 All right, good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that be of interest to libraries. Encompass Live is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's okay. We do record the show, and it is posted to our website in our archives afterwards for you to watch. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can see all of our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who you think might have interested in any of our shows, they can sign up for upcoming sessions and go back and watch any of our recordings for the show. Encompass Live debuted in January of 2009, so we are in our 10th year of the show. So there's quite a few archives there, lots of recordings for you to go back and watch. And we cover a variety of things here on the show, book reviews, interviews, demos of services and products, we do mini training sessions, basically anything of interest to libraries. And we do cover all types of libraries here. The Nebraska Library Commission is a state agency in Nebraska for libraries, providing training, consulting, education, grants for all types of libraries across the state. And our webinar series reflects that. We have sessions for public libraries, academic, K-12, museums, correctional facilities, basically anything that's library, we have something for you on the show. That's really our only criteria for all our topics is that something library related. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations and sessions for things that we are specifically offering here in Nebraska. But we do bring in guest speakers from around the country sometimes. And that's what we have this morning. On the line with us is Natalie Buzan. Good morning, Natalie. Good morning. And she is the director of the North Riverside Public Library District. This is in North Riverside, Illinois. And she's been on the show quite a few times over the years here and there. First, I think became aware of us and we became aware of her with our Big Talk from Small Libraries online conference. Is that correct, Natalie? Very true. It's like a bad penny. I just keep coming up. It's terrible. I know. Oh, it's great. It's always something new that you have. That's awesome. Yeah. For those of you that don't know, Big Talk from Small Libraries is an annual online conference that I do, a one-day conference, all done online. The same way as this show is for Small Libraries, specifically with presenters and speakers from Small Libraries with a population served 10,000 or less. So all of our presenters are in there. So if you're interested in Small Libraries or are from one, that would be something for you to take a look at. It's the last Friday of February every year. And we just did it a few months ago. And Natalie's been on that and she's been in Compass Live. And this is one of a new session, a new presentation, I think, at least for us from you, about reaching out to your collection. And I'll just hand it over to you, Natalie, to take it away and tell us all about it. Sounds good. Hello, everyone. Good morning. I am probably going to ask you guys to chat in, chime in. If you have any questions, just stop me. If I ask a question, please answer because I like this to be as interactive as I can. I do not have my webcam on because it is seriously depressing behind me. I, it's just beyond depressing. But let's, like I said, there's only one good thing coming out of this. That means that hopefully my cake topper will not melt before it gets to me from Florida. That's the goal. So we are talking today about reaching out through your collection, um, libraries of things, unusual collections, lending stuff at your library. It's been talked about. It's been in the news. It's something that you can definitely do, but there are a lot of things to think about when you're doing that. So let's take a little bit of a look at people who are lending things. I did a poll on, um, the ALA think tank on Facebook asking people if they could chime in on this. So I have lots and lots of different responses for you guys. Oh yeah. It's, it's amazing what libraries are doing out there. But if any of you are lending something unusual, something other than books, movies, magazines, newspapers, why don't you write a little comment. So we all know what you're doing and give us an idea of how that's going. And then we're going to talk about some funding sources for you guys. Ideas about cataloging and how we can address some marketing issues and some legal issues because of course in this day and age, we all have to worry about the legal issues associated with lending out. Oh, I don't know. A glass fusing thing. Unfortunately. So the American libraries magazine did this wonderful picture in 2007. And they were trying to highlight the fact that libraries are doing this. And I, I think the library of things was actually coined by a library in Amsterdam. It's somewhere in the Netherlands, but it spread very, very quickly. Just the, the title of it. And libraries all across the U.S. are embracing this. We started doing this when I was a director in Michigan and just kind of have expanded it from there. I haven't started doing it at the North Riverside Library yet, probably because I've only been here two months. But I am planning on getting there. I have already started poking and prodding some of my staff members here to work on it, but it's also a mindset because you look at this picture and you see people loaning out taxidermied animals or sewing machines or Santa suits at the whole gamut there, right? But how many of your board members or how many of your staff members would look at that and say, no, just, no, libraries don't do that. Or that's not what we're here for. Or the myriad of other things that I've heard from my library boards over the years. I don't know how many of you have had that issue in the past, but I have pretty much every library I've been at. This is the fourth library I've been director at now. And it's a slow, steady process of convincing our library boards that libraries are more than the quiet place with books and movies. And that's it. Well, first we had to convince them that we could have movies here, but that's been a while. So they're okay with that. And