 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host Christa Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar and we don't mind if you call us that. Encompass Live is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. The show is an hour long officially, but we will go long or short as necessary. We post the show on Wednesday mornings, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do always record the show every week, so if you're not available to join us on Wednesdays, you can always go to our website and look at our archives, and I'll show you where all those archives are at the end of today's show. Both the live show and the archives are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your colleagues, friends, neighbors, family, anyone who you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. We share them with the live shows if they want to sign up for those, or if they want to watch any of our recordings. Our recordings do go back quite a ways. We started Encompass Live in 2009, so we do have all of our archives back there. Do keep that in mind that some of the topics or things that are mentioned may be officially out of date, but everything is dated, so you'll know when it was actually broadcast and recorded. We are librarians, so we archive and save everything, so it's all out there for you to watch. We do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, interviews, training sessions, demos of services or products. Really, our only criteria is that it's something library related. Something libraries are doing, something we think libraries could be doing, new resources, services, anything. Some of the topics you might look at the title and say, what is that? Why is that on the show? But trust me, everything always comes back to libraries. That's the key here. We do sometimes have an Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations and sessions on things that are Nebraska-centric, specific to what we're doing here in the state, but we do also bring on guest speakers, and that's what we have this morning. On the line with us is Amy Newberry, who is the director of the McLean County Public Library in Livermore, Kentucky. Good morning, Amy. Good morning, Krista. How are you? I'm doing good. How are you? Good. All right. I say we're fair to Midland anyway. And we've noticed on the session it did say that also along with us would be Angela Smith, who's the outreach coordinator from their library. However, she's kind of watching from the sidelines today. They were a little short staff this morning, so Amy is going to be handling this all on her own, which I think you'll do just fine. I'm doing a comment box if we need it. Yes, that's true. Yes, Amy, if you're out there, no. Angie, if you do see anything you need to comment on, I'm watching the questions box here. Type in something and I'll let Amy know. So our topic for today, the official topic is how to break up boredom, interactive events for all ages. And this sounds like a lot of fun what they've been doing at the library. And I'm just going to hand it over to you, Amy, to take it away and tell us about what you've been doing there. All right. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. Including Henry Public Library. We were the last library formed in the state of Kentucky. We have been here a grand total of starting sixth year, beginning made it first of this year. So we came to a non-library, cultured area. We have a very small county and there's about 9,400 people in the entire county. The city where we were located has about 1,000 people in it. So a lot of our patrons come by the ankle express, bicycle, or skateboard, or just wandering by. We do, our county is spread out, it shakes more like a pork top and we're down in the bottom fat corner and we reach all the way across the county with our bookmobile service, which of course Angie is our outreach coordinator extraordinaire. And she handles our bookmobile as well as the programming here in the library. We, as you might imagine, have a very, very small budget. We are a taxing district. Those of you in Kentucky know exactly what that means and maybe across the United States who knows well, but we have a very, very small budget. I have three full-time staff members including myself. So when we did our first annual state report, as you might imagine, we were at the bottom on all of the rankings, whether they be programming events, attendance, collection, whatever. And I'm pretty smug and proud to report and it's due to Angie's hard work. Last year we were number one per capita in children's programming across the state. Awesome, that's great. We were pretty quick with that. Just to give you some background, when I say we do things on the cheap, we mean it because we have a very small budget. People come to the library and coming into a place that has no library culture, they think, oh, library, brick building, full of books, pretty boring, dry, dusty, and all the women are old and they wear their hair in a bun. Okay, none of that applies to any of us. Yes, we have a very old building. It was built in the late 1800s. It is a two-story building which gives us a great programming space upstairs. I've got a meeting room that holds about 2,300 square feet. So we can put a pretty good crowd of folks in there, particularly if they're little folks. So we decided that we need to be a cultural center. We need to be a learning center. We need to be an activity center, a family center, all those sorts of things happening in our building. And so we have become that for our county. We had a lot of naysayers. We had lawsuits filed. We won't get into all of that because that's a whole different webinar. But people are starting to say, hey, if it's not happening at the library, it's not happening in town. So that's what we were after. And we started some of these programs to the delight of everybody, parents, children, and grandparents involved. So I'm going to zip through these slides and show you some of the things that we have been doing here in Livermore, which is in McLean County, Kentucky. We all know when you start to plan an event, you have to get your planning straight. There's two methods of planning according to McLean County Public Library. You can have planning meetings. You can have committees. You're going to sign a task, follow-up meetings, lots of paperwork. You appoint people here, there, and yawning. Well, there's three of us. If the three of us can't sit down and say, this is what we want to do, this is how we want to do it, you do this, you do that, which is kind of our method of planning. This is an official program planning form. This was Gleaned from Adult Programming, a manual for libraries printed in 1997, as you can see. And they say, put all these things down on paper. If it's helpful, I will admit. Who is your organizer? Who is your audience? What are your goals? The date and time. If you're going to have a guest speaker or a guest presenter or someone has them come in, how much money you need? Who's going to handle publicity? This is the way that McLean County Public Library plans events. We need to do something. Andrew and I plan across the wall, literally. Her office is next