 All right. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, a webcast, an online show. The terminology is up for debate, but whatever we are, you can call us whatever you want. We're here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. If you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that is fine. We record our shows every week as well, and so you can go back and watch our shows on our website that I'll show you at the end of the show and see all of our archives going back to the very beginning when we started in 2009. Both the live show and the recording recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends and colleagues and let them know what kind of shows we have going on here. We do a mixture of things here, book reviews, many training sessions, interviews, standard presentations. Basically, our only criteria is something, it has to be library related. Other than that, you know, we're pretty open to anything. We do sometimes have guest speakers come in and sometimes we have Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations, and that's what we're doing here this morning. We have our from the basement to the West Wing, the Talking Book and Braille Services New Space. We had some major changes happen. There's a lot of history behind why this had to happen that I'm sure we'll get into. And our Talking Book and Braille Service made some big moves last year across the hall from where we are right now, but very close. So I'm just going to hand over to you guys, you can introduce yourselves and tell us what happened and where you guys are now and how things are going with it. Thank you, Krista. Yeah, and good morning. We've been trying to keep the Nebraska Libraries posted as changes developed in the Talking Book and Braille Service. You might remember that we moved to the Digital Players. This is through Library of Congress about what, six, seven years ago, and this is what the new player looks like, and it is compatible with this book. This is a mailer for a book on cartridge. Do you want to introduce you guys first? Yes, I will. Cartridge looks like this, and from that the Library of Congress developed BARD, which is online reference service or online download sites. People can download their own books and magazines. And just under 10% of Nebraska Talking Book borrowers use BARD in addition to service through the mail from us. And from that they added two apps both for BARD. One is the Android app and one is the iOS app. And so that is how the Library of Congress is keeping pace with technology. I'm going to tell you some changes in Talking Book and Braille Service, and before we go further, I want to introduce the panel this morning versus Brad Muran's long-standing volunteer. He's one of our narrators. He was here of at least 12 years and was present when we moved the studios from analog to digital recording, and was here when we moved from the lower level to the West Wing on the first floor. So Brad is a valuable asset. We're glad that you're here. Glad to be here. And Gabe Kramer is here. He's studio manager and moving the studios. That is not moving them, but obtaining sound booths suitable for the new space was a very important consideration. And Gabe was a key player in that process. I'm glad you're here. Thank you. And Scott is here. Scott Schultz is a coordinator of audio production and circulation. He's a hero of the move. He shouldered much of the heavy work that was ongoing for a good, hard, heavy year. And we survived it, and obviously we'll be grateful to Scott. And I'm Dave Orgley, and I do talking book and Braille service. And Scott, why don't you talk about the slideshow to get things started? Yeah, I put together a little slideshow to kind of go over a bit of the narrative of what it was like to transition from the basement to the new location that we're in. And I kind of tried to put this from a more general perspective that any librarians out there who may be considering a move just due to, you know, whatever conditions come up needing to go to a larger building, needing to downsize, having damage in a building that requires a quick move. Hopefully some of these tips can help for, you know, any of those sorts of situations as well. So I guess we'll go ahead and jump into the power point here. Okay, can I just use the arrows? Okay, so the space that we just left was in the lower level of the atrium building here at the library commission. The commission is basically occupied a portion, I guess about half of the lower level of the atrium building and a large chunk of the first and second port as well, all of this immediately above one another. And we've occupied that for about 20 years. I moved into this building in, was it 1994, Dave? It's 1994, that's right. Yeah, and so the studios and all the circulation stacks were sort of designed and organized about 20 years ago. So Dave still had some experience from the previous move that was very useful as well for figuring out what to do in our current situation. In the lower level space, we had most of the talking books collection, the stacks are organized down there. We had a fairly large tape duplication area where we would make copies of all the books on cassette because they were on cassette from the 70s up until about 2010. The recording studios, there were two recording studios constituting a total of four rooms down there, two narrator spaces and two producer spaces. There was a fairly large meeting room down there called the crane room that some of you may have visited. There was a computer training room called the Heron room. There was a small break room with enough space for a couple people to sit before joy or saying that sort of thing and quite a few different little storage areas down there as well. So we were occupying quite a bit of space down there and after years and years of just different problems mostly related to being in a basement. I mean anytime you're in it's a nature basement, right? You always have some water intrusion problems. They became sort of difficult to fix. It is sort of an aging building that we're in and those low-grade problems are the most difficult ones to tackle. So we were kind of keeping an eye out for potential alternative spaces to move those things to get away from those problems and an alternative space became available on the first floor of our building. I guess it was about three years ago. There was a firm called Firespring that was in our building for quite a few years and their business has continued to expand and they moved out to the south edge of Lincoln at this point and there are space set vacant for well for about a year before we started begging to get into it. Yeah, at that point we decided to sort of look into it and see what could be done. So some considerations that we had in looking at this new space. First of all, was the space going to be large enough for both the circulation stacks and all the different types of rooms that we would need to put in there? Another question is if you're putting yourself in a good location for building recording studios, the booths themselves typically need to be placed in some kind of location that's fairly protected from outside noise. Obviously you build rooms that are as soundproof as possible in and of themselves. But that said, if you're building a soundproof room and putting it next to a highway, you're still going to have some problems potentially. There's just so much outside sound. Buildings themselves have a lot of sounds that you have to think about for that. For example, furnaces in the winter time, often times when they start up, that it's an old building and has sort of a rickety system that has really loud sound transmission going through the pipes when the furnace starts up in the morning. Those kinds of sounds can end up in your recordings. So there are a lot of little things to think about. So not only do you need to look at where you're located within the building, but you almost need to kind of hang out in a potential space for a while and just stand there and listen basically to make sure that unexpected sounds don't