except I have that one board member. There's always that one board member, right? On the plus side, a lot of boards are a lot more progressive these days. And I'm hoping very much that you all have that. My board here is very concerned with a lot of other things right now. So I'm hoping to get them on board with this very shortly. So do any of you loan out Santa suits? Not that anyone has said. Nobody's going to fess up. I love that. I love the idea. I see that there that that's people need that once a year thing. Sure. I have to admit that we bought a Santa suit at both of my libraries in Michigan and in granted, we did use it for Santa that came to our library, but we ended up loaning it out to people in the community who needed it too. It wasn't, we hadn't officially cataloged it, but we did loan it out unofficially. So it was kind of in process of becoming a catalog thing. Does anybody loan out anything fun or different? Yeah, we do have some people that start typing in what they loaned out. Let's see. One place does literacy kits from early learning through fifth grade. Oh, nice. What do those have in them? Good question. Yeah. Can you let us know, Marianne, what's in those actual literacy kits for you? And we'll share that. Yeah, that's great. In our Omaha Public Library, they do seeds, watt detectors for electricity, toys, video games, another library does, of course. Our Blair Public Library and Technology Center here in Nebraska loans out. Cake pans. That's a very common loan. We love cake pans. Yeah. Those kinds of things that you can like make, you know, all the crazy cakes, a different design. Like here's a dinosaur shaped cake, which nobody can really make on their, well, okay, professionals can make freehand, but us common people. I was going to say, I think, I think my soon to be mother-in-law, she is absolutely fabulous at doing things like that. I just stare and she's like, Oh yeah, you can do this. I'm like, no, no, I can't. I will cheat with a cake pan from the library. Absolutely. Okay, guys. So here are a few that I pulled up from the things that people had sent to me and it, it basically comes down to a lot of people have gotten these through donations, it seems. I was talking to one library that, not this one that loans out Halloween costumes, which I love that idea, but another one who had a costume shop that went out of business in town and the library was offered their leftover stuff that hadn't sold. It'd be a good tax write off for them and whatnot. Yeah. But they were trying to figure out how in the world do we do this? Do we, do we lend them out? Do we charge for them? Do we limit it? This library limits it to kids and teens. And what are the costs associated with this? And that's one of the things that I was going to talk about later, but actually I'll bring it up now. Um, you always have to remember the repair costs and the maintenance costs of things like this. So the library cast, the Halloween costumes, it was an issue of, do we, it's same thing with our Santa suit at the library and the reason that we hadn't catalogued it yet, but we were working on it. How do you clean that? Do you clean that every time? Do you leave it up to people to clean that? How do you go about that one? And then there are just some wonderful fun things. So people are really into instruments. It seems like I talked to people who do guitars, ukuleles seem to be everyone who's doing instruments is doing ukuleles. Um, my last library, the river valley district library on import Byron on the Mississippi river, they had, I had found out just before I left that one of my staff members was in the ukulele club at school. I didn't know this existed, but they came out to our Christmas walk and did a ukulele themed Christmas production. Um, kind of fascinating. I was really, really impressed with her and her group, but it kind of moved us to wanting to do things like that. And I think that's what it comes down to in a lot of ways. It's really nice to have these things, loading art, learning, loading cardboard, cutouts, learning cake pans, those don't require any specialized knowledge at all, but when you're learning, loading out ukuleles or bongos or xylophones or a portable piano, I don't remember which library that was, but that was, that would be a little bit more than I want to go because of the fact that we don't have people who know how to maintain those here and we don't have them in my community who know how to maintain them. So that means that I'm going to have to find somebody outside of our community. If I'm lucky, I can find a volunteer, but not necessarily. On the other hand, I've had four xylophones donated to the library since I started here two months ago. I don't know where to go with that. Let's, let's, I don't, I, I, I, I, I, I don't know where to go with that, but I either, people don't want to have a garage sale or they really think that we need a xylophone. I don't know. You just never know. That's, that's okay. I really don't. I just go with it. Um, so it's not that our community doesn't think that we need these things and we've had a lot of people willing to provide these things, but it's a matter of, you have to make sure that you can maintain them and keep them in good condition for everybody to use. I love the top corner here, pairing up our fishing poles with books on fishing. We did a fly tying kit that we paired up with fly tying books that talked about how to make them and how to use them and how to properly cast and things like that. These aren't things that take a huge amount of space and at least for the fishing rods, there aren't things that take a whole lot of staff knowledge because pretty much everybody knows how to use a fishing rod. Right. At least I hope so. I'm crossing my fingers. Or you paired up with a how to fish book. That is a possibility. That is always a possibility. The, what helped us with the fly tying kit because we did have a lot of questions about what is this or what is that or how do you use that? How does this all go together? Was pairing that up with a series of programs that we did. So we did a six week fly tying class. They could check out the kit and they could do the fly tying class. Obviously we only had one kit and we had multiple people showing up, but a lot of them had their own tools or they could share tools from the kit. And that helped us publicize it, brought out our books like fishing books and fly tying books that don't get that much use. Not, not surprisingly, they tend to sit on those nonfiction shelves and well, not come out very often, but doing things like displays like this where you can check these things out or classes where you can teach people how to do, I wouldn't do casting classes at my library. Not going to lie. That just sounds scary. That's not indoors. Maybe, you know, you take a field trip. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. Although North River side. So I went from two very rural libraries where, yes, I had water nearby so I could definitely do that too. I'm like 20 miles from Chicago now in a tiny little area with only 6,000 people in my village, but it's not tiny, but not so much access to water or rural areas where we can actually do things like that. I love the idea of the power tools and all the tool libraries, but it comes back to a maintenance issue for me. We've had some of these things donated. We are working on this, but do you put these together in kits? Is anybody who's on here right now loaning out tools? That's what I was going to ask. Is anybody have any tips about, yeah, doing power tools? So I know I've heard of it being done, but not just beyond the fact that, yeah, that's the thing that we're doing. So if you do have done it, let us know. I do have the librarian who did the literacy kits did explain more about theirs. Do you want to hear about that? Oh, definitely. So for the literacy kits, they have, it depends on the age level. The pre-K and below have board books and learning toys, and the older ones have fiction books and workbooks, and then older learning games with cards and puzzles, et cetera. Oh, very nice. A combination of things. And she's trying to put together a quest to make STEM kits for ages 8 to 18. So you put it in the older, you want to get past the literacy level, but she's looking for funding for that. Now, we had just started STEM kits at my last library at the River Valley District Library. Kathy, our children's librarian, was in charge of that. She got a grant from John Deere, actually, and we had asked them for some funding to do something like this. And they were kind enough to give us some money. If you have a manufacturer in your area, a lot of times you can pitch STEM kits to them, and they will. It's the same thing with tools. We pitch the idea to ACE hardware, or you can talk to Home Depot and ask for returns that are in good condition or different things like that. A lot of them will partner up with you to come out and do a program and to lend out some tools. We also worked back in Michigan. We were working with, just after I left, they did a program with a local plumber who came out and did basic plumbing, how to take things apart, put things back together, how to fix your kitchen sink. Right? It's great advertisement for them. It's a great possibility of donations for you. And it's a way to pair. Again, you're pairing some of those guides and things that you have with the materials that you can lend out. This has been relatively interesting. I did volunteer for one of these one time, and it was kind of fun. Lending out people. The Human Library Project is, there are a lot of libraries that are doing this. It tends to be in larger areas, but some smaller libraries I have talked to have been doing this. You get a group of people who are willing to talk, just talk about themselves. So, which is scary, quite honestly. So, you have to find the right type of people who are willing to answer any questions, who are not going to get offended, who want to sit back and talk to people. And this could be, the idea is you shouldn't judge your neighbors by how they look or how they act, or people in your community, it brings attention to the fact that people in your community are all different. They're all unique. And again, it's one of those things that you can pair up a person that you have, say I was your human library person. Right? So, I was your book. You could pair me up with what books I pick out that I think relate to me. So, maybe I pick out the books on furniture refinishing or how to start a, how to write grants. No surprise there. Or how about if I picked out the books on how to distill essential oils, because I do all of those things. Or what if you picked out books on coming from a broken home? That fits with me too. And they wouldn't know that unless they started talking to me. So, you get a chance to sit down and talk to people in your community. Anybody can sign up for this. Usually you ask people to participate for a set amount of time and anybody can walk up and quote unquote check out your person, talk to them. They get a chance to share what library books they're into. They get a chance to share what they're about, what makes sense to them. And you get a better idea of your community. Other people in your community get an idea of your community and so do you. I think that was a fun idea. Yeah, I think our University of Nebraska Omaha has done that, if I remember correctly. It is fantastic. Here, yeah. It's just been, it's really eye-opening when you sit down to one of these and you get to talk to people. I saw people who have my uncle. So if you walk up to my uncle, he looks like a stereotypical Harley rider, the big heavy beard. He's got the chaps and leather he wears all the time. He is a big guy, tall, broad shoulders, big guy. Sweetest guy ever. He will tell you about how he does Harley runs for to raise money for cancer. He took care of his mom for eight years while she had cancer and go on from there. But again, it's one of those. Don't judge a book by its cover. Yeah, and that's the thing too I like about them is that you will sit down and talk to someone that you probably never would have before just because you don't run in the same circles. You don't do the same things as they do, but you're curious about it and you can talk to all these different types of people. Yeah. I love the idea of pairing this up with books that make sense