door to mine. We're separated by a very thin dry wall. And we yell, what sounds like fun? Have we got any money? Who can we solicit for donations? That is the key when you're doing programming in a very small area with a very small budget. And we give you things up. You get this, I'll get that. Do we forget anything? Make sure you call your local newspaper. We have a weekly newspaper here in the county. It appears on Thursday. And everybody says, well, I didn't see it in the paper. But if you ask somebody, well, we read the paper every day. It's one of those things. They go back and forth. But make sure that you get the word out. Now, we put up flyers. We put up posters. We put signage out in front of the library. We have a TV with a flip thing going on all the time, a crawler, about the events happening in the library. Some people see it, some don't. But we always put things in the children's backpacks at school. Angie, that's one of her many tasks every week is we print a small booklet that has all of her activities for each month in them. And she gets them to the schools to divvy out to the teachers. And that helps a great deal to get the word home because the parents will at least take the papers out of the backpack. So I'm going to get on the refrigerator. So I'm going to get buried in a pile of crap. We all know that. But it has improved the communication to get things out in the school system and get it on the school's website if you can. Always, always have a contingency plan. You think, I've got the greatest game in the whole wide world. And it's going to take place out in front of the library. It's on the sidewalk, whatever. And it will rain. So always think of something you can do inside. Keep your audience on. Just say, oh, I'm sorry, we canceled it. Always, always have a contingency plan. Something that you can do inside. Maybe we have used kids as game pieces. We have used foam core on the floor for bases and for board spaces and that sort of thing. You can just fail it down to have it inside. And then you can always just play board games if all else fails. Our kids love board games. I don't know if your kids in your area do, but it's something that, I don't know, it's a little extra contact, I think. And they do enjoy the board game. One of our favorite is Googly Eyes, which is very interactive. You notice the kid in the middle of the picture has an oversized pair of glasses. They distort the vision. He's trying to draw that coke can in the middle of the table. And, yeah, it doesn't really look like a soda can when you finish with it. Some of our small kids get into Googly Eyes and it's amazing what they come up with. They pass the glasses around. They have a huge time with that. Quelf is another board game that we play inside when it rains. You'll notice the foam on the floor. Those are the spaces for the board. It's a very interactive interview. If you've ever played Quelf or not played Quelf, there's different cards in it. The children are all different. And it's, you know, smell your partner's shoe or play patty cake in the middle of the floor or stand on one leg, or there's all sorts of different activities. And, yes, it will be noisy. It won't be like a normal, quiet library. But we kind of like that where we are. Out front, this was a game of trash-git ball. Using trash cans and basketballs. You can see the kids in the middle going for a dunk shot there. Our mayor in our town is Super Pro Library, which is very nice to have. And we will call him in the morning and say, we want to shut the street off for a couple of hours. And he says, fine, I'll bring you a barrel and some cones. So you see the blue barrel and the cones. And we parked the book mobile across the other end. And we play in the street for an hour or two. Very cost efficient, if you look. That's somebody neighbor's trash can. Every kid has a basketball, it seems like. We divide in teams. That's Angie, a referee in the middle in the pink shirt. And that's a fun activity for a couple of hours. And when they get hot, they come in and drink and get a book and watch a movie for a little bit, and play some more trash. It's all pretty cheap. This one is probably the most fun that we do. When I did this live, we demonstrated, so everybody got to play. And I'm sorry, you all are on a webinar, so you can't actually play. But this is Hungry Hungry Hippos Life Sites. You'll notice that we took a garden hose. Made a circle in the nose floor. We bought those little plastic bottles at Walmart. Very cheap. You'll notice the kid with the laundry basket on his head. The furniture roller that has the cotton rope kind of did it. They divided into teams. You're just looking at one end of the room. And they, under their own power, wheel themselves out to the middle, under a timer, one from each end, and they scoop up however many balls they can in the laundry basket. And then the team, they pull them back. Everybody knows how Hungry Hungry Hippo goes. This works in the street. It works upstairs, mostly nowhere that you can do the laundry basket. The kids love this one. They have to be careful they don't run over their fingers. You just caution them before that. The furniture movers are cheap. We made those. Flywood with the most expensive thing were the wheels. We bought four wheels for each one of them. Put a piece of carpet on the end and tie the cotton rope to them. Laundry baskets are small. The ones we picked up at the dollar store. That game probably cost about $10. And when it rains, can we go out and play? It's really, really life-size Hungry Hungry Hippo. The older kids, this is one of our teenagers. She didn't want to lay down on the board, so she scooted on her backside with a basket on her head. And then of course the parents wanted to get in on it. And it was not nearly as easy as they thought it was going to be. That's why my boyfriend was actually in a black shirt. He was just really into it. It was kind of a trick. It's not as much fun as easy as you think it's going to be. But the life-size Hungry Hungry Hippo is probably one of our more successful life-size games. It looks like you have a... Is that a meeting room at the library where you do this in, or is this somewhere where you push apart the furniture? That's our art gallery up here. We've got about 2,200 square feet. The work on the walls is all done by local artists. I have since redone this room. These vines were made this spring. I got to paint and put new flooring down, those sorts of things. But we will still do these activities at the same time. Yeah, it's a great space. We're really lucky to have it. This is, again, Candy Land. Everybody's familiar with the Candy Land game. So we let our middle schoolers, our tweens, if you will, decorate the street on the Candy Land board. We get a sidewalk chalk, which we had donated, and the kids took off and they went out in the street and made a Candy Land board. You can see the colored spaces all the way around again. The book will be at one end. Columns and marbles at the other. Some of our participants are pretty small, if you will notice. There's the spinner that he's got his hand on. And they prayed, I don't know. They spent, it seems like, two hours out playing