come through that space every once in a while because you could have the misfortune of visiting the space during a quiet moment. And then when you walk out the door or some crazy loud thing happens, it's actually quite cyclical and you just didn't have to be there for that chunk of the cycle. We're right on a bus route and so most of the city bus is correct as they're from the way. This is one reason that you often do see recording studios built into basements because it does give you quite a bit of protection from sounds coming from outside of the building in, smaller windows or no windows at all. Also, you'll sometimes see studios built at the upper portions of a large building, upper floors or the top floor because they're again, they're sort of protected from traffic sounds. In our case, the upper floors of the building, of course, are so occupied and the first floor has worked out quite well at the moment. We're sort of protected from the rest of the sounds in the space or kind of protected architecturally, which we'll see in a moment. And from the outside of the building, we're quite a ways away from the windows and there's another sort of vacant office space now between the front of the building and where we're located with a hallway in the center. So that should protect us even if that area should become occupied in the future. Another consideration are what improvements can be made to improve the quality and efficiency of the work that you're already doing. If you're looking at a new space, it may be time to sort of think about things ergonomically. Are there anything that's missing or how could you locate things to create a more efficient workflow. An obvious component of that for our move was being on the first floor puts us very close to where the mail comes in. In the past, all of our mail comes into the back of the building on the first floor and had to be transported to the basement on a freight elevator, which takes a while and occasionally if the freight elevator isn't working it gives you some problems without you can get things to the lower level. So it's nice to all be on one level now. And it's actually not very far from where the mail is because we're oriented closer to the alley of the building than the front of the building at this point for where the mail comes out. So it's actually not terribly far away. And then one more thing is to start thinking about long-range considerations for your facility. If you're planning on continuing to expand your collection at a relatively predictable rate, you can start thinking in terms of when your feet are shelving. If you're going to have the space for that, how you're going to accommodate it, what sorts of weeding plans that you might need to put in place to balance out acquisitions. In our case, the National Library Service provides the majority of the books that we circulate on a fairly predictable number per year, although that number has increased in last year. So you can kind of do some estimates on what space you need and then how you're going to compress shelving or shift things around over time to sort of plan for how that's going to go. So let's go ahead and jump into... This is a little bit of what our lower level space looked like. I've got some better PDFs coming up for some of the newer stuff, but unfortunately I didn't have a PDF of the old space because it's old. Don't need that anymore. Right. So in this illustration, the long little segmented pieces that you see are the shelving units that were in the lower level space. The highlighted ones have moved upstairs with us, and the ones that are not highlighted are still, while they were in the basement up until about a week ago, and they were probably just renewed. There's still stuff down there. We're going to see a totally vacant photo here. Yeah, it's taken a while to get everything moved out, but yeah, finally that sort of thing is done. So you didn't need those extra shelves then when you guys moved over there, or are we still keeping them? Need is a relative concern. We tried to retain as much as we could fit, basically. We did have some issues with how much will fit in the new space because it is considerably smaller. I think one of the slides coming up kind of has the exact numbers. And the exact collection went away. We expedited that with permission, so that was very helpful. Yeah, we're in an interesting transitional period in terms of media formats that we use in switching to the digital. Well, there are two aspects of it. One is the physical cartridges themselves. The digital cartridges take up a little bit less space on shelves. So we're able to theoretically get more per shelf if it came down to it. There are a variety of strategies we could use to shelve things sideways if it came to that. In the future, we can look at how we could reorganize things on shelves if we run out of room. With the cassette collection disappearing, that gave us a lot more room to work with as well. And some of that long-term planning that I was talking about a moment ago kind of comes into play here, too, where I anticipate that over time we're probably going to see more people using BARD, using the download site and mobile devices to access our collection and probably less people using physical books. So there's a certain calculated risk there, but if you're looking 20 years out or something like that, one could start to assume that we would have less reliance on circulating physical objects and more circulation happening through the internet. Who knows? With this machine, there's been speculation that maybe someday there'll be ways to push and pull books to a physical machine, kind of akin to the way that a Kindle works. It's hard to say, but there are all sorts of technology expectations that we could anticipate some of those things influencing how much physical space we need. Other areas of this, the circulation area for where our incoming mail came in is sort of the top of the illustration, some sort of shelving there. And the duplication area was up there kind of just to the right of that yellow highlighted space there. Oh, yeah. They can see all that. Yeah, so our circulation area is where Gabe is there. And then just to the right of that is tape duplication. It was an alcove. A consideration that I have here is that as we've transitioned to digital recording, we can do a lot more post-production with things and something that I've thought about for the last decade that I've been here is the fact that that area is located right next to where we sort the books as they come in, which is kind of a noisy process. So I wanted to try to find a way to sort of sonically isolate the duplication stuff because duplication now is a lot of post-production work as well. And that is best known in a quiet space. So that's something that we look into and we'll see how we were able to address that in some slides coming up. From there, we have a bunch of circulation shelves heading down a hallway over to where the recording studios are located. And Gabe's kind of tracking down there. And then that area there is the recording studios that we had in the lower level. They're still down there if anyone's looking for a second. The bones of everything is still there. Those recording studios were built up on a ramp area. So they're sort of isolated from the floor of the basements. And then past that, we have more shelving. And that area actually goes a little bit under the side lock. That's a vaulted area that extends beyond the outside confines of the east wall of the building. Yeah, the end of the building is roughly right here. Right. Yeah. So that's kind of where we were starting with. Oh, the meeting rooms and stuff too, I guess I'm correct to mention. The meeting rooms are all these things down for the bottom here. We've got the storage area, the Heron Room and the Crane Room. And those are quite large spaces too. So we had to think about how we were using those. And that's yet another long-range consideration issue. We had to think about how various different parts of the Library Commission were using those spaces as things transition