite a few for our both libraries and we've had pretty good success but there are a lot of grants out there in places that you wouldn't expect. Yes, if you type in library grants into Google, you're gonna come up with quite a few but a lot of those are for larger libraries or they require you to do lots of things or they might even require you to be a 501c3, not a charitable institution, which a lot of libraries can't be or they aren't. So where do you find crazy grants for things that will support your nonfiction collection or allow you to do programs to support your nonfiction collection and get people in here to look at these things? There are seed library grants out there. You can go to different seed dealers or especially I think I got most of mine through Burpee or there are groups out there that promote heirloom seeds. You can look into them, a lot of them have grants available for starting your own either heirloom seed garden at your library or starting a seed library like this or different things like that which they are not excessive grants. They're not ones that you have to fill out 10, 15 pages of information or write essays to get. These are things that are much easier. They are trying to get as many people as possible included. You can look at crochet or knitting organizations if you have a state organization like for instance, we have the embroiderers Guild of America and they meet here in the door library. So I've been talking to them about putting on programs or donating their extra things to us so we can get things going like this and that is all free for us. But even if you don't find grants at these organizations, say you see you look up Burpee or Annie's heirloom seeds or something like that and you don't see any grants listed, give them a call. A lot of times they'll have stuff left over or they'll be willing to help you do this as long as you put out their catalog for people or different things like that. Okay, so buying cheap is my other possibility. All right, you don't have very much in funds. We have $600 for the year for all of our programs. How do I make this work if I actually have to buy something? Well, we use eBay, Craigslist and Freecycle. So if I go to, I put together a little list in my shopping cart, right? Just this morning to look at it and it's just over $200. Obviously I am not gonna buy all of this stuff for the year because it's just not gonna happen. I don't have that much money but I can put together a wish list by doing this. And if I wanted to print this off, I could and give it to people. I can put it in my newsletter. I can put it up at the library. I can say, hey, I'm looking at looking for these things like a bicycle repair kit. We don't actually have one yet but it's high on my list of things to do and it's $35, $36. Okay, I have a huge group that carves wood decoys and they're always interested in getting more people into carving. I don't have a carving kit and we're gonna have to put some restrictions on who can check this out because it's sharp and pointy and we don't want people to get hurt but it is not terribly expensive to do. Or artists, kids, we've had several cheese making classes and we actually have quite a few books on that and people are very, very interested in our area. We have a large number of dairy farms, especially small family owned dairy farms and they're interested in getting into artists and cheeses and things of that nature that are not terribly difficult but on the other hand, who wants to spend what 40 bucks on a little cheese press to see if it works or to see if cheese making is gonna be something they even wanna try? A lot of times they don't and that prevents our area from growing and that prevents people from checking out these books. Maybe they check one out and they read through it and they realize, oh, this is just too much work but unless they actually try it, they don't really know and this gives them that opportunity or the fly time kit. Yes, actually this is the one that I bought but I got it. These are all buy it now by the way so they're substantially, while some of them are substantially more expensive than it would be if you actually bid on these items but you can see it comes in a wooden case so I don't have to worry about the case. A lot of these will come in cases and that's what I was looking for besides the cheese press. I don't know how you put that in a case. But the beating, you can see that there are several different types of pliers. There are lots of small instruments here. I don't know what they're all called. I don't know what I'm looking for when I check them back in. That's why it's very important to put together a list. Okay, let me go back over here. So donations, oh, I'm sorry. Where would you get your materials? If you could get donations or if you get people, do you have businesses that would be interested in donating these things? Do you, some of you I know are already doing this. So where did you get your materials for people who aren't? Give us some ideas. That's always a good idea. Somebody says she loves the idea of the eBay rich list. And donations, donations, donations, yes. This is how we survive, isn't it? So how do you ask for donations? We go through and our local townships have newsletters. And we're a district library. We're part of three townships in a village. So we have information that goes out in all of their township newsletters. That reaches more people than our district