for that person. Having that person go out and pick up books that write that they can talk about that makes sense that that show them. So it might give people an idea of different things at your library and different people in your community and brings everything together. So your mission statement and ultimately this all comes back to we can lend out as many things as we want, right? There are libraries that are lending the sewing machines, they lend Netflix subscriptions, basically real cruise. They lend out spiralizers. I had just gotten I did a spiralizer in door Michigan. We had carving kits like wood carving. I've done the microwave glass fusing. I wasn't kidding about the glass fusing. We did that. But if it doesn't fit your community and your strategic plan, then it's not really worth developing. You want to make sure that you're fitting your strategic plan. If you don't have a strategic plan, I put a I put a very nice little guide and the notes section on this slide. So don't worry about finding it later. It's there. You're good. And make sure that you mention that Natalie. I'll just jump in and let everyone know at the end of when the recording is available for this, we'll also have the slides as well. So if there's anything that she posts up here that have URLs or things like that, don't worry about trying to scribble it all down. We'll have the slides for you as well. Wonder if it will show me. Oh, you probably can't see that. Can you actually? Yes, it did come up. Yep. Oh, good. Yeah. Yes. Your science. Yeah. Wonderful. So the strategic planning for small libraries. I will actually pull that up so you guys can see that too. Oh, through air so cool. I love air so and they are actually presenting in Illinois this year. Yes, that's where the conference is. So very, very excited. I am crossing my fingers that, like I said, I've been here two months. So I don't know if I'll be able to go with everything else that's going on, but it's a very easy step-by-step guide. It goes through the big question about why you would want to do this. And then it's a matter of getting people on board, creating a community that is receptive to doing this and making sure that you have staff members or volunteers or board members who are with you and working with you to do this. Because honestly, you can't do it alone. As much as I would love to say, this is one of those things that you can just sit down and write, you can't. You really need their input on that. Hey, it went away. All right. Although I seem to not be full screen now. Oh, well, this will still work. So a couple of years ago, this library, two, three directors ago, three, no, four, four directors ago, this library put together a strategic plan with a fantastic director that they had. And it came down to a few really key mission statements that they wanted to address and they wanted to satisfy curiosity with lifelong learning. They wanted to stimulate imagination with the reading, viewing and listening. They wanted to have a comfortable place. They wanted the library to be a place that people wanted to go, but they also wanted our website to be a place that people were comfortable with visiting. They wanted to make sure that people could connect to the online world here and create early readers. And what was nice is under each of these, they put a couple of goals. So I know that in the relatively near future, we want to expand out and have binge boxes here at the library. And we are trying to key that in to fit our stimulate imagination with the viewing section. We also want to make sure that we can key that into early readers and make sure that we have some literacy feature, literacy films that are all put together in one kit. Is anybody doing binge boxes? Anybody doing it? Go ahead and let us know. We did have someone do a session about that. Yeah, I think that was me, actually. You, okay. Because then someone asked, I'd asked me about it previously. So. Okay. So very quick update. Binge boxes are a box. Oh, somebody just said yes and they go out a lot. So we do have someone from here that is doing it. Yeah. That's fantastic. I have done these at both my other lie, three of my other libraries, and they're just basically a hard plastic box that you put four to six movies and try not to do TV series, because that's just not a good idea. But I know we always have checked them out for one week. So can you imagine a couple TV series and it checks out for one week? Oh, no, no, no, no. Not a good idea. But it gives people the opportunity to check out whatever you think is a good set. So maybe it's six Star Wars movies altogether. So you don't have to go searching around. Maybe somebody has the original number four and number six checked out and you wanted one through six and you can't get them now because you have to wait for that person to bring it back and then they're late and, you know, it's just frustrating. Or maybe it's a we want to do one on this is how the brain works. So we have a series of nonfiction. Maybe they're short movies. Maybe they're long movies, but a wide variety of type of movies that feature how the brain works or how learning works. Or we have some. This is how you learn your shapes or different things like that. Quite honestly, they're looking at putting together Disney Princess movies right now because that was super, super popular one at my last library. But that's one of the things that we're looking at doing with our alternative things to fit our mission statement and our goals. One of our goals under satisfied curiosity was making sure seniors have the skills that they need to continue learning learning new things and address their self directed personal growth. So we're looking at putting together some boxes that have different craft things paired with this is how you sell online. And we're also instituting some new classes on technology, how to use different types of technology, how to be familiar with it, how to use your technology. It's a matter of bringing everything together and fitting it into our mission statement very directly. And honestly, if your mission statement doesn't fit what your community really wants, you need a new mission statement. That should be key right