Candy Land. It was a long morning, but they enjoyed it thoroughly. Again, cheap and expensive. Something they won't forget. Let's go to the library and let's play again. And I see this is something that's on the street. And I can see in the far back corner there's a cone. So this is something that you said the mayor is very supportive. They just block off the street for the amount of time that you'd be doing the program. Yes, and we actually have a wonderful relationship with our county judge executive and our local mayor for our city. If you'll notice in the back, some apartments you see, some light blue and some brick, that's senior housing. And we're a lot of entertainment for those folks. They come over and they play bingo with us, but they come out and watch everything that we're doing if they don't participate, at least for the money entertainment form. True. Yeah, that's something probably that we never thought about as we are coming to watch. Yeah, just be one of our audience members. They have lots of suggestions and they're a terrible bunch. They really get into the, children and the kids get out and start playing. We have had bounce houses out here in the street with water and all the bouncing in the slide and then all that sort of stuff. We've had some seniors join us for that and we're like, oh gosh, watch a hip, but they have a great time. Because it's a lot of fun. They're not really sure what we're going to do next. Everyone knows Angie. She's been in the school system for 17 years. So she is my true treasure. Because Angie can call and say, we're going to do this and they're like, okay, how can we help? And that's the most amazing part. You've got to have community support and not necessarily monetarily. That's great too. We can call our local subway and say, hey, we need a sandwich platter. We're going to entertain some folks and more likely than not, they donate those too. So I can't stress enough the importance of community relationships, partnerships, if you will. We work very closely with our family resource center. We call them Friskies in Kentucky. I don't know what they are across the United States. But they always have great ideas. They're always looking for numbers to put it on a very practical director level. Headcount and numbers. And so it's always great to help. They have a lot of grants that we have been able to share in as far as programming in different events. And we've had some early childhood type grants and those sorts of things as well. So partner up with your family resource centers if you are not. Same thing with your extension groups. If you have ag extension services in your county. Use those folks. Because they're always looking for programming ideas and are super willing to help. During our summer reading program, this year we were fortunate enough to have Home Depot partner with us. They provided their kits. They had a birdhouse and a wheelbarrow and a boating house and a couple of those things that they brought. And sent some staff members. Sent their employees down to help build and instruct and explain about building and the different tools and things that they would use. We did that for our little ones and our kids under 15. And then we had our extension office partnered with us and we built better meals. And they did some layered salad and some fun stuff like that. So always look at ways that you can partner with community organizations. Stretch your budget. Lean on their budget a little if you can. But it makes an incredible involved experience for the patrons. This also is upstairs. We did this more for our adult patrons. We set up a nine hole golf course. Now that picture of the room doesn't look that big. But again, 2,300 square feet, you can set up nine holes. And you'll see, we went on the cheap. We had the two doors donated. The flowers were donated by our local nursery. And we used pool noodles to make bank shots. And we ordered a kit. Oriental trade, I think, is where we got the kit for the different holes, you know, with the yellow. There's a curve and a whole green ramp and some little cones and things like that. And the rest of it we just made here. And we played golf upstairs. We actually had a fundraiser go on downstairs and while you were waiting to have your bail money paid, you could come upstairs and play golf. So there's a couple of jailbirds upstairs playing. I love the flowers, the greenery that was put there as well. We were trying to create our own amen corner. It's not exactly a gust of it. We were trying anyway. But that was very popular. And then the kids came up afternoon after we got the jail over with. But it was a lot of fun. And very different. You didn't really think you were going to be playing golf in the public library. This obviously is outside our library, but we hosted a car show and a concert. This was a cruise in. It was not actually a show. Car aficionados will know the difference between a cruise in and the show. But they did, by popular vote, pick a favorite and that sort of thing. But again, get the older Oakland. Our senior population came out and danced in the street. We had lots of music going. Again, a different event that you don't think was associated with the library. Cost was very little. I think I paid $40 to have dash plates made, which are little things that they put as they show their cars. And they just said something very simple, fall festival, with my public library and the dates. But we had a good turnout. People wanted up and down. We actually sold, we set up, of course, what do you want to call it? We sold baked potatoes and taco salads. We had bottles of water. Our friends made some money with a concession sand to help offset the cost of the plaques. That is also a very low cost. The folks bring the entertainment. When they bring their cars, people always want to see old cars. Old Detroit, they want to see that. This, believe it or not, is our local position. We had Knock Will Hide come in. He plays banjo, like a fiend. Historically, it's crazy songs. And we, again, do this in the library. We close at 6 o'clock, so we start the music at 6. People want to hang around. We have some folks get up and dance and all those sorts of things. It didn't cost us a thing. I said, sure, I'm glad to come down and sing and play. Again, get people that we've never had in the library before. They think, oh, I don't read. I don't like books or whatever. But everybody likes music. And everybody loves Doc because he's in it. And this is a great way to get people exposed to the library. And people sometimes have, I don't want to say phobia, but a fear or apprehension about going in the library. You know, there's something about the library. These sorts of activities, though, reach out to those folks and bring them in. It's something completely unexpected. It doesn't cost you anything. Our seniors are on a limited budget. Of course, the ones particularly in the housing are here beside us. And they can walk over. They can ride their scooters over. And they're entertained for an hour, an hour and 50 minutes. We usually have some kind of refreshments go with it. It's been donated. There's little cookies and a bottle of water in there, too. But again, it's a way