gradually to more webinar-based things too. We oftentimes don't have meetings that end up using like the whole Crane Room, which is a fairly large space. So we're able to get away with a somewhat smaller space that's thoughtfully designed to still address a lot of those sorts of issues. So let's move on to the next slide here. This is a raw illustration of the space that we moved into. I guess there's a date up for the top of there from winter of 2013. This was taken after we got access to go explore the new space a little bit more thoroughly and take a tape measure with us to get some real numbers on how this would work. And you really do need to think about that. For a move like this, we weren't looking at doing a full tear down and rebuild. We were going to try to retain as much as possible of the currently existing spaces that are already in there, only removing what we absolutely had to remove. So after taking all these measurements, it was mostly a matter of figuring out what walls definitely did need to come down and then what we could repurpose from there. We ultimately didn't end up building any new spaces into the area other than the recording booths themselves, which we'll address that in a moment. But for the most part, we were talking about spaces that would kind of have to be removed here. So like in this illustration on the west side, there's a wall that had to come out right over there so that area can be used for shelving more efficiently. And the wall was non-structural. Yeah, we didn't remove any structural walls. That was a good consideration. There's a really beautiful curved wall right in the center of the space, which unfortunately did have to go out. It was a really pretty feature, but really bad use of space, especially when you have shelving coming in. It just wouldn't work. Also, there were ultimately three offices in the center. Only one of those we decided to retain. And we opened up the other two. Yeah, that one's still there. And then the ones just to the north of that are gone. All the stuff on the south side of the space had to be removed there again. It was kind of bittersweet. The very first office toward the southeast corner is a really beautiful space. It had all glass and it looked really striking. But again, unfortunately, it was just an early bad location for strategically where we needed to move things. Unfortunately, other things we were able to retain along the east wall. All of those offices are now in use by circulation and studio staff. And the northernmost space there is that one there. We're able to use for some storage. We also were able to keep a training room. The fire spring folks had a server room basically back right where our game was bouncing there. We would see that one there. And then they had a small kitchen behind that. With that space, what we were able to do was just move a non-structural wall that's between those two spaces to open that up to create another training room there. So at this point, I was kind of doing things more or less by hand because this was all still quite preliminary at this point. And after taking all these measurements, we could do some more realistic calculations. So in the basement, we had almost 13,000 square feet. The total square footage in this new area is almost 8,000 square feet. So we went down by about 5,000 square feet. Pretty substantial. Shelving similarly, we had about 1,700 one-year feet of shelving in the basement. Once we calculated what we could accommodate in the new space, it worked out to be a little under 1,000 one-year feet. That actually, as we were in the process of installing things, we were able to pick up a little bit more. I think we're a little over maybe... Yeah, it's six double units. Yeah, so we might be a little over 1,000. Yeah, I think a little over 1,000 now. So we continued to do some careful measurements. And so this illustration is a transitional design as part of the process. At this point, I had taken the measurements and there's a color-coded narrative that kind of goes with this page, but I didn't include that because it's more just internal details of basically how to use the rooms and what to do with them. So some of the things we just talked about, you can sort of see the red X's here, removing certain dom structure walls. The color coding is basically in reference to various different parts of the process where we would locate people. A few other things, maybe noteworthy there. I'll drag this down here. There are some doors leading to another space that we're not occupying that are down on the south side, both on the west, and then again here on the east. Those needed to be sealed up, so there's some references to having those spaces sealed up. Let's see, we had... Yeah, in this case, mostly it's just issues of deciding what are different portions of our operations would be best located. I don't know how well you can see these, but there's some subtle dotted lines on the west east, throughout the whole space. Those are just sort of preliminary marks where I thought shelving would be located. The windows, there's some very large open windows on the west side of the whole space, and as we were planning, we were kind of deciding whether we wanted shelving to run north-south or west-east. One of the reasons we went with west-east is to allow a lot more natural light into the space. Studio staff having been in the basement for 20 years... We were having some sunlight, light on deficiency. We have full-length windows as per an old department store, because that's what this was. Yeah. Yeah, so that helped a lot. Having some nice lighting brought into the space, which frankly just makes it easier to see the books sometimes too. It's very difficult to mount lighting to deal with circulation staffs because they're fairly close together, and they're quite tall. It's kind of difficult to see when you're pulling books in the morning or shelving books in the afternoon, and now the whole area is much more evenly lit, so that ended up being really good. Another aspect of that, in this illustration, this area down along the south in the center of the space is destined to become a recording studio location, and the nice part about locating them here is we were able to keep them somewhat away from the circulation staffs. The most active staffs tend to be outside, and they're also somewhat protected by the center office that still remains, and this also creates a nice situation where the meeting room is for the north side of the area while the studios are on the south, so that if people are having a meeting that gets a little uproarious or something, I guess, they don't tend to get too crazy, but if there is some volume coming from this area, it won't interfere with the studio operations, which is great too. If people can come in, they aren't walking past the studios. That's right. I snuck in that way too. I should mention, where I've got the cursor here, there is a door right here from the hallway, and this actually tracks very nicely back to where the mail is located too. If I call the cursor here, the mail goes across the hallway here, and it's basically back over in this corner. That ends up working out quite well for mail delivery stuff as well. At this point, we've got kind of a loose idea of what we need to do, and then we need to start working with a designer that's going to be able to formally implement the plan. We took our initial designs and ended up working with an architectural firm called Innerspace here in town. They kind of came up with a process that works more or less in three parts. You have a detailed demolition plan, then a detailed construction plan, and then the third element, they at least help with some logistics, but then you need to contact a mover to make the final aspects of getting things relocated. They help us develop a remodeling narrative that had two primary illustrations that go with it, the first one being this demolition plan. It's difficult to see at this resolution where the dotted lines are, but a lot of those spots that we were talking about removing are dotted lines in the