there. What does the community want or need? Yes. And then we go right back to let's do a new strategic plan. Oh, somebody did ask it was binge boxes like when you're binging a TV show. Yes. And on this case, you know, you spend a whole weekend watching one series type thing. Yeah. Yes, I'm not going to lie. Hallmark Christmas movies were probably our number one check out ever. Ah, OK. Followed very closely by the Hallmark mystery series and Disney princesses. Those were probably our top ones, but our nonfiction ones did all right to, which I was very happy with. So I guess the question is, are they affordable, right? We talked about donations. There are grants out there and I'm going to go back to our strategic plan. We needed a priority list and we're still working on that. I've been here two months. I'm getting the staff together to find out who would be responsible for things like this and talk to them about creating a priority list of what do you think should be the first things that we do. And it's not necessarily a matter of, well, part of it is part of it is the matter of these are the things that we can get some grant money for in our community. These are the things that we can reach out to companies in our area and get some donations. These are the things that we know that people want to donate to the library. Let's not talk about Xylophones. Also, let's not talk about embroidery hoops. I'll tell you, you ask. People will bring you dozens of embroidery hoops. Thank God for Pinterest. That's all I have to say. But you need a priority list. So you can make this affordable if you know where you're going and make sure that you can definitely tie your priority list back to what your patrons are interested in and what they want to see. And then reuse, renew, recycle. That's what I grew up on. And then I added in upcycling when I started refinishing furniture because that's what the new term is. But make sure that you ask people for donations. A lot of these items are like the cake pants that we were just talking about. They're things that you use once a year, maybe use it once in its lifetime. Somebody probably bought it because they made that Barbie cake for that four year old's birthday and it was the most amazing thing ever. Actually, my best friend's mom made both of us a Barbie cake for her 16th birthday. But let's not talk about that one. It's one of those things that you've got. It's sitting in the basement and you just need to convince people, hey, why don't you share that? I know the garage sales are really, really tempting thing, but library's tax is deductible. You should do that instead. And then there's the how do we do this? How do we? How do we display these things? The picture that I have down here with the lovely lady that has the box. How many times do you think you can loan out a cardboard box before it comes back in? Let's go with less than pristine condition. Needs replacing. Yes. I have two cats. One of my cats's name is Kelmowski. Kelmowski is, you know, that stereotypical gorgeous long haired gray cat. She also has a problem. She loves to chew on paper. Yeah. So little fang holes and then she likes to rip and tear and spit the pieces out all over. Yeah. She also likes cardboard boxes a lot. I may have brought home library things that we had in their original containers. And shortly thereafter, we realized that investing in plastic containers, you can go to big locks. You can go to the dollar store. They have plastic containers that are not super expensive. Granted, they're not the highest quality. But on the other hand, you're going to be trading these things in and out as things check out or they get purged out or different things like that. So if you've got the money to invest in high quality containers, fantastic. If you don't, you'll still have something that's plastic. It's going to last a whole lot longer than your cardboard containers ever would. But it's one of those things that's really easy to forget about. So please don't. Advertising and marketing is another thing that helps people when you're trying to justify whether something is affordable or not for the library. You go through and you look at say your database, you look at how many times people have access to overdrive, right? How many times did they check materials out from you? And that can give you a good idea of the value. You can multiply that out by the average cost. You get an idea of the value that your patrons are gaining from the database that you purchased. Same thing with the library of things. So we need to know how many times these things are checking out. So if you have kettle balls, I think, right? Aren't those the things on the top? Yes. Yeah. And that picture there. Yeah. I may not have used those in a while, but let's go with it. So you've got your kettle balls. You had a nice little introductory one session class on how to use them because you had somebody in the area who knows how to use them at your library. You've got some books out there that you put on advertising and some videos that are all together with your kettle balls that you're displaying. And you put it up on your Facebook. Now the question is how much is it checking out? So when you put together your newsletter or when you put together that poster for the gym, you can tell people that we have these items here. So we know you're just taking introductory class. Why don't you come to the library and check these out? And then when you're making up your final year end report, I don't know how many of you do year end reports for your community, but I found that it's really nice to put together to give your community an idea of how much value they're getting from you, especially if you have a vote coming up. Yes. But even if you don't, making sure that they understand that you're one of the few entities, governmental entities that people can see their money coming back to them. It's not something that's going into wastewater treatment where you don't know how much is being spent where or you don't know how that's coming back to you. They can see exactly how much is coming back to them every time they check things out at the library. And this is another one of those things where you can