to get folks that you don't necessarily normally think of as a patron of the library. This is something we started new this year. You'll notice the bucket at this young man's feet yard seat. It's meant to be played outside. He loved how it was too hot to go outside in the day. So he wanted to do it inside. We take these out as a kit. We do some passive programming, if you will. We have three or four different kits. We have a battleship that we play out in the street. The kids have become the battleships. They stand together and yell back and forth over a curtain. Just kind of a different approach. The yard seat games, they actually check these out and take them home. We have some of the items in our makerspaces. Some kits, making bracelets, making sun catchers. A couple of different activities like that where they actually check them out, take them home, do the activity, bring them back. We refer with them. I see Angie has a question. Oh, Angie said during the concert and car show that it ended a very long day, that during the day you had 300 school students there to participate in Johnny Appleseed Day. Oh yes, I had forgotten that was Johnny Appleseed Day. And then the following up was... We coordinate with our schools. There's an elementary school here in Avertown, and there's an elementary school in Calhoun, which is the county seat, which is about 15 miles, and then Sacramento, which is, yes, about 20 miles from the library from 25 across the country. And we coordinate with those schools to have Johnny Appleseed Day. I have a gentleman that comes with an antique apple press, and he makes apple cider out on the front porch and talks about the apple trees and how Johnny Appleseed planted trees across the United States. And we have games upstairs and books upstairs that we read in activities. So it's a pretty long day, but at the time you get that many elements in and out and pin the apple on the tree and read a few stories and things. It's a long day, and yes, she's right. We did have the car show after that activity. It was a pretty good day. We actually raised money today by spending our hard-earned capital. Nice. The yard teams, like I said, these types of games and kits that we check out to the folks, they take them home. They have a week check out, and they bring them back a lot, and we find check out on Friday, and they bring them back on Monday. They don't keep them. They won't play over the weekend. Well, like Angie's husband is very crafty, as is Angie, and they make a lot of these things, the wooden dice and those sorts of things. She said the cost for this whole one was $5 for the Yardzy. Right. For the Yardzy. I have tons of white buckets, courtesy of my horses, so I have lots of buckets sitting around, and we rest out the pieces of wood. This was a fun day. We had a touch of trucks today. Angie started very early calling different businesses smaller ones. This is a coal mine buggy. We have recently... We're opening our second active coal mine in the county. It's an underground mine, and this is a man-carry, how they load up and ride down the shaft, and then in fact, where they're actually face-mining. But you see the gentleman standing in the back with the orange on their coveralls. They talked with the kids and explained what they did, how they did it, how this little vehicle worked. We had, I think, 18 different vehicles this year, from National Guard to a coal mine, to a tractor with a hay baler, and a fork on the front, ambulance, police, bait troopers. We call everybody we can think of that had anything that had wheels on it. Again, we're a very small town, so farmers are, of course, our biggest asset. We're working on a combine. The guy wouldn't bring one that far from the dealership. It would take a few days to get it done. They opened them up and let the kids, as you see the kids, they're on them, crawling around and under them and around them. I looked at one point and I wish I had put that picture in. I had these same little girls. They were all sitting in the buckets of the tractor. They had a bucket on the front, and they were all lined up. It was a cool day, as you can tell, out on Twitter. This event, again, you're out at lunch. We provide lunch for the folks that bring the vehicles, and it's like from 10 to 1, we don't do it all day long. We focus when the kids are in school, so they can walk down from the elementary school and get the numbers. If they get home, sometimes we run it a little bit late, so the early kids can go home, then their parents can come back. We have a lot of adults and seniors are out. We have a Ford dealership in the county, and they brought us a jazzy Mustang and a super-duper pickup truck. And, of course, the parents are really interested in that, crawling through those. The folks are just really good to donate their time and their materials for the events that we do here. The National Guard Unit is in the next county, but they love it when Angie calls. Can we bring you a helicopter? I mean, they are always very proactive and anybody can do to help. And these gentlemen, actually, the one in the middle is their PR and safety guy. And for the coal mine, you can have a look in the brick building behind. That's a very old building. That's behind us. Ourage is older, and we have a basement that is dirt floor. They're going to come next week and we're having a coal mine experience in the basement. So, they're going to show what it would be like to be in a coal mine by being in our basement, which is kind of frightening, though. It's really closest, yeah. It'll be a great interactive event for the kids. We've done dinosaur digs. We've made the eggs, you know, with the sand and the flour and mess and put the plastic dinosaur gentlemen buried those in the basement so the kids can dig them up. That was a great mistake. We will do that again in the next couple of weeks. But touch a track is great because you can get your community involved. Like I said, you're out lunch for the folks that bring vehicles if you choose to. But the kids, I remember I was here for this. I was here for that. And that's what we're doing, we're creating memories and good feelings so that when they're ancients like me, they will want to come to the library and understand the library and they'll bring their children to the library and they'll know our patron base. Yeah, because you're new. The schools, libraries, in the former life I taught school and the elementary schools. The last time I went in the elementary school library, the books were the same when I was there 20 years ago. That's sad. We're new and we're different. Growing a library culture I always tell the story. When we started, we were arranged and we were certainly downstairs and my computers were all against an outside wall and everybody had headphones because they all were into the greatest sound in music. I'd had a meeting upstairs. The county judge executive was there and some of the magistrates. We had walked out on the sidewalk and they were all looking in at the library and one little boy was sitting at one of the computers with his headphones on and he was just jamming. He was chair dancing like crazy and he looked at me and he said, you know, whatever his