illustration, which indicate that they are to be removed. The narrative itself, as a text, there are additional things like removing, I didn't mention this, there is a shower in this space where I have the cursor now. We decided that we could take care of that before work at home, so we had the shower removed. We have a really cool repurposing of that area too since it has access to plumbing fixtures. So they're removing the shower. They're also going to remove all of the carpets and some different types of cabinetry throughout other areas of the space. So all of those things. This is a really nice shelf that ran right here. There were some other pretty things. We had the beautiful curved wall, we had the beautiful glass office, and as Gabe was saying, there was this beautiful built-in shell wing in kind of an L-shaped. That was really pretty, but it wasn't going to work. I believe it was recycled. That's what I hear. So that aspect was kind of interesting. So then we move on to the construction plan. So this is pretty close to what we ended up actually following ultimately. In this case, you see just one office here in the middle instead of the three. These offices structurally remain the same. You see a major wall removed here creating a larger training room space, which is pretty decent size. The circulation area has moved over here. There are restrooms over here, which of course are in the same place. The shower that was over here is now sort of a little kitchenette area. Not really large enough for anyone to sit in, but certainly offering to use a sink and some cabinets to make food. There's a microwave back there, that sort of thing. There is a refrigerator as well that's kind of back in a little corner over here. So that's close access to the training room folks, too, if they would need to have any goodies there for a training, then that's fairly close access for that area. There was one wall going through the center of this office back here. Again, that being non-structurally removed that to make a larger area. And this is where the duplication equipment and post-production equipment is now sort of completely walled off with the door. So it is quite a bit more acoustically isolated than it was as just a wide open space in the lower level. The shelving here, again, we can see is going east-west. And the studios are these six rooms down here now. I'll talk in a moment about why there are six rather than the four from before. This door remains open over here as an egress door mostly just for fire exits, things like that. The door that was over here is now sealed. The main entrance remains the same and there's another door over here. So this is the basic layout that we began to work with. And then you start talking in details. Basically all the different infrastructure systems which you don't think about every day just how complicated that stuff is, but we just have page after page and final architectural drawings specifying what to do for all these types of things. So with data, as you're making a move like this you can consider updating what types of data you're using. We were considering updating to CAT5 and we do of course still need to use landlines so we had to verify that we had telephone wire and everywhere. In our case we did end up having to add quite a bit of pretty much all new data wiring everywhere and several phone lines as well. Then we had electrical issues our duplication area as well as the studios do use quite a bit of electricity so we did need to make sure those were stable and we had ample outlets to access those areas. Heating and cooling needs were interesting. Obviously you want the whole space to have consistent heating and cooling but here again this becomes a particularly tricky issue with recording studios because a lot of heating and cooling systems do create noise. In normal day to day circumstances one can tune out the noise fairly easily but microphones don't have as much luck tuning it out. So we need to figure out ways to have the heating and cooling still work and have ample airflow but also be as silent as possible with that and some subsequent slides. The intercom system, we have an intercom that is in the lower level so people can be paged back to offices or certain areas of anywhere in the commission basically that is needed. So we needed to figure out how to move that system upstairs. Some plumbing issues to consider for remodeling in our case it was mostly just a matter of putting in a sink in the area where we removed the shower. Fire alarms again were kind of interesting because we had to figure out what to do with the studios and relatively sound proof. You can't hear as well inside them so we had some special strobe whites installed on the inside of the studios which do work quite well. They're actually pretty winding actually I was surprised at just how bright they are. And then finishes we had to get new paint and new carpet for the space. We were given some samples to work with on that. In the meeting room as well we made sure to have some walls done with a very white colored paint that could be used for protecting things on walls. We ended up doing two of those so we've got some flexibility with moving that room around if we need to lay it out differently and sort of had all those things to implement. So the actual move itself they started basically with obviously the demo and then followed that with doing the paint and carpet before we started moving things in. So moving on to the recording studios for a moment. Studios do sort of become a project within a project because they have some kind of unusual structural considerations. Really nice acoustically sealed places I guess to describe in lay person's terms you're basically trying to build a room within a room you try to build a space that absorbs sound on the inside and then is also somewhat decoupled from its surrounding so that it doesn't take outside sounds in. So structurally there was some architectural considerations both physically building them as well as where to locate them and how to decouple them from the surrounding area. Then in terms of technical stuff digital recording which we've been doing for well the whole last decade since I've been here. As we've been here that means that we've been doing a lot more post-production reviewing of things now that we're doing the digital books there's a level of doing navigation markup that patrons can use to skip around in various different elements of the Booker Magazine and I thought that we really need some kind of new workspaces to do that stuff because there's much much more work being focused in those areas as time goes on and to try to do it in the open air is really it's kind of difficult so it's nice to have some spaces where you can actually hear what you're doing and really focus on it and again over time I think because digital recording makes everything quite asynchronous in terms of the production process being able to take those things out of the studio into a place where you can sort of focus on quality and quantity issues is really nice to be able to do. So in our case we looked at what it would cost to have an architect come in and physically build something to have it designed in a contractor to build it and we also looked at a variety of different companies offering modular booth designs our spaces are larger than the typical recording booth that you would see which is sort of a phone booth size object but of course they can build them to whatever size specifications you need that ended up looking like probably our best bet for balancing quality getting to the types of noise reduction levels we were hoping for balanced with cost because you can easily run into high six figures by having something designed and built just for you which as part of this move wasn't really something we could do wasn't easy enough I don't know if the move really would have happened if we wanted to build something really intensely expensive so but we were able to make that work my preliminary design for the recording studios in the six spaces is here showing six rooms four of them are