covers because we don't cover all of two of those townships. Well, great. Now we're asking for people from those townships to come in and help us or at the very least come in and see what we have. And they're reading about, hey, they're asking for these things. They're asking to get people to do these programs. That must mean they're doing neat things. We want to support them. We want to help out, which is great. Even if they don't now necessarily normally come to the library, we're drumming up more support and we're getting our name out there. It's wonderful for advocacy. It's wonderful just to get people to realize you exist. When I started here at the Hopkins library about two weeks after I started, we got somebody who stopped in and said, yeah, I stopped at the gas station and asked if there was a library in town. And they said, no, they couldn't think of one. We're like five buildings down the street from the gas station. That was very depressing. It was very, very sad. On the plus side, now we have posters that go up at that gas station and add all the other businesses in town and they have our logo on them. They tell you where these events are. We have things going out in the newsletters for everybody. We have our own newsletter and it has gotten people excited, has gotten people interested. When I started, we didn't have a Facebook page. We didn't have a website. Now we do and we get a lot of people who are interested in our events and what's going on just because they look at those things. Okay, so you already have stuff in your newsletter. You've already got all that going. Wonderful, that's great. Have you're looking for other places to go? Have you ever been to Wish Upon a Hero? That's one of the things that we have tried and has worked out very well for us. It's a free website. You just start an account. You put up there, I am looking for X, Y and Z. We had no DVD collection and we had no funds for a DVD collection. I have $600 for AV. Well, at that point in time, I had $0 for AV. Now we have $600. So we put down there that we were looking for DVDs and we were looking for family-friendly DVDs for the library. I had boxes and boxes of stuff from random people all over the country just appear at our library. It was one of the most exciting and wonderful things that has ever happened for us. It was absolutely exciting. Absolutely wonderful. Okay, I'm gonna stop here. Where did you guys say that you get your materials from or you would get materials from? Do we get some? Yeah. Oh, just go ahead. Donation, someone did say they love the idea of the eBay wish list, but they can't purchase things at a purchase order so eBay wouldn't work unless they personally buy the item. So that could be a good idea, but they don't. TechSoup is another place that I'd be afraid like technology type things, someone wrote. Facebook Roups is another resource that someone has used, donations, yeah. Social media campaigning for donations. So using that to try and just reach out and just say on your Twitter or Facebook, we're just looking for this, anybody in the community send it to us. Yard Sales and Estate Sales is another place to go. And I will admit, although the door library does have a credit card that I can use to buy these things so I can buy things off eBay, Hopkins doesn't. Hopkins has to reimburse me for absolutely everything I buy, which is kind of a pain in the butt, but on the other hand, we can go around to different places. And if you're limited to purchase orders, I'm sorry, some of these things are not gonna work for you. But on the plus side, you can put out ads on Wish Upon a Hero or on Craigslist asking for free items or if your local newspaper will do it, sometimes ours will for us. Hey, I need 100 empty water bottles for the Worm Farm program we're gonna do this summer or something to that effect. You'd be surprised at how many people will start collecting and bring them in. So newsletter signs, emails, we've got that. Auctions of State Sales, Garage Sales, Barn Sales, somebody already mentioned that one. Always a great idea, you can stop there. They don't necessarily get a lot of people who stop in and say, hey, if you've got this, this and this left over at the end of the night, can you give me a call? Would you be willing to donate that? I'm using it for a library or I have a partnership with the local retirement home and they need these things and we're gonna work together or anything like that. It's always a good idea to just ask, it can't hurt. Okay, so letting people know what you're looking for. Yes, the social media campaigns are a great idea. We didn't have any of that when I started, but we do now and they have been very helpful in getting people excited about what we're doing and getting people involved. But just posters, if you don't have the time or the expertise or anything else to get into social media and really, really drive that, then make up some posters. Drop them off at the school. Ask them if they'll put that into their newsletter. Ask them if they'll put an announcement out. Stop at the local gas station. We've got one in town and one outside of town and I always make sure to hit them up with our posters so they know what's going on, what we need, what we're planning on doing. If we want one any grants, stop at a local township meeting and just say, hey, does anybody have this stuff? Because this is what we want to do. It gets people, it makes people feel like you are including