cost and his aggravated and his hateful phone calls that I have had, he said it is worth every dime for that. And he's exactly right. We make it in one time when we've done our job. But we're reaching out to all of the students in the county. This slide was the end of our event that we had and Angie told them that they did not know that they were going to draw on the side of the building. So again, they took the chalk and they treated them down the length of the side of my building and then they decorated themselves. We were going to do it with a water hose and it was not a good enough day to do the water hose outline on the brick building. But to this day, I still have these cherubs on the side of my building but you think it's grandson when Angie tells them, I don't know anything about it. They have a ball. So again, those are things. When my boy got hurt a couple of summers ago down at the river, we were about a block off of the Green River down here in the rough river. He had cut his foot and he came in just all of a sudden crying and scared and everything else and he came to us because he didn't know where else to go when he was hurt. And again, he said volume. He said, well, I knew you all would take care of me. That's what we're after. Yeah, we're going to take care of you in lots of ways. But, you know, in many, many ways. That's the kind of relationship we are trying to build with our kids. So when that they are, they'll bring their kids and their kids will bring their kids. We will be here for them in many, many ways. And Angie is talking about someone that he says someone is very great that you rest him every year for our friend's jail fundraiser? Yeah. Yeah, we have our share of this is our building. Like I said, it was built in the late 1800s. It's handmade brick. It's very soft. But we have about 6,500 square feet in the building. Collection's got about 24,000 books and movies and that sort of thing in it. We do a fundraiser every year. Our friend's group, we have a jail. Some of y'all are familiar with that. We create a list of folks that we want to arrest. Our county judge is always the top of the list. That's what she's talking about. Yeah, the judge. Yeah. We send the sheriff, he gets in on the game too, a couple of deputies and they will go to the school, the courthouse, whoever, some self-surrender. We say, okay, you've been arrested. Here's your bail. You need to raise this much money. And we won't let you out until you get the money raised. The first year we did it, we raised $1,500. For one afternoon and it's found as small as we are, that's pretty impressive. We did it the next year and we raised about the same amount, about $7,000 and we skipped a year just to kind of give everybody a rest from being arrested. We had some folks that really get into it, they'll put on costumes, they put on the black and white stripes and caps and wear a number around their neck. We make a door and his husband's made a jail cell door in our doorway and it looks just like a jail cell. But then we feed them breakfast if they're here at the 7 o'clock in the morning session because the farmers like to come in early. And then we feed them barbecue at lunch if they stick around as long. Usually the school bunch wants to hang for lunch because they really like our barbecue. Again, it's a tremendous fundraiser and it, like I said, it doesn't cost us a thing and we do extremely well as far as fundraising for our friends group to help the library, of course. We've done various fundraisers, I know there's a library in the adjoining county that is down the Flamingo sale and we've talked about doing one of those as well, but since they're close we probably won't feel their idea. But everyone seems to have a good time, they enjoy it. And again, Fred will, when you're new some of you may be newer than I, but six years is a pretty young library and they're not sure what we're going to do next. So we're always going to try something new and something different. Our next deal will be the coal mine in the basement, of course, and then a dinosaur dig with our kids that do story times with us and our tweens as well. That's fast and furious, but that's pretty much the end of it. Like I said, I didn't do nearly as well as I would have done with my buddy, but she's written a couple of talents. We do have a question. How much is the average bail for your inmates? We're depending. We set the county judge at about $500. School teachers and some other folks I think $200 is as low as we've gone. So somewhere between $200 and $500. And so people can pay a little bit at a time until they've gotten enough for someone to get out. One of our folks from the school, her husband brought down a pack of penny. He wanted to stay a little longer. Most of our folks and our county judge is no exception. He gets all of his money donated before he even comes in. We had one gentleman that stayed. I thought he was going to stay here all night. He kept calling his, he was actually a preacher. He kept calling his folks and none of his parishioners would bail him out of jail. I didn't know what that said. What's going on in that church? So you said you're new. Your building, your library is new. And this building you said is from the 1800s. What was it before the library was in there? It was many things. It originally, well not originally. I don't know what the exact original part was. If you look at the building you can see it's two halves. It was the first brick building built in the town of Livermore. And about halfway through they decided it's going to need to be bigger. So they built the other side. I'm actually speaking to you from the last window on the left side is my office. But it is in a dry goods store. It had apartments in it at one time. It was a telephone exchange. It was a post office. It was a TV repair shop. It's been lots of different incarnations. We have a lady here in town that has done a photographic history. I guess it's the best way to describe it. I don't know how many pictures she has of our building in those different incarnations. The steps came down from a different side. There are steps on the side of the building that you can't see. There was a wooden sidewalk. There was no sidewalk. There was dirt. There were trees. I mean it's interesting to see it from 1889 I think it was when it was originally built. It looks like it's a pretty good shape for being that old, too. Obviously being kept up over the years pretty well. It is. It scares me a little bit to go in the basement and look up. I try not to. Maybe because it doesn't work. The basement is pretty scary. A tornado came through town and took the roof off in 2009 and they refurved to put a new back wall on it and of course a new roof on it, but other than that it's original back to that long ago. Of course the women's club of Livermore I think a lot of the libraries across the state of Kentucky were founded by local women's club the GFWC if you will now. They started a library kept it as a community library. It used to be known as the Livermore Community Library. If Susie could keep it open for two hours or Sally could come in for three hours or how they kept it open and the books were donated. We had a mayor