still going to be used as two studios you have an aerator room and a producer room in pairs for each of those in this particular illustration this area here is a pair and this area here is a pair that box in the center indicating where windows would be to communicate between those rooms and these two would be standalone once we actually got into the space you can see that the final layout is a little bit different here we end up having pairs of rooms that are on the outside here and the outside here with the standalone rooms in the center largely this was done because this is a giant structural pillar right here as well as on either side of the area and you really can't do much to get around that so we ended up sort of changing the way we did that in this move also the move was done as essentially an in kind process with the owners of our building and so adding those two additional rooms we tried to negotiate those in to no avail so we ended up having to go through a bidding process to pay for these middle two rooms well not really to pay for them but to have them built because the dollar figure had to go through the state bidding process to verify that that they were obtained correctly so we found a company to work with our building owners to install their four rooms so we recommended in our bidding process that we go with a company that could provide the same brand so that everything would be the same because again you wouldn't really want to have two different companies products in the same location if you didn't have to all install at the same time because one of my big goals was just trying to make all these rooms sound exactly the same so as you go from room to room everything is completely translatable so when we're talking about different sound issues in the studios we're all on the same page no matter where we're sitting so that helps quite a bit so the actual demolition went through a good chunk of 2014 they went all the way down to removing some tile that was underneath the carpet and getting the whole floor re-leveled and ready to go they removed the walls that we requested including the set of offices where the recording booths went they got the shower out of there and got the wall out of the old room and kitchen thing to make a better training room area and then the recording booths arrived here we've got a few photos of the construction there they were truly an astonishing amount of equipment that entire trailer is completely full the the lading bill that day just blew my mind I mean the weight of those studios was like more than a car we knew that the truck was coming is it here yet, is it here yet they there it is we had a week before Thanksgiving last fall guess what we looked out that it wasn't slick that day but it could have been pretty scary with this company the company went with this called Vocalbooth.com the Vocalbooth.com people send a technician now to oversee the building of the booths and then they hire local people to actually do the construction work so the area that's prepared for them now you can see the HVAC stuff sticking out of the ceiling there are also outlets which you can't really see there but these things are essentially standalone and you run wiring to the booth and then wire the booth from outside wiring so that's an area where three booths are going to go there's basically two banks like that and here's some of the work in progress they're laying down the floors kind of a note here which I thought might be interesting for people who aren't familiar with this stuff this is sort of what the inside of a wall looks like so you can see what happens to stop sound transmission is it'll hit these outside walls and then little pockets of air like over here, over here, over here are really what help to stop sound transmission. Sound hits things is somewhat absorbed and somewhat reflected as it hits a solid object and then some of it passes through the air hitting another object and then hitting another object and each time you hit those air pockets solid object transitions is where you really start to absorb a lot of sound different types of materials absorb different frequency ranges better as well so that's why you see a mixture of materials so basically they get them laid out on the floor they get the doors installed the trickiest part ultimately is connecting them to those HVAC systems up above just as that's wrapping up we had movers here in the Lincoln and Omaha area on Renssel was a fairly well known library mover they came in to coordinate moving all of our book materials and office materials from the lower level to the first level in this particular shot I think the studios were just being wrapped up when they started moving the actual physical shelving upstairs and then they code the books very carefully so they can get everything relocated on the proper shelves upstairs which they did a wonderful job but we really didn't have any problems at all that aspect went quite well we do have some new studio technology because we were moving upstairs and we hadn't updated the computers in the basement for I think six or seven years the materials that we were using to report in the basement were basically completely out of date we were using an audio interface that requires going through a serial port which a lot of newer computers don't even have most things have moved toward USB power at this point or you know, lighting bolt or fire wire that sort of thing in our case we went with a USB audio interface the lower right here this is an audience product called the ID22 and we tried several different things I had some companies send out sample things to test ultimately this thing worked the best for our types of needs both in terms of inputs for recording and the ability to route sound back out into the narrator's room so they can hear what's going on as well similarly we'd been using kind of a hodgepodge of speakers to do recording and I wanted us to have these aren't exactly the world's fanciest speakers but they're pretty solid and they're quite consistent these are a JBL product and there are copies or pairs of these in both the studios as well as the multi-purpose rooms where we're doing post-production and editing and reviewing and there's also a pair of them over in the duplication area for the post-production that happens over there as well so again if we're ever talking about say a particular narrator has a sibilance issue like a high-pitched upper-mid-s sound that's coming through too loudly when we're discussing that we know we're all hearing the same thing because it's coming through the same sorts of speakers whereas in the past some people's speakers would like really bump those upper mids whereas others would have them fairly controlled and we'd be like I don't know what you're talking about everything sounds fine so this way we've got a pretty clear indication without having to go in and do like frequency analysis moment to moment which I do a lot of that anyway just sort of looking at files for trends or certain things that we could work with but it gives us a little bit of help with that we stuck with the microphones that we were using were fine we retained basically as much equipment as possible I definitely didn't just want to buy new things just for the sake of buying new things but with the audio interfaces that was pretty important because we really were it was down to the point where it was almost impossible to make any changes whatsoever to the system so this should buy us some flexibility for a few years these things they're essentially computers nowadays and so unlike real real machines where you could maybe use the chain machine for 20, 30 years and just relap the heads every once in a while these things are somewhat made to be replaced every few years so that's the world we live in so and it sounds good so there's that so here's a quick tour of what the space itself looks like in this photo we're seeing on the right side the library commission front doors which are the main doors that have been there since 1994 the next slide here is essentially just going to look over to