say, OK, we have 15 items in our library of things. They checked out 123 times this year. The average price if you had gone and bought those things would have been, I don't know, $10 a piece. And we multiply that out that would be what? Over a thousand dollars. That's what I'm going with. Actually, I don't know what numbers I just gave you. I'm sorry. That down. It's a math problem. It's too early for that. It's just an example. It was it was an example. So. You can go with something like that and be able to give people numbers and people understand and love to see numbers. They they love to see the value that they're getting back. Partnering with other organizations is a great way to do outreach and to bring attention to your collection and your library of things together. So like the kettle balls on the top, maybe I've got somebody in the community who's doing one exercise class at the church a week, right? We my libraries back in Michigan. There was a little tiny church that did Wednesday mornings. They did Zumba and Thursday somebody else did a general exercise class. So we partner up with them. We do a one day class to advertise. Well, it advertises them, but it also advertises. Did you know that you can check out these kits on exercising at the library instead of having to buy your own materials? Because maybe it's January 2nd and you have good intentions about exercising all year round. But let's let's be optimistic. You're going to do it, but you want to see that if you like kettle balls and you're going to try them out before you buy them. That's what I'm going. Exactly. Yes. Try it. Yeah. If you're not sure if it's going to work for you, that would be a great cheap way, you know, free way to do that. Yeah. Also really good to advertise on January 1st. So cataloging is another one of those tricky things that's difficult to do. A lot of cataloging software now will let you put in kit or will let you manually enter different things. It depends on your software, how much control over it you have. But make sure that each item that you're cataloging while you're prepping for cataloging. We talked about putting it in bags or boxes. You can see here that they have a wide variety of items that they use to hold their their collection. We have started purchasing things like this. I don't know if you can see my mouse. I'm guessing the clear plastic bag down here. OK. And they are zippered. We can have them imprinted with our logo or information. It's very identifiable, very easy. If you aren't going to purchase something like that, I think they run about four dollars a piece. And I have the link on the notes because this is something that I liked. And I'll probably add links to the other things that we have used in the past. If you don't want to use something like this, that you can have imprinted with your logo and your information, make sure you either have laminated tags that you attached to everything or you have stickers that can go on some of these boxes that you can attach to things. Because it's just so difficult for people to keep track of these item times and it's really difficult for them to remember where they go, which has been really interesting, especially when you're checking out items that are in a suitcase or a bag or something else that just kind of blends in with all of their stuff. Mom gets home with her three or four kids, everybody throws their stuff in a corner. They forget that that backpack is actually library stuff. And then four weeks later, you're calling mom up and saying, hey, do you happen to still have that kit? Because we kind of need it back. Only checked out for a week. May have happened a time or two, but everybody is always really helpful about that. And I don't. I haven't had any kits go missing. I have had parts that were misplaced, but we always got them back, except one of the SNAP circuits. We had to order some new parts for SNAP circuits. But besides that, we've been really lucky. Yeah. And that actually is mentioned that because someone did ask a little earlier and I was just waiting to see if it was going to come up or not. And I think this is just a question in general with anything like you lend out. How do you handle breakage or damage to some of these things? So you have you generally have your policy for replacement, right? So if somebody completely destroys it, you tell them they need to replace it and it will be ax them out. And that's one of those things that I have under legal issues. So I'll just flip forward. Making sure that you have release forms for all of these items and it can be a generic release form that you just write in what the item is and what the amount is that the replacement would be. But making sure that people are aware that these check out, just like if you checked out an e-reader or a book or a DVD, you wreck the case, you wreck the actual item, then you're going to have to pay for the replacement. So get it, get your policies in order before you start doing these things. Yes, and I do have a couple of suggestions on here from different organizations that have done this. But you can find sample policies all over on library of things or lending out unique items or different things like that. It's not very hard to do. The other thing to think about is age restrictions on those release forms. Even if kids are going to use them, making sure that the parents are aware that they are responsible for it, not the children. They are responsible for it. So we had, I mentioned the microwave glass fusing kit. Glass is hot. Glass is dangerous. It's not it's not something to be treated lightly. And we, although we knew kids were going to be using this primarily to make a pendant or a key chain or different things like that because it's a small item, we made sure that only ages 18 and up could check it out. We didn't care who was using it. That was their responsibility. We made sure that they understood that the release forms, but only certain age groups could check it out. Kind of like our, we had a wood carving kit with chisels and different things like that same type of thing. So make sure that you have your barcodes attached, instruction labels, make sure that there are some type of instructions