back in the 70s and 80s in this town that was very pro-library and she tried really, really, really hard to get a tax industry created and those sorts of things and she never could make it happen. She had books donated. There was a troop of Boy Scouts over there that heard about Amber and her drive to get a library in this community and they brought a U-Haul trailer full of donated all the way from Delaware and they brought them in and all the ladies in the women's club helped write spine labels by hand and did all these things and shelved all those books. When we started five years ago I had handwritten spine labels and today of course we're all automated and all those wonderful things. It was a neat project. To build a library is something new. I have a neat police library program in the state of Kentucky and I have a sister library in Campbell County which is one of our larger counties. You said this is originally it was a live and work community library but now it's the county library so that changed Yes, we created a tax industry in 2009. You're the only library in your county then? Yes. I put a little free library you know the little boxes I hope that throughout the county I have I think five of them out that we fill and rotate stock and that sort of thing in and out of those and those seem very popular particularly folks may not be able to reach us during our hours we are open I think 52 hours a week and we run the bookmobile every other week but if they miss us then I can hit the little free library and those are pretty neat. That's awesome. You got to get out to everybody. I was trying to look on a map I looked at a map to see and I looked at your Facebook page did you guys get the eclipse? Did it reach where you were? You seem to be kind of near the line. 98, 99% it didn't get pitch dark but the crickets started hollering and the streets came on security lights and things like that but it wasn't completely dark but we all ran out with our glasses and so much. Did you do any sort of program at the library for that or was it just the whole town? Yes, the whole town schools had things going on in the schools so we gave out some glasses that we had ordered everybody was traveling and going and it was 100% in Madisonville which is about 25, 30 miles from us and so everybody was going that direction to see us since they were that close but we did have some folks that's interesting on the river I had a library dog so I had taken him for a walk after the things started moving and they were from I want to say they were from Michigan her brother worked at the observatory in Livermore, California so they wanted to come to Livermore, Kentucky to watch the eclipse. You know you'll find in Livermore, Kentucky Not the same but yes it's a sister city. Well I probably ran you short but any more questions? Do anybody have any questions that you want to ask of Amy or Angie who's on the line typing to us type into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface if you want to ask about any of the other programs and things that they were doing I actually did look at you said you'd read down the floor and the upstairs and I think I saw that on your Facebook page the new floor is like a wood I believe a laminate and painted and brighten that space up that's the largest meeting room in the county is in my library so you get used a lot from that there are political forums company meetings we had a company that was trying out some new software and they wanted to come where they could all be in one spot to do it so we had smart boards and Wi-Fi and all those good things so they came here to do their training we've done a lot of different community events in our room so it needed to biffen up it looks good our Facebook page and Angie has an outreach Facebook page as well visit and like us we presented this webinar in Fargo at the Arsall the association was called last year are you all going to that I'm not attending this year no I have previously but not this particular year but we do always promote it and support them yes we have a question that came in about the car show when you had the people bringing the cars in do you is that also a fundraiser do you charge people to bring their cars to the car show or is it just an event how does that work we did not we did that to get people down to see the band we had paid for a boy that had local ties with a southern rock type band and we got him and we did not charge for the cruise in more of a good sort of thing we had the concession stand though and we made about 650 of them a concession stand so that was run by the library by you guys at the library yeah okay and people that have show cars like that they always want to show them it's tricky to find a date that they're not already committed because they don't go far and yawn to show them but if you can get a date that's good then hang on to it they just want to show off and talk about what they've done to their particular cars and to see other people so I'm sure oh yeah that's a whole brotherhood the cars strictly the older the fours the muscle cars those sorts of things it's basically the same group everywhere you go you follow their shows but they have a ball and again that may not be a group that you would normally attract but something you do at the library we do family movies we've done movies on the outside of the building we had 300 people in the street watching the Lego movie on the side of a brick building think about it it was pretty clever oh yes bricks get yes was it either I guess if it's flat enough yeah it would have probably been completely if you're telling a sheet or something but the kids loved it oh yeah again got people that you normally would not attract with just in the world so we think completely out of the box do really weird and different things my father is always constantly at the library exactly and I think it goes back to what you said at the very beginning of your talk that wanting to be the community center the center of activities for what goes on in the town that you just think of anything that your town may want to have done as an event or an activity jump in and offer to do it figure out a way to do that and then just the people will come to it because of whatever the activity is and they'll have that same reaction the library did this well we have put together some kits I didn't have a picture of them for geocaching so maybe all probably for me with that idea we've done that kit we've got one we are if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records thank you very much Livemore Kentucky is mentioned because it is the only place in the United States that with the foot of the bridge you're in McLean county in the middle of the bridge you've crossed one river you've crossed another county you're getting ready to cross another river yet when you get to the foot of the bridge you're still in McLean county it's actually look it up it's the confluence of the rough and the green river and it's right here outside my library I can see the bridge from my window so of course here everybody fishes up and down the river so we put together a backpack type kit it has a fishing pole and a temporary license if you're a kid of course you don't have to have a fishing license in Kentucky and those sorts of things we have an ice skating arena in Owensboro, Kentucky which is 17 miles from us and they will donate free passes to us so our kids go out on ice skate we did that as part of our summer reading last year we took them all ice skating but just different than we bring the animal tales shows and those are not cheap they bring in kangaroos snakes and anything else they can bring because kids won't get a chance around here to see a kangaroo no you're not going to see you're not going to see we do have a question actually I think you're just mentioning a little bit about that someone is asking besides games have you tried lending out anything other than books and you did just the fishing fishing the geocaching brain dead we've not tried the instruments we had thought about instruments there was a lot of musical talent around here but we've not had any donations honestly and we need more donations in order to do that program but the backpacking or a bird watching kit is one that we'll put a guide in you know the local birds and just who they are and what they are some tree identification this is poison ivy don't hold on to it sort of thing if you're going to go out and look for those birds and go fishing you do need to know that yes Angie says you also have backpacks with tennis equipment yes we have two tennis courts here in town it has tennis racket and balls and the USTA rules which I don't think anybody ever reads but they're in a backpack and we have just the town has just installed a disc golf course a non-hold disc golf I don't know if you're aware of that that's probably the most popular we've got books all over everywhere so that's our next kit to get put together is for disc golf yeah I have friends here that play that yeah it's basically like golf with a frisbee yeah it's fascinating I can see where you can get hooked very easily and it's a whole lot cheaper than that bag and clubs and balls and tees oh sure probably for you guys it's a lot easier to check out something like that than actual set of golf clubs yeah definitely well no question oh wait here we go I forget if you'll type sometimes someone just said they love the hungry hippos game that was awesome so just a comment about that one which I thought was really fun too oh and she says that you have a lot of stem kits as well that the schools check out through you yes Angie worked very diligently I forgot about the stem kits she'll bash me for that when I get down different little things that they can build I know the one for elementary kids was how to say Fred and Fred was a worm and you had to build like a life preserver and building bridges there's lots of different all sorts of little activities that she has put together and kits that we do check out to the schools and those are very successful of course stem and theme both and we have two areas set up in our library one for the smaller children we have a little alcove I guess that's the best way to say under the fence and we put the smaller children in that area with more passive type things that they can build and all sorts of supplies tongue depressors and q-tips and I get a shopping list from Angie and I go what is this for we go in her kit and then the older children we have another area towards the back of the library that we set aside for some older projects it's amazing what they will come up with when they start building we have a little box of magnets and fascinating but those kits are always and they're not expensive again I cannot reiterate enough that we do not have much of a budget for the time you pay on a building this size that leaks like I said I might add we do have replacement windows but it's an ancient building my paraplegic month was like a thousand dollars which was talking to me but in a town that's small and we're on KU which is cheap power but anyway supplies are basically cheap you can buy a gross ton of tongue depressors and q-tips and cotton balls and little magnets and those sorts of things and let the kids use their imagination that's part of what I think they don't create and the steam kits and just our maker areas give them a chance to use their brain use their head for something other than to hang a hat on and Angie says most of them cost less than ten dollars if you're like us clean out your closets or your junk drawers and kids will figure out what to do with them and she recommends that Pinterest is great for suggestions just tweak them for your own activity yes look for an activity that someone else is doing and then figure out what do we have that we can do just with different materials right we have used pretty strange things I've got lots of shoeboxes if you all use Schwann's or order any food and those nice hard little heavy cardboard boxes that aren't extremely large they make great things to put the kids in that check out and she said that the stem kits are checked out through the schools so you have an agreement that the schools actually check them out from you to use in their classrooms yeah that's a nice conversation our elementary school here in our town is of course very heavily with our Head Start and preschool programs as well we have one middle school and one high school in the county and three elementary schools so hook up with you Will, she spends all day on the bookmobile at one of the elementary schools on Monday is there all day they check out books, they do activities and that's K through fifth grade and she has all those kids on the bookmobile sometimes she gets quite sick but she gets sick and looks at me trying to make her back and roll and carry on but yeah, it's key to get partnered with your schools and community officials camps with the community because strongly enough absolutely so anybody have any last, we have one last question here that came in because it's almost getting to 11 o'clock, I think we'll wrap it up with this one here someone wants to know, this is a good question I think to wrap up with what do you think is special about your town specifically and how does the library fit in with that especially unique about your town especially unique everything it is, at one time this was a very thriving community it had right at 2500 people in a lot of furniture industry here they floated the logs down the room made a lot of furniture, some of you may remember the famous barrel furniture in the 70's that was yeah, that was all made here in Livermore oh nice my room was here on the furniture factory and he made a lot of things for top value stamps which he used to redeem stamps there were a couple of things that he made specifically for that but as the industry went away so did the people it went from 2500 to just barely a thousand it's very close knit it is heavy agriculture we ranked fifth in the state and agri-seed which means a lot of chickens and a lot of grain soybeans and corn some wheat so we're a very small rural agricultural based community that the world has kind of passed by it's pretty like stepping back about 50 years maybe 60 and many people like that it's very quiet it's very clean if you will quiet most of the time and I think they were hungry for something I don't think they knew what they were hungry for but you know there needs to be an activity we are not in the county seat which was a huge unhappy point when we open the library we need to move to the county seat well the building is here the books are here and we're here now so no we're not moving to Calhoun I mean the greatest need is here in Livermore because the schools the high school and middle school are all in the county seat of course in Calhoun which is more centrally located probably like that we look like a pork chop and we're in the bottom right hand corner of the pork chop and if you put the bone at the top so I think our ability to offer such a wide variety of programming events ideas, concepts totally formal because again you're thinking okay this is 50 years ago a library was a place that had books you could go read the newspaper in the magazine and check out a book and then move on there wasn't a whole lot of stuff going on and I think we've kind of changed that perspective particularly in our county I have a lot of folks that would drive to Davis County which is like the county north of us about 17 miles pay $40 for a library card and then you came here and they said you have the same things you have the same databases the same amount of books if you don't have the beautifully titled you can get it you're in a library alone let's quit paying for that let's support you guys and it's nice to see them go hey we can do this at home and get the same benefits here so I think recognizing what we have here in town and our patron base is key to know what we need to offer sure Angie says everyone knows everything and then she laughs typical of small town but then she says we can call for volunteers because we know the majority of our citizens if we are in need of water for our waterslides our neighbors let us hook into their water if you're cleaning up after an event they are there to help oh and then she mentioned the greatest thing is when a gentleman just walks in the door and gives you a $10 check and says y'all are doing great things keep it up and she says this gentleman comes in every year and does that for you yes he does I look for that white truck that's part of the that's part of the small town that everyone knows everything and everyone yeah and I think that's great that you guys are revitalizing what's going on with the community that's what libraries are for definitely that's what we're here to prove in the beginning we wanted to be the community center and if it's not happening at the library then it's not happening and like you said there's nowhere else for them to go for these things as well and you have the biggest meeting room in the county for people to use for things it was hard to get them to believe that we needed a county library but it didn't take that long once we got rolling for them to go hey let's go and so when a child looks at you and says if it's not going on here then it's not going on again that's an awesome quote we do what we do everywhere great alright I think that's a great way to wrap it up it's not happening at the library it's not happening because we're just a little after 11 o'clock this is perfect time to wrap up for our full hour very good thank you this is great seeing what you guys are doing there so many awesome ideas that are unique to what you're doing but it's great to see that I've seen other bigger libraries do more comp and more expensive versions of the same things and it's just great to see having the kids make the candy land and just so the more simpler displays of the games and things that can use your imagination more I think that's awesome I like those thank you Amy thank you Angie for being on as well as you could there while you were down working the desk so I think that will wrap it up for this week's Encompass Live but I'm going to pull presenter control to my computer and I'm going to show you I do have here there we go your library is on Facebook page there yep that does look at nicely the plans and here's the new floor that you have in the meeting I believe that's it yep so if you're interested in more what they're doing you want to talk to Amy or Angie more about it the Facebook page would be a good way to reach out to you absolutely that's perfect and there's no number right there on our 7th almost over we're having Friday yep alright so I gave them a like of course so that will wrap it up for today's the show then thank you Amy and Angie thank you everyone for attending I'm going to pop that over to our Encompass Live page here the show has been recorded is still being recorded at this moment and we'll be here on our website right underneath our upcoming shows is where we have a link to our Archived Encompass Live sessions and at the top of the list are most recent ones so this is last week's show this new one from today will be posted here at the top of the list as soon as it gets all processed probably later this afternoon it'll be ready just as long as YouTube cooperates with me and I'll have it up here everyone who attended registered for today I'll send you an email letting you know it's available but as you can see here all of our things here are just free and open to anyone to watch so you can just go here and click and you'll get to our recording if there were slides that's something too if you want to if Amy send me your slides I can post them up as well for people to look at okay I'll just email them to me some time later today no rush and you can take a look at them there so that's our show we also on Encompass Live do have a Facebook page as well we link to it from our page and all of our session pages so if you are big on Facebook and you want to keep up on what we're doing on the show give us a like over here we post reminders like here's your reminder about longing into today's show when upcoming shows are we have when our recordings are available we post on here here's one recording from a few weeks ago so if you are big on Facebook just to keep up with things that's where we do post updates to what's going on with Encompass Live and next week's show I hope you join us for that is the facets of fair use here in Nebraska we have four regional library systems and the director of our southeast library system is Scott Childers and he is going to talk about fair use guidelines how you can or can't use someone else's intellectual property the yes's and no's of all of that specifically for school libraries but potentially expanding some of these topics will also expand out to publics as well so if you're interested at all in what you can and cannot do with things that you find potentially online sign up for that show and I was just starting getting our September dates confirmed here too so we've got some of those coming up you'll see more time we do do the show weekly every Wednesday morning and I'm working on finalizing some dates and descriptions for things you'll see a lot more topics will come up here as well even though it looks a little scarce right now you'll get that filled up pretty soon so keep checking back there other than that that wraps that for today's show thank you everyone for being here this morning and we will see you next time on Encompass Live bye bye