the west from here this is the other side of the escalators and it's hard to photograph out here because there is so much light coming in from the central area of our building but this area is the new area so you can see those front doors a little bit better here and so I'll do a really quick tour of this stuff and then we can sort of talk about the studio experience itself when volunteers come in the front door to do an aeration they can stop at this desk and check in they tell us what project they're working on and how long they're working on it and folks that are working on books have books sort of in this little cubicle system here that they can check with and in case we can't find a word on the internet there's this nice old on the bridge dictionary over here that sometimes comes in handy looking up various anthraxiosities so it went the wrong way there so the studios here are on the left and you can see some of the circulation stacks from the illustration we saw earlier the stack right here was able to come out quite a bit closer to the studios than we had guessed so we did gain someone near feet of shelving there that would definitely come in handy the offices that were in that space on the east wall do remain there and we were able to use those quite nicely the mail processing area this is essentially where a couple of those offices in the center of the space were removed to make room for this giant circulation table that runs north-south and then the outgoing mail is sorted into these bags over here, circulation table being back here the new training room is called the cardinal room and this is a shot from the front door looking to the north in this area basically we had to remove a wall that was somewhere over in this area separating two rooms in the original space and it's worked out pretty well so far I think it's a nice space we did get some new countertops and then some new fronts to cabinets that were sort of old and worn out I think a new sink fixture things like that in this space and we got some new tables with awful design it made more sense to order some different sized tables that would orient better in the space and these tables are also wired so that people can plug their laptops directly in which is a really nice feature as well that's room is nice that's as needed that's what if anyone's been here and done training we had the Heron room downstairs from here which had 12 desktops permanently set up in there now we have this room that we can either have it be that way where it's just for having meetings or we bring in a bank of laptops plug it in and boom you have your computer lab I saw the computer team has that nice there's a wrap now to bring the computers I haven't had to do it it was very efficient it looks really neat we had some nice cardinal illustrations around the building too so now we've got a few of them we've got some I don't know what's going on with these cardinals over here they look a little jaundiced I'm not sure what state that is we've got some nice red ones there and some sort of yellowish nutritionally deficient ones over there so the duplication area again having switched from cassette duplication we do very very little about at this point basically just to repair books very infrequently primarily this is focused now on digital duplication this very unusual looking computer on the right I figured I would do a close up of this so folks could see it a little bit better this is a computer that has a special fixture attached to it to accommodate the shape of our cartridges being plugged into it this runs on a Linux piece of software called Gutenberg which is made by NLS for us to use there are some really weird problems with trying to do duplication of tons and tons of USB devices on Windows based computers basically Windows operates under the notion that when you plug something into it it's a USB device that you're going to have a fairly limited number of those on a computer maybe a camera a scanner, an iPod probably less than 20 things in the course of owning a computer you end up plugging in 100,000 USB devices into them it's writing stuff to Windows registry for each one of them that ultimately completely consumes the computer it's impossible to clean out we've tried to clean the registry but it's basically impossible so we've switched to using this Linux based system which works quite well we have that system as well as a similar device that works as a backup so the cartridge duplication happens there and there's a desk in this photo on the left toward the right side of that photo and that sort of matches the setup that one finds in the studio sonically the little shower area is now this kitchenette that tile up over is like bathroom tile I guess from the shower area the shower was sitting exactly where that's basically right where the counter starts it's for volunteers and staff to use and visitors for volunteering areas we keep lemon juice and honey and that sort of thing around the computer booths basically look like this with a chair and a microphone and some lighting options for user booths look like this again with some different lighting options the speakers, a talk back microphone and software we're using the review and markup rooms look pretty similar they do have microphones here for doing things like assembly or we may need to record some transitional materials that have to do with navigation of books the finished studios themselves you can see the HVAC stuff has been connected here and now has fancy insulation around it it's so tricky making those things be quiet initially when they installed them they just left tin on them and the tin somewhat acts as a megaphone ring and resonance sounds from throughout the room and conveniently tossing them directly into the studio so we ran the studios in the basement for a while while we got this work out but this insulation's working quite well and now they're quite silent this is what's left of the basement area it is it is empty it's pretty amazing this was just emptied out literally last week so the process it's taken a while to complete the movement sort of happened in phases we moved the studios were physically built upstairs around November and we moved circulation stuff upstairs around November but we didn't end up recording upstairs until about February or so because we were waiting to have some type of which we solved with the studios we have decades of memories in those files right, very much so I think that's, oh yes one more little thing our beautiful windows not having had windows before it gives us a little opportunity to do promotion so you can see these posters here we have a lot of foot traffic past our location and so now we can leave some posters out sort of explaining what we do and I can see people looking at those and talking to read them really often as they go past the space so I hope they're going past, certainly they're being read so that's helped quite a bit but yeah at this point I think we should talk a bit about what the studios are like and kind of the volunteer experience I'm going to go back to a photo of Brad's there's Brad here well since you you were here before and after the move if you just want to compare and contrast sure as far as background, lighting general likes and dislikes I really like the new boots I think one of the things that would every once in a while kind of creep into the old studios downstairs when they were built on the ramp if you had another narrator coming in after your session if your session was it from 2.30 to 4.30 and the other area was from 3.00 to 5.00 you could every once in a while hear the footsteps down the hallway through the old studios we had to stop and then wait and then go back we don't I I can't hear a thing when I'm in those boots the one thing I hear is Gabe's voice telling me to be louder or be softer or stop or you missed a word here or there they're very silent and I haven't heard any air it sounds like the HVAC sounds I haven't heard any of them I've been using these boots since we started since they were constructed lighting is great it's dark inside the