that go with these things. Almost never are kits self-explanatory. So I brought up snap circuits a minute ago. Snap circuits, if anybody has used them before, you can attest to this. They are the easiest way to see how electricity works I have ever seen. Just so user friendly, they are fabulous. But the idea is literally you have these pieces and they are snaps on either end and you snap them together. And you you see the path of electricity. You can turn it off and on. You have fans. You have different gadgets that light up all sorts of different things that happen. But you have problems with people understanding how this actually works. You mean if I touch this, I'm going to get zapped? Yes, you attached a battery. You are going to get zapped if you touch this. So making sure that they have an instruction manual and and things like that is kind of nice for them have an idea of possible combinations. So giving them some instructions to follow, like if you attach this, this and this, this will happen. Give them a miniature lesson plan. Also give them the warnings. All of these things that you're going to pick up are going to have some type of warning. Maybe it's not intended for children under three. Maybe it's a this glass is 400 degrees. Please don't touch it until it cools off. It could be anything in between those two. But make sure that each one of your kids has the warning information for what's in there on the kids. Software systems for cataloging. I know that we were using Sierra and Millennium back in Michigan and that was very user friendly for adding kits. We are on Searcy Dynex here where I am at North Riverside and we have kits in there. We're working on how to. So each time you catalog something that's called kit, you can add in what's in that kit. And same thing in Sierra. We our goal is to make sure that that is as detailed as possible. So we have our fly time kit. We threw in a book on fly time. Here's the title of author. We also have the fly time kit has nine pieces that are in it. Here are all of those pieces and it comes in a wooden box. So our staff know when they're checking it in that yes, it's going to be in a wooden box. It's going to have nine pieces. It's going to have a book with it and it's going to have its carrying case or box or whatever we happen to put it in that case. It was a little clear carrying case like this one. If your software system won't let you do it, you can go old school and you can do check out cards or you can do things like Excel. My library here had some fun. Our friends group had a lot of the old library cards that people would just write their names on and we would keep them and it was it was fun. I don't know exactly what they're using that for. I just know that I pulled out a bunch of those for their book sale last week. It was it was interesting. OK, so I talked about the warnings on containers. Copyright infringement is also an issue, especially with things like C libraries that has been going around. If you're using heirloom seeds, you should be fine. If not, you have to be slightly careful. Because of copyright infringement coming up. Photo release forms are not a bad thing to have if you are planning on making sure that people are going to be photographed with your items. And actually, I am pretty much out of town from what I'm seeing. So no, that's OK. If you have any questions, please let me know. You've got my email there. You've got my phone number. You can get a hold of me any time you want anyway. All right, sure. All right. Thank you very much, Natalie. Oh, and I see you have a new name there, new last name. That's what's going to be. That's what's going to be in May. So I figured I would put it on here to begin with. Start working on getting that out there. Yeah. Yeah. I went through that. When you get married, yeah, it's a thing. It's not easy. I am only hyphenating for work. I am actually taking his name, but I figured I'd hyphenate for work for a couple of years so people got used to it. Absolutely. All right. All right. So thank you very much, Natalie. Anyone does have any questions? We do still have some time here. It's only 10 55 a.m. Central Time by my clock. So if you have any comments or questions for Natalie, type them in or any thoughts on things that you're doing, as she had asked earlier. Someone did ask, I think you said you're going to have this in the notes where you bought the personalized clear bags from. I think you said you were going to have a link to that. It's coming from for imprint, actually. OK. That's where those are coming from. But you can find them from other vendors. That's not a problem for imprint is the name of the company they use. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Let me see. Yeah, there. Yep. So you can. They are really nice company to work with because they will let you order a free sample and they will send it out to you for free. So you can actually see the quality and decide if you like it or not. It's not going to work for your purposes and everything too. Yeah. Which is really nice. Yeah. I think being able to see, you know, you can guess, well, it says the dimensions are this and this is how much we need. We want to put in one of these. Let's hope it works when it gets here. Well, the other problem we were having is, OK, we want to do this. But where are we going to store them and how are we going to store them? Yeah. This gave us a chance to see them and actually try to put them in our holders that we're looking at or see where we want to hook them. I also have two additional slides after this that have lots of answers that I got. Oh, well, you said you had asked online for what people were. Yes, from there from that. OK. The WIG library I thought was fabulous. Oh, yeah. Rock Island Public Library was actually right next to us at River Valley when I was over on the Mississippi River. And we all did cultural passes to museums and botanical gardens, art museum, Children's Museum. Where else did we have? I think we had somebody else too. And those went out like hotcakes. I think here in Nebraska, I've seen libraries doing things like tickets to the local baseball games or hockey teams, hockey, you know, not well, I suppose you could