them, which is always a good thing and gets people excited. I should explain, both the door township libraries previous belief was a good day in the library when no one is there. So we are working very hard on an advocacy campaign too. So if I stress that a bit too much, that would be why. Okay, so volunteers are very, very important. Yes. Yeah, we did have a couple of other little tips came in while you were continuing the last question. For people having issues with purchase orders and whatnot, Amazon doing Amazon wish list that they can, Amazon will set up corporate accounts that will work with purchase orders. Yes. And then also we know at libraries that we are kind of special, different than other departments in municipalities and cities and in the government. One library has set up with their auditor to allow them to be the only municipal department with a credit card so that they can buy from Amazon eBay on their own. So they've actually gone to the auditor and said, here, we do things differently. This is how we need to get the materials for the library. So we're gonna need a pass, so to speak, to be able to do this. And they range with the auditor. So that could be an idea for some other locations. That is a wonderful idea. If my website will pull up, which I know Plinkett was having some issues. Okay, we'll give it a few minutes. I can show you, we did a rotating GIF. So it's very, very simple to do. And we have a Plinkett website, which is provided to us by the state of Michigan. And I know quite a few other states have these available to you if you don't already have them and they're free, which is great. But we put a rotating GIF on there, which is just rotating pictures of our wish list and we connected it to Amazon. So if you click on that, it will bring you to our Amazon wish list. And even if you don't click on it, you'll see the pictures of all the items that we have on our wish list on there. And it could be anything from a new set of books to we need a new chair for the children's area to some cute little magazine bookcasey things for little kids to display items or things for programs. I think we even asked for a couple of pads of paper and stuff like that on there. And we tried to go with all different price ranges for people who are interested in that, which is great. It has been very, very helpful for us, got more people interested and given them something to look at instead of just saying, hey, I wanna get something for the library but I don't have any clue what you guys need. So I'm just gonna buy this and we'll drop it off. Okay, do you already, do all of you already have a friends group or are you in the process of starting a friends group? I'll ask back in a few minutes. Why do you need volunteers for a non-literary collection? You really need them if you're tight on staff. Like I said, we have two part-time ladies here plus me and I'm part-time here and part-time at door. So it's pretty tight. We're open 37 hours a week. It gets very tight around here. So we need volunteers to help solicit our donations. A lot of our volunteers range from teens all the way up and they can talk to their friends, their groups. There are a lot of tiny little groups in this small town or this area and they all have their own specialties and they all have stuff left over. We have one lovely lady who comes in and says, everybody knows that I crochet so they just give me all these needles and hooks and everything and I have so many, I have these boxes full of them. You want them? It's like, of course we want them. Of course we can do things with them up to a certain point and then we put them in the craft exchange cabinet and other people just take them home and never have to return them which works really well as well. So you can get them to solicit donations for you, make up those posters for you, take care of your Facebook if you trust them to post on behalf of your library for you and they can help you get everything into your cataloging software or set up your Excel spreadsheets or take the pictures and put together a book so people know what's in each item or just list things out for you which is really, really helpful when you don't know what some of those accessories are and they do or you don't have the time to put that together. Well, a lot of times they do. We have a large retired population around here who is very interested in crafts and artistry and different things to that effect so we get them in to help us out with these things. They're better than we are. They know these things more than we do. Why not use their knowledge? So how many of you do have friends groups already? We have several people who say, we have a number of people who say they have friends groups or they would like to start friends groups but they're not sure where to start. Some people do not. Well, I can tell you if you get at least one person who's excited about your library and wants to help out with this, they can take care of almost all of that starting it up and everything for you so you don't have to do a lot of it. I went to our state friends group organization and said, hey, I need a constitution and bylaws for our friends group. Can you help me out with that? And it turns out they already had something written up. So we bought their little packet, we put everything in our name and away we went. We got everything registered. We are with the state library. The door library still does not have a friends group yet but I only started there three months ago so it will be soon. And the friends group in Hopkins is a wonderful addition to our area. They have a volunteer folder so if you put in a certain amount of time you get different rewards from the library or from the friends group and it's been wonderful for things like this. Where else can you find volunteers? There is, if I just do a quick Google search, Volunteer Michigan. Yes, I know that doesn't work for all of you but for me it's wonderful. I can put things up there. I can say, hey, we need people for this or that or the other thing and ask for local people to get involved. Okay. Natalie also wanted to say for friends groups, at least all the libraries in Nebraska do belong to United for Libraries, the national organization for friends groups that's now associated with the American Library Association. They have a great website with a lot of information about how to form a friends group and how to get a friends group running smoothly. So that's a great resource for people. United for Libraries, don't they also have a couple grants to help friends groups get started and get moving? I don't know if they have grants or not. Okay, I know our local, the Michigan State Friends Groups does have a grant to help new friends groups get going and get moving and get helping their library. So you might want to check in to that, anybody who's looking at starting a friends group grant section on their page. Yeah, actually, Natalie, I did just look up on their website for United for Libraries and there is an awards and grants section on the website. So there's something, yeah. Wonderful. I should say that generally friends groups are organized as 5013C's nonprofit organizations and they have a legal organization. Very often you can sort of become part of, let's say a foundation, the friends group can just be a sort of a little subgroup of that if they want. So there are ways to form a friends group that are not terribly involved. Yeah, these don't necessarily have to be difficult. If you want to put a lot of time into it, you can, if you don't, you don't really have to. You can just give it to somebody who's very excited about your library and a lot of times they can run with it. Okay, so audience, I'm running a little bit short on time and I wanna give you guys a couple minutes for questions if I can. These appeal to everybody. You can have the cookie cutters which are great seasonal things but they can be seasonal for summer, for making bird feeders, seasonal for winter, for cookies, all different times. And advertising them is not that terribly difficult. We've mentioned a couple different ways so far. Programming is one of our big things. Everybody is always looking for new programs to get people involved. In this way, you'll already have the tools for it. You'll be connected with talented patrons. You know that these people have been using these things. If they're donating their old ones to you, great. Keep their name. Make sure you know them. Ask them if they're willing to do a program for you. And free is always great. I have found that a lot of these people are willing to are excited about sharing their talents, are excited about sharing what they love to do and it gets them involved and it's no cost to you. And you can do additional advertising through your programs. Put up a display of these books and the non-literary items that you have before your program. We have a Stashbusters program in Dore and Sticks and Strings here in Hopkins that are all fiber arts. So we have our knitting needles, our crochet hooks, our books out before they meet. And it gets people looking through these things and checking them out. New programs often equal new patrons. It pulls people in. Maybe not from your area, maybe from other areas, but it gets more people coming into the library and then word spreads and then people get more and more excited and then you may have to start a sign-up sheet because things fill up too fast. Like I said, we have a very small facility so sometimes we take advantage of the park across the street. Makerspaces are another big word in large and small libraries right now. They sound really expensive and you look at some of the ones like Detroit or the ones in Chicago and they are massive 8,000 square feet or whatever they are. They don't need to be. I saw PLA is gonna have a program called Makerspace in a Box. We do a little tiny Makerspace events with our non-literary collections and it gets people to look at our reference material. It gets people to look at our non-literary collections and to think about what they could do differently with these things. Yes, you can make jewelry with those things but you could also use a lot of those tools to do robotics. Okay, so now our jewelry kit just doubled over as a robotics kit. That's great and that gives us an extra marketing tool. And it was free. All we needed was somebody to come in and say, hey, I could use this for great. As long as it's not gonna hurt the tools, we're good with it. I'm gonna skip over the YouTube thing and say does anybody have any questions or comments because I know I'm running a little short on time here. Yeah, we have a few minutes for Q and A and we definitely have a whole bunch. So I'll start with one from Susie on Twitter. Curious as to what all is in the Are We There Yet kits? Oh, good question. I did not mention that. Okay, we have five different Are We There Yet kits. Two for adults, two for kids and one for teens at the moment. And we got clear plastic backpacks from eBay. They were like five bucks a piece and we put books that were donated so they were free. We have knitting needles and yarn and one of them along with some patterns. We have crochet hooks and yarn with some patterns. We have puzzles in all of them. We have games like educational, how to do multiplication, how to do addition, how to name the states and different things on that. Mad Libs Junior we got for the kids ones and we put little games or little toys in there for the little kids that people can check out. So maybe there's some bouncy balls. Different things people have donated that we can use. Finger puppets are in one of them. It gets their imaginations going. It gets them learning something new and it keeps them occupied. Krista, you have one for the audience? Or several? Yeah, one that I've mentioned multiple times that I think the good thing to answer is what about safety and liability such as things like knife kit or the canning kit or the danger of someone in experience using a pressure cooker. And I think Laura here mentioned power tools. Well, how was that handled? That is something a lot of times you're gonna have to go with your insurance company but I can give you a small example. We have the felting needles. Felting needles are like fish hooks that are straightened out, right? They go in, they're going to pull. See, people generally stab themselves at least once or twice when you're working on this and you are going to bleed. So then we get these back, we have to make sure to clean them before they go out again. Otherwise, you risk the possibility of blood being left on from one person and the next person stabbing themselves with that. We have not worked with anything large enough that our insurance company has been hesitant yet but like the sewing machine is something that we're gonna have to talk to them about because what happens if somebody runs over their finger with that, that could be a serious issue. We have started in Doran and Hopkins. If we're looking at their technology for them and we're touching it like kindles or nooks or whatever, they need to sign a form that says if we accidentally drop it, we're sorry but it's not our fault, things like that so we won't be held responsible. And we ran that through our lawyer to get that approved and it's something that we may end up doing with if we end up getting power tools or a pressure cooker or something like that. Okay, Bonnie McEwen mentions that there's another volunteer matching site at www.volunteermatch.org which is a place that you might find volunteers, a place to recruit people. And someone has asked if you would give a link to your Pinterest page. I'm sure I can do that. Do you want me to pull that up right now or do you want me to send it to you? If you can quickly, that would be great. Pull it up for people, yeah. What we will do too is as we mentioned at the beginning of the day, we are recording all of these sessions and on the Big Talk website, we will be posting the recordings and PowerPoints and any links that the presenters want to provide to us. So we'll be able to do that. Natalie also has put her email address up there on her last slide was up a moment ago. So continued conversations will be available either directly with the presenters or through the Big Talk website. So we'll do that. And if she doesn't get this up, we'll try to provide a link to that. And I do just want to note, we are getting lots and lots of good questions coming in and we apologize, we will not be able to ask all of your questions during the time. So where we are having to pick and choose, we've got 225 people logged in right now. So we're getting lots of great info and questions from you. So if we don't get your question, we apologize, but you can contact the speaker afterwards if you like with their email and see if you want to get more information from them about their presentation, if we weren't able to get your question out. Please feel free to email me anytime. And here's our Pinterest page. It's just Hopkins District Library Pinterest page. And we follow several other libraries. A lot of them are quite large. They have staff that do these things, which is great for us because we don't, we're tiny. I'm pretty much the one who runs our Pinterest page. Let me go to our boards here. But you can see we've started Party Ideas and different things for adults and teens and kids. We started Summer Reading Program Ideas. So Michigan Summer Reading Program this year is science themed. So we started putting in easy things that we can do. Okay, some of these are crazy things we can do, but that'll be fun anyway. Okay, any other questions? All right. Well, thank you, Natalie. As Christopher mentioned, we've got tons of questions, but we do have a limited amount of time. And we are done with our first session. Natalie, thank you very much. That was wonderful. Like I said, we will be providing recordings and slides and everything starting next week on the Big Talk website. So with that, Natalie, thank you one last time. And we are gonna go ahead and take about a seven minute break here and we'll kind of run some intermediary slides while that's happening. And we will be back with our next speaker, Hope Decker, excuse me, the director of the Co-Hawkton Public Library in New York in just a few minutes. Thank you very much. We'll be right back.