room except for the light so it really illuminates the material pretty well the speakers are great the sound bubbles it's not too soft on the talk back into my area in vice versa they're great I've really been pleased with them temperature has been nice too we had a big issue with that that was also a problem too the basement ones and again that kind of had to do with the soundproofing issues during the summer they became a hot box particularly around 10 and sometimes 15 degrees hotter than the surrounding area so we can control the temperature within the studio area which seems to be working quite well they have two thermosats one on each end of that whole bank of rooms and I go in and check on those typically they're within a couple degrees in the outside area I think the general consensus from our volunteers is on a 1 to 100 scale they're 95% love them the only complaint I have has to do with and just the general construction of them in general some people it's not quite enough light in there and the way they're constructed is it's actually separate boxes you've got two separate windows so you get a really bad glare every once in a while where downstairs they shared a window essentially and they shared a wall I think the window downstairs was at an angle that's true although sound transmission between the rooms especially if we had male narrators with really rich low voice you would hear because narrator rooms were back to back with one another you could hear that even in the narrator booth the narrator section of the booth you could hear the other narrator two doors down sometimes I can hear them in the old and like I said I don't hear a thing except for Gabe's voice in the room I guess maybe I really like the booths I have not experienced any problems with glare or any of that I'm not saying that I'm special but I haven't noticed them I guess they are if you were a person that was a little claustrophobic maybe or maybe had a little anxiety about being enclosed in a very small or not very small but in a smaller contained area but I don't think that they are too small are these smaller than the ones that were downstairs then inside? they are roughly the same but I think the dark walls and the door that closes behind you there gives it a sense of a smaller enclosure but it's big enough for me I don't have a problem with them the outside is 8x10 so the inside would be somewhat smaller if I remember right they are within a couple inches length and width wise the same the ceiling height is slightly shorter by I think 5 between 5 and 6 inches they are roughly the same size the darker colors make feel smaller and the fabric so that dark fabric might be harder and the fabric does a good job of catching reflected sound I've been really happy with that in the basement we did have some problems with reflected sound creating delays especially with vibrator and aerators voices which sort of bounce around the room a little bit and these really do catch sound and not what it bounced around we didn't know that she's the sound quality anymore it's helped a lot it's been a major improvement I as a narrator have been really happy with all the improvements the vibrators and staff who have some problems with the mobility issue and here it's a front door and a few steps in here instead of going all the way downstairs they are ADA accessible we have a way to put a wheelchair ramp if that's a need there's just the ramp and it's there to install as needed it's just right there they do have custom doors as well they do have an ADA width I think the standard doors are a little bit more narrow but yeah with these you can easily get a wheelchair in and out and yellow game said we have a wheelchair ramp that's very quick to install we can put it up in a minute to have people get in so that's been quite helpful too so yeah these do have the same sort of room with a room construction but they have it within themselves basically so they're sort of built as like an outer box and then built around that so with that interconnects running that's something ADA accessibility that you didn't touch on earlier you know shells have to be spaced so far that's right, yeah there's measurements throughout the whole area we verified that for instance the restrooms were going to be ADA accessible that as shells were laid out we kind of sort of designed what I would look back on the floor to make sure it's ADA compliant everywhere so yeah it's a pretty accessible space obviously much more so than any circumstances getting into a basement where you have to rely on elevators sometimes are down so it's amazing how the booths are located right towards the front of the space and right in the middle of where people are walking in or signing in or in their office or walking around I can't hear a peep when that door is shut it's being like in a little world there's no outside sounds you can see people through the window on the door walking by or talking to people and I can't hear a thing they're great and yeah you've really gotten to see all the technology we've used over the last 12 years or so going from real to real which the real to real machines themselves have generated a lot of noise yes they did click click click actually people were clang clang they were very loud they had machine noises and if you had to back up to redo a sentence you had to back up like a sentence and a half before and then play it and catch it at the right spot all the rolling at it and that takes up some time it does little increments here and there out after a while but the switch to the digital interface and recording was fantastic yeah a lot of the editing we do now we can do without having to use volunteer time we can just drop markers in the recordings as we go and then clean things up a little bit in terms of spacing right after someone leaves I find that extremely helpful well that was an issue when we were downstairs we were using not only old computers older software but they weren't networked either that's right now we can sit at our desks pull something from the studios if we need to work on it we don't actually have to be physically be in the studios event we've got newer computers newer software and it sped things up right so something we didn't mention is there is a very small server room in the new space because we're quite a physical distance away from where the main servers are in the library commission now we had to do some pretty interesting tricks to get the wiring to get over to the new space Vern from our computer department did some amazing work to get those over there but that's been super helpful he's done a lot of climbing on ladders I saw last year for that high ceiling in the building's main entrance in fact we've gained roughly 30 minutes per project that we've worked on since the move so projects are taking about 30 minutes less which doesn't seem like a lot until you add that up over for each project yeah moving book carts from one wing to the other much easier than between floors and book carts travel all the time yeah I hope those little things even if you only save a second or two here and there I try not to exactly micromanage things but at the same time like gosh when you do save 5 or 10 seconds on a given process in studio that you end up doing 100 times every day and thousands and thousands of times every year it's a huge savings in terms of productivity you can add another book project potentially get another magazine done and those things are really significant and pay off for the patrons and I think another example that is the computers the the recorders are sitting or gave sitting wired to the internet so if there's a word that we can't pronounce and it's not in the dictionary in the myriad of dictionaries that sit next to the narrator we can just call it up and you can get a definition and a pronunciation off the web like that I remember when I first already working or volunteering here especially with the real real and David had to get up go out of the room go down to the computer look it up and it would take anywhere from two minutes to ten minutes just to try to find a word and having them wired there right on the spot we had an incident just like that last week or two weeks ago where there was a food pronunciation or a talent or something and it wasn't in the dictionary and Gabe was just like push play and he gave a pronunciation and I was like alright let's go yeah YouTube ends up being really helpful for us a lot of times like with young kids sports names for instance that maybe you're just joining Huskers we can find like some pre-roll footage of their high school careers where someone says their name correctly things like that that are very difficult to track down YouTube can be really helpful for us and it makes a difference people want to have their names said correctly as a person that gets their name mispronounced all the time and once you hear that pronunciation a hundred times in that article it gets sold after a while so it is nice to have that function I don't know if there's any questions not right now, does anybody have any questions out there if you do type in your question section in your go-to webinar interface we can answer any questions you might have or tell me in the microphone and I can unmute you but nobody asked during while you were talking no I think you were pretty comprehensive about how you did everything I know I can't think of anything that others are wondering about I don't see anything coming in and it was very nice to because Scott is talking about the water seepage into the basement of the old place while it prevents some on Scott's level some technical problems and on the narrator side it was nice to be able to not have to smell must must in the basement or to have more when it did have those leakages they had to have fans running to try to garbage the forest the ambient noise so it's been really really nice to have the move up to the first floor from a narrator perspective it's been really nice we don't have any more errant sounds there's no nasty odors that linger for a week it's not a hot box in the summertime I'm surprised about that you think down in the basement usually it's supposed to be cooler but obviously well many issues that were going on down there that you wouldn't expect that's true yeah this area seems a lot easier to keep running basically so some of these it's funny with these old buildings I have an old house myself too and it's difficult there are certain weird quirks that happen they're just really difficult to get them under control in a building of this size and scope those areas can be fairly large and just again very hard to like you said Dave this used to be a department store so it was originally built for a totally different purpose than all these little individual offices that we have here which is why very much in the wintertime sometimes we have fans running in our offices because it's gotten too hot or in the summertime you have a heater going because it's gotten too cold just because it just wasn't originally built for chopping it up like we did yeah this building has had a number of live expenses as a department store prior to World War I or maybe shortly after 1919 yeah it was about 1919 shortly after yeah the Rudge and Gunzel company started the building those of us who are on Nebraska Talking Book patrons may have actually heard us record an article about the building yes yeah in Nebraska history wow yeah it was Nebraska history is such an interesting magazine because as we recorded that we discovered that there were more elevators than we knew about it there were some empty elevators yes and this building sure it was amazing maybe that's where those air and sound there were ghosts no stories about ghosts though no I guess we never did have any ghosts that's kind of a weapon from the nights do you have a bus to Willa Kathy though when she came up with this oh right alright well it doesn't look like anybody has any urgent questions nobody typed anything in we were chatting so I guess we'll assume you guys are all good you know anything any last words I guess if anyone does have any questions about moving stuff where you're looking at doing some kind of move feel free to give us a call with the Talking Book and Braille service and while it's still fresh in our minds we can definitely help out it was a very interesting learning process I know for me at the time I sort of became kind of a point person for speaking with a bunch of different people that we had to speak with to coordinate all of this and it was a great learning experience and I learned a lot more about buildings and contracts and building infrastructure and good things to know though because you never know when they're going to come in handy you know library work occasionally does have construction work to the extent 20 years from now and you've got to move again I suppose yes I feel like this was a long dark tunnel but the tunnel and someplace worthwhile if that encourages somebody and on the narrator side it's been a major improvement we've been seeking from myself I've been really pleased with the outcome the boosts are better I think the outcome in the product is better and the overall narrator experience has been improved significantly since we made them move up here so thank you it's been a pleasure well Brad thank you I'm happy to do it we want you to have a nice comfortable room you're doing well mission accomplished all right if anyone is wondering too Scott you did mention those pictures the slides may have been difficult to see when you're watching now the slides will be included and posted with the recording later so I'll put them up so you'll be able to look up on your screen and get a better look at the way all that kind of mapping out of everything sounds great that'll be included as well so I think that will wrap it up pass me the mouse here thank you very much everyone for attending thank you very much Brad, Gabe, Scott and Dave being here today and telling us everything we wanted to know about moving our talking book and braille serves from the basement to the west wing and we dubbed it the west wing it's called the west wing someone came up with that idea I'm not sure who it was but yeah I remember back when we were first talking about it some email last year mentioned that and I was like really? cool alright we can go with it so that will wrap it up for this week's show it is being recorded and will be posted to our Encompass Live website which is here and our recordings are right here underneath our upcoming episodes our archives are here as I said all of our previous shows the recording goes on to YouTube the slides will go up into our slideshare account and if there are any links related to a show we'll put them into our delicious account I'll add a link to the Tbbs main webpage for more information about what you guys do to the recording for this one then so that will be later this afternoon depending on how long it takes me to get everything done so that wrap it up for today next week our topic is library challenge the amazing library race this is the Karni Public Schools have come up with a new way to teach their kids how to use the library trying to make it more interactive, more fun they do a natural competition like the amazing race type thing where the kids have to look at, answer research questions and what not and we're going to have some staff there Connie, Delkin and Kelly Melson from Karni Public Schools are going to be with us and tell us all about this new program they got going out of the schools there so do sign up for that and any of our other shows you can see here on our list about coming episodes also if you are a Facebook user and Compass Live is also on Facebook so do go ahead and like us over on Facebook I post reminders as you can see here, reminder of when a new show is starting up posts about our recordings when they're available reminders about next week's show coming up so if you are a big user of Facebook and want to keep up with what we're doing that's where we do most of our social promotion so other than that that wraps it up for today thank you very much and we'll see you next time and in Compass Live bye bye