do, you know, NHL and, you know, national professional teams, too. But for like, you know, the AAA baseball, you know, tickets, you know, from the library and a discount or cheap. A lot of times if you contact those organizations, they I know in Michigan, we went with the White Caps, the West Michigan White Caps would give us a whole stack of free tickets for our summer reading program that we can get. Right, right at the end, yeah. All right. Well, it doesn't look like anybody has typed in any desperate questions right now. So these slides you have are on your, oh, I see you got on your Google Docs. OK, they are and I will send them over to you. I'm sorry, I jumped through a whole bunch of stuff there for everybody. But really, if you've got any questions, just send them on over. No problem. Yeah, send me the link. And when the recording goes up, as I said, the link to this will be included and also those notes that you see that she's been looking at will have those other URLs to other resources and things that are available for you. All right. So I'm going to pull back presenter control to my screen now to wrap up for today. So thank you very much, Natalie. This is great. I was glad to see all the great ideas. I know this has been a more common thing happening in libraries, definitely doing these sharing lending out anything, you know, whatever people come in and ask for what that you come up with. Or as you said, if you get a donation of xylophones, figure, let's lend them out and see what happens. You know, it's just been fascinating. In Michigan, I started doing these about four or five years ago. And both of the libraries that I've worked at here in Illinois, neither of them have done this at all. It's interesting because some of the libraries yet someplace is like, well, of course, we've been lending cake pans for 40 years and other completely unaware that this is a thing. Yeah. But it's getting out. Yeah. And some people are thinking of different things as different like the human library or the, you know, passes to the zoo or the baseball games or whatever. It's all that's all things that are just not the traditional that people think of libraries about that. We can be a resource for. All right. So thank you, Natalie. Thank you, everyone, for attending this morning. The show has been recorded, as I said, and if we go to our Encompass Live website here, if you just Google or use your search engine of choice, Encompass Live is the only thing that comes up called this so far, our fingers, and you'll get our website. We can see our upcoming shows, but our archives are right here underneath. There's a link to the archives and today's show will be at the top of the page here and we will have a link. Let's see what we had last week. Yeah. Just like this one was last week's show, link the recording and a link to the presentation on Natalie's Google Docs will be here. So you can watch that should be available sometime later this afternoon, as long as YouTube cooperates with me in the processing and uploading of the recording and everyone who attended this morning and registered for today's show will receive an email letting you know when it is ready. I'll also be posted out to our social media and mailing lists. While I'm here, these are archives, as I said, the beginning show and cover slide premiered in January 2009. So this page does have our archives going back all the way to the beginning. I'm going to scroll down here. If you get a little, if this will make you get vertical, close your eyes. So you can get all of our archives going back to the very beginning if you wanted to. We do have everything here, everything's on our YouTube channel. Recordings are there, links to slides, handouts, websites are here. Do be aware that when you are looking at some of these older shows, some things may be old and expired. Some of the information may be outdated, of course, because it's been 10 years. Some of the links to certain websites may not work. We don't have the always keep up on all of those. We try to if we find out. So keep that in mind when you're going back. Everything is dated though. So you can see when it was actually originally broadcast and know that was from that time frame. Things are different now, but for historical purposes, it's all still here. I'm going to scroll to the top again now. So we do keep them all there, even though they are old. We are librarians, so we archive everything. And this is just another one of those things. You can also search here if you want to do a search on the any any any words that are in the title, the description, the presenter's name. You can search the entire 10 years of it, or you can search the most recent 12 months if you're just looking for something we did very recently, the most recent years worth. So that is our archives. And Encompass Live is also on Facebook. If you click on our Facebook link here or from any of our pages, you get to our Facebook page where we do post when our shows are starting up reminders. Here's a reminder to log in for this morning's show on the fly when the recordings are available. We post them on here. So here's a recording notice from last week. So if you are big on user on Facebook, give us a like to keep up with what we're doing over there. And I hope you join us next week when our topic is introducing the Nebraska Authors Database. This is a resource that has been available for a while, but now it has become an online database, Nebraska Authors.org put together by our Lincoln City Libraries. And Aaron Willis from Lincoln City Libraries will be here next week to talk about this. This is a database of biographical information, everything about authors from Nebraska. So sign up for that one if you're interested in hearing about the new database. It actually goes live on Sunday. Yeah, the 22nd. I'll just check my calendar and then we'll have the show a couple of days later. The URL is available right now, but it's not officially launching until Sunday, the 22nd. So I'll hope you join us for that show in our future ones. Other than that, that wraps up for this morning. Thank you very much, everyone, for attending. And we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye.