 Hello everyone and welcome. And thanks for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Managing Mobile Library Device Checkout Made Easy. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host. Today our guest will share his experience managing mobile device checkout at his library with three different types of devices. But before we begin I have just a few announcements to share. We'll be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting today. Please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will be tracking your questions throughout the webinar and we'll answer them at the designated Q&A section at the end. All of your chat comments will only come to us as the presenters but if you have comments or ideas to share we'll forward them back out to the entire group for you. You don't need to raise your hand to ask a question. Simply type it into the chat box. Should you get disconnected during the webinar you can reconnect using the same link in your confirmation email. You should be hearing the conference audio through your computer speakers but if your audio connection is unclear you can dial in using the phone number in your confirmation email that we've also just provided for you in the chat. If you're having any technical issues please send us a chat message and we'll try to assist you. This webinar is being recorded and will be archived on the TechSoup website if you're called away from the webinar or if you have connection issues you can watch a full recording of the webinar later. You'll receive an archived email within 24 hours that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during the session. If you're tweeting this webinar please use the hashtag TS4LIBF. We have someone from TechSoup live tweeting the event so please join in the conversation there. TechSoup connects nonprofits, charities, libraries, and foundations with tech products and services as well as information so that you can make informed decisions about technology. Since 1987 TechSoup has distributed over 11 million technology donations to over 200,000 nonprofit organizations, libraries, and charities in over 60 countries worldwide. Last year in 2014 the TechSoup donation program distributed over 61,000 products to libraries for a savings of over $19 million. TechSoup offers a wide range of software, hardware, and services through their product donation program. This includes discounted technology products from JourneyEd.com, software from Microsoft, and refurbished computers. For more information about TechSoup product donations or services please visit TechSoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. All right, well now we're ready to begin. So thanks again for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Managing Mobile, Library Device Checkout Made Easy. We'll be sharing three examples of library device checkout programs including e-readers, tablets, and laptops all from the same library system. We hope you'll learn a few new things from our guests today. And our guest is Steven Tafoya, technology trainer with the Garfield County Public Library District in Rifle, Colorado. Steven has helped develop innovative technology programs for the library including device checkout, makerspaces, and patron technology training services. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and Twitter we have Becky Wiegen and Ginny Mies from the TechSoup team and will be on Twitter using the at TechSoup for Libs handle. Now we'd like to know a little bit about you too. Tell us if your library is currently checking out any technology devices. You can choose your response and click the button to submit. And once you've submitted your response you'll see a graph showing the results of the poll. You're also welcome to tell us more about your experience in the chat. I'll give you just a few seconds to respond here but of course some of you very clearly are stating yes or no whether you are currently checking out devices. And I can see that a fair amount of you are saying well not yet but you do plan to check out devices soon. And that's great to hear as well which means you've come to the right place to start learning. I'll give you just a few more seconds to respond so we can see what the range of responses look like today. And it looks like most everybody's in. So I'm going to go ahead and close the poll in three, two, and one. All right. And you got one response in right at the last second. So we're pretty almost evenly split here but definitely more of you are already checking out devices and then kind of split between no and not yet but we plan too soon. All right. And we have just one more poll that we'd love to know. And whether or not you're currently checking out devices isn't really the question here. We want to know what types of devices you're interested in checking out at your library and you can check all that apply here and then click submit to send in your responses. And so this is really about your desires not necessarily the current state of affairs. So we can see definitely e-readers, tablets, and laptops are right in the lead there, of tablets being the most popular choice so far. But I can see gaming devices and MP3 players also have a bit of interest there. And of course if you're selecting the other option we'd love to hear in the chat specifically. I see GoPros, mobile hotspots, Projector. Wow, really interesting devices coming through. Somebody mentioned LeapPad, which are those learning pads for children that have learning software preloaded on them. So all sorts of different devices being checked out. It's really great to see that. And so we'll try to summarize some of those and share them back out. I'll give you just another few seconds before we close this poll here because I know you came here today to learn more about these topics and we'll get to that topic in just a few seconds here. How about I close the poll in three, two, and one. All right, so there are those final results. Again, tablets definitely in the lead e-readers and laptops in a close second and some interest in other types of devices as well. All right, so what are we covering today? We're going to talk about device checkout falling into three specific devices, two different categories. So we'll take a look at how to check out Kindle, iPads, and Chromebooks. And these three types of devices happen to be what is currently being checked out to patrons at Stevens Library. So he's going to give us the inside scoop on how it works with those three devices. Of course, I'm sure that many of his examples will cross over to other types of devices as well. Now throughout the webinar, we'll share tips, examples, and resources for you to follow up on later. And we hope that you'll be encouraged to try or perhaps to improve upon device checkout at your library. Now we will have questions, time for questions throughout the webinar. We'll take a couple of question breaks. So go ahead and ask your chat questions or your questions in the chat as they arise and we will keep track of them and we'll get to them at a designated section during the webinar. If for any reason we're not able to answer your question live, we will follow up later via email with a response. Also just as a reminder, this webinar is being recorded and all of the slides, resources, and materials that we share will be included in the archive and you'll receive an email with that archive within a few days of the completion of the webinar. Alright, so with that I'd like to hand things over to Steven so he can tell us more about his experience and we'll start off with Kendall. Steven? Alright Crystal, thank you so much. Hey everyone, my name is Steven Tafoya. I'm the Technology Instructor for Garfield County Public Library District, as Crystal mentioned. Thank you all for being here with me today. I do appreciate your time that you've taken out to come and listen with what I have to share with what we are doing with tech devices. As tech instructor I do help oversee and look our circulating tech devices but in addition to that I provide training to staff on our e-content services and new mobile devices that come out on the market. So the staff are best ready to help patrons when they bring them in the door looking for help from us. In addition to that I do, like Crystal mentioned, dabble with makerspaces and maker activities, moving to some STEM programming initiatives in our library. And I am the 3D printer guru in our district so I do have a passion for that. And to kind of top that off I started our Minecraft initiative here at Garfield County Libraries too. So if you have questions about any of that feel free to email or contact me. If you have questions in addition to what we're talking about today I'm always more than happy to talk about Minecraft and 3D printers, maker space ideas, and yeah it's a lot of fun. So I get to play with all the cool toys and share my knowledge with people. So before we get into the content I want to talk about Garfield County Libraries. In Garfield County we have over 56,000 residents. With our library district we do have six locations that range all the way from parachute Colorado to Carbondale. And this is what's considered the western slope area of Colorado. In our library district we've issued over 50,000 cards of which 28,000 are active members. Our circ stats from last year well exceed over 730,000 checkouts last year. And summer reading we had over 6,000 registered of which 9,154 attended our programs. So that's really great for us because we're seeing an increase year over year with what we're doing. And it's also good because it gives us a picture of what we need to be on the lookout for when we're implementing these new technologies that are being discussed and rolled out in our district. So that being said when we look at our district as a whole we have a very diverse community. On one spectrum we have parachute rifle which fall into the oil rig kind of, I don't know, town or neighborhood, the oil wells, the hunter kind of category. You have new castles in the middle which are classic small town feel. And then you have Glenwood and Carbondale which are more like tourist type towns and they have more of an artistic community on that side of the spectrum. So we serve a wide variety of people in our communities much like you do in yours. So that's the things we look at when we look at implementing new technologies inside of our county. So to start off I want to talk about our circulating Kindle program. As you can see from the image we have these very cool kit bags which I'll talk about in a little bit that have our library name on them. But this is the classic blue bag that we use to circulate our Kindles that go home with our patrons that choose to check out a Kindle device. So why Kindles? When I started back in 2012 first of all I didn't know I was going to be working in libraries. At the time I was just kind of looking for a job and I became one of those accidental librarians and it just so happened I also had a passion and a natural talent in working with technology as well. So when I came on in 2012 and I was starting to learn all the basics of serving patrons in the library I quickly latched onto the things that were happening with technology in the library world. And one of those initiatives was the Kindle program that was being started in our library district. So I don't exactly know completely where it started other than the first two branches in Parachute and Rifle. Those Kindles were funded with friends of the library money. So the friends were interested in having these devices in our community. Now at that time we were also beginning to not purchase but promote our e-content services through Overdrive. And at the time e-readers were at a kind of skyrocketing in terms of their popularity. So this was kind of a good time to basically ride that wave into the e-reader future with this program that we were going to start. Looking at the Kindle kit before I talk about the process this is what we started with in our kit. Again we have the customized blue bag which carries everything. We have the Kindle device. At the time we had just the basic Kindle model which had all the buttons. Since then we've brought on some more of the newer paper white touchscreen Kindles that have the glow light on them. So we have kind of a diverse selection of Kindles that are in our circulation kits. In that we also have cases that protect and sit around the Kindle themselves so we have that double insurance of protection there. We created a short user guide and we also have and provide a cable for charging during the user's checkout period. Now if you look at there's two slips of paper which we've since discontinued using and putting in the kits. One thing we kind of toyed around with and tried to experiment with was given the option to allow patrons to come with the Kindle and sit at the desk and check out titles from Overdrive in addition to the titles that we were purchasing for the device. But what we found out was nobody really took on to that. They were pretty satisfied with what we provided. The other slip of paper was kind of cool and we got some feedback there but basically that was a blank slate where people could suggest titles that they wanted to see on their Kindle. So that was our way of reaching out and saying hey make this Kindle yours in our community. What kind of things do you want to see when we make our purchases? So that was a great way for us to get feedback. But that actually has happened more kind of word of mouth at the desk and I think that's just kind of our decision to take that out now because it just happens in conversation. So it just comes down to the Kindle, the case, the instructions, and the charging cable that go into our kits. And if you look at our display boxes we actually took the actual Kindle box and decorated it all up with all kinds of stickers as you can see. They don't look so much that way now but we had a donated by the Friends Library sticker. Because these were genre Kindles we had genre type stickers on there. The display boxes are what went on the shelf. So instead of obviously not having the Kindle out there itself we put the boxes out there with a variety of information. And we had matching barcodes from the box to the kit bag. So we just kept track of which box tied to which Kindle kit. So going into funding, when we talked about getting started with this it was an experiment that began with funding from the Friends of the Library. And now we're at a point where we've seen some pretty good growth in this program that we've purchased additional Kindles through e-rate money that we have. And so we're doing this intentional to bring the Kindles to all the branches. And so right now we're at a place where we're bringing everyone on board and we're trying to kind of replicate the model that we started a few years ago to help hopefully increase this awareness of this device and that people will check it out and use it and educate people on e-reader technology and meet their needs. So going more into the model itself when we developed the collection development policy for this the first question was again funding, where does the money come from that we use to purchase these e-books for our Kindle kits? So right now we have kind of either or. We either use existing book budget for each of the branches they can choose to use that, or if they have friends backing their library for this purpose they can use friends money to get their e-books. This is what Rifle did primarily in the beginning was the friends of the library were so passionate about getting these Kindles out there that they also donated money for this cause as well. But a lot of the other libraries will now bring in their existing book budget. Another thing we did with our Kindles, the first thing we started off with was doing genre Kindles. And I've been to a few workshop sessions at different conferences where other libraries have done this. They've had different Kindles that had different genres. One Kindle was a western genre. One was a romance and different genres for different libraries. And I think what we've kind of found out is that the marketing there didn't so much play out for us. So a lot of our Kindles are just going to be moving over to general use Kindles where we kind of load whatever titles are needed. But if you're looking at doing this you can kind of see what works for you. You can maybe try out the genre Kindles or you can just have a general use Kindle that can be, any title can be added to those Kindles. I think the biggest kind of drawback there was people thought if I have a genre Kindle and I really want to read a romance book but the only one that's available is the Western, I have to wait for that romance Kindle to come back. And we really like the idea of being able to kind of customize the Kindle for that patron right there and then because we were able to help them meet their needs. So we kind of did that. Another thing you can kind of do if you've ever been in the Kindle store you know that there is a free section for eBooks. So always frequent the free section because there's a lot of good titles you can get to kind of populate your Kindles. Even big name publishers and big name books will put their books for free for a short period. So it's definitely good to add this into your collection development of eBooks to look at that section to get those titles as well. But you still need to do your research because there are what I call chart hackers in the eBook world, people that are self-publishers that have ways of kind of boosting their sales up to the top but their eBook is really not that good in terms of content. So it's kind of the same thing just doing your research like you would in any sort of collection development scenario. Some things we've also added to our Kindles are bestsellers. We look at our library record and we see which items are coming in that are going to have a lot of holds and we add those to the Kindles to add an additional avenue to access those titles. Any page and request like we've talked about. And we've also done companion titles. So when the Friends of the Library has their book club we add those titles to the books each month. CMC which is our Colorado Mountain College here. They have a common reader program each year in the fall. So we'll add those titles that go in companion with the program to what they're doing as well. So we look at those avenues in terms of providing a service with our eBook readers to basically supplement what other people are doing in the community. Looking at security with Kindles, so the route we went with our Kindles is we control everything sort of manually through one Amazon account. And I'll kind of talk about the pros and cons about this as I go through. And one of the cons right now is with the purchasing. If you're doing this the way we're doing it, Amazon has a thing that's called One Click. And if you go in to make a purchase whether it's with a credit card or a gift card, what you have to know about that is when we make the purchase is we have to add the card, make our purchases, and take off the credit card. Or if we have a gift card we have to choose whatever our amount is going to be, do our mass purchases, and then just kind of be done with that. What we found out is that one time we left the credit card on our account and the patron had taken the Kindle home and we found that they made some additional purchases and they didn't have to have a password because of the way Amazon does their One Click purchasing policy. So in terms of purchasing and going with this model you do have to be careful if you're going to manage these Kindles in this way. Just like if you were signing up for an Amazon account as just a normal user. So whatever you do no matter whether you choose to do this way or the other way I talk about in just a second you always have to make sure everybody in your branch is on the same page for whatever your purchasing procedure is so they know that once they're done purchasing they need to remove the card, really highlight those points that are really important in the process. Like I said earlier again we tested the option to have Overdrive as an option but there were no takers. People were pleased with what we had. Moving into privacy, again for the most part we haven't had any issues with privacy. There's no patron data that's getting sent into the Kindle and we've never seen any but there are in the settings areas where you can kind of sign into your social media and be an active participant with your e-books that you're reading. And so that can be an issue if you're managing just the way we are without any sort of management tool like WhisperCast. So you have to keep an eye on that too and know that's something you'd have to check for as well. If you're looking at ways to kind of manage this, if you're like, okay I really don't want to do the manual way that you're talking about. Amazon does provide a service which is known as WhisperCast and again you can go to the link and read all about it. But basically this is an institution management tool that allows you to do everything from the cloud and you know set up your devices, purchase your content and push them out to the devices and set them up also in groups too so you don't have to do everything by hand manually. Some drawbacks there, again they just have a lot more restrictions in terms of the licensing and their terms of use to be really, you have to be very careful on how you go about using WhisperCast because they have the authority to kind of go in and wipe out what you're doing if you're not following what needs to be done under the WhisperCast terms of service. I'm only beginning to look into this a little bit more and talk about it with the branch managers. So it's not something we're 100% sold on but it is something we're kind of looking at just because the management piece is a lot easier from the user end and you can block things like the settings so that in terms of the patron privacy their stuff doesn't get accidentally put into the Kindle device. You have a lot more control over the device itself. With our policy, these Kindle kits are Kindles that do go home with the patron. We consider it a lucky day item so it's a first come, first serve. If it's on the shelf it's for them and it's their lucky day. They don't have to place holds. We don't put holds in on any of our e-reader devices so if it's on the shelf, yay. They do have a three week period with no renewals so the way we kind of help address that is if they come in and they're like, I want to renew it. The language we use is we say, oh but we do need to take this in and load it up with new titles and kind of do our maintenance on it. And most people are pretty fine with doing that as well. Right now everything that goes home that's a technology device is adult patrons only. We do not check out these e-readers to anyone under the age of 18. So that's kind of our policy there. And we also do not loan them to external libraries. They stay within Garfield County. Real quick, some challenges that have come up in doing the Kindles. We've talked about how do we talk about count use and do we add these as something we want to, when somebody reads a title on the device, how do we know and how do we count for that title? We don't have an answer for that and we may not even try to find a solution. That's a conversation that's happening right now among our circulation team. But it is something that you might want to think about. Are the titles that they read, is that important to get those stats? Or is it just about being able to provide customer service and give some tech education in exchange for not having these item stats? Like I've already said before, management of title distribution is tricky if you're doing it the way we do it because it's a lot more manual. So you have to balance it to determine and see, do I want to manage these manually or do I want to use the WhisperCast service that Amazon provides? Tech hygiene is another one. Always have a tech cleaning kit. We've had kit bags come back that have a lot of cat hair and they smell like smoke. So it's good to have kits that allow you to clean the screen and for breeze the bag and get all the cat hair off. Always keep in mind damage. You're going to have Kindles that come back damaged to let the patrons know what the cost of replacement is and then what your procedure is for getting new Kindles back. Do you have an insurance plan that fixes these things or do you just purchase new Kindles? And then keeping the updated collection, the collection list updated. How are you going to promote that too? Because what we found out is we have this huge list of e-books, but how do we promote that to patrons? We've tried things like putting a list in a binder and maybe we've talked about having it on a website, on one of our web pages, or maybe even in the catalog. But there's not really a good way to kind of do that because eventually what will happen is you'll have this huge list of titles that's going to be hard to manage. So you have to think about what will work for you there. So that's another thing we're kind of developing now that we're moving into the other branches. We want to get their feedback as far as how they want to manage it too. Some feedback really quick. Jeanine Rose who is the Rifle Branch Manager who has been over this kind of Kindle thing the whole time. One of the things she said is that she loves what she loves about the circulating Kindle collection is how quickly she can meet the needs of the patrons. The biggest thing is people will come in and they want that new title right away. And it's not there, there's 150 holes, but she can sit down and say, hey, we can order this on a Kindle. We see it's a lucky day item. Let us get it for you. We have the budget for it, and we can get them and meet their need right there. So she's had a lot of experiences there where people are just pleased to pie because of that. And a few more things she said, who benefits from this? Some things she said, the Panic Strick and high school student who wastes the last minute to do the required reading for a test and she can get it on there for a Kindle that the mom or dad can check out for their kid to use. The person that is going on vacation and they want to take as many books as they can, but they don't want to take all the weight of classic traditional books, she can put it on one device and it goes with them on this tiny device that doesn't weigh as much. Somebody that is timid about e-book technology, e-reader technology, they can come in and play. She considers this the gateway drug for people that have never touched a Kindle device or a tablet device. This is their entry into it a safe way for them to experience the technology before making a big decision on their own. So those are some good things that have come out of our Kindle circulating program. So I'm going to go ahead and turn this back over to Crystal who is right at the Q&A portion. Crystal Right. And so we have had a lot of questions so far. And Susan, I think this is a topic that everybody is really interested in. So we will get to as many questions as we can right now. We will also have time at the end. I'm actually going to hold some of the questions for later because I think they actually cross over what you are about to talk about in the next section. So if you don't hear an answer to your question right now, don't be discouraged. We will get to it one way or another. But Steven, thanks for sharing everything so far. I mean there is just so much information here. And a lot of questions we are getting are asking for more detailed information. So I'm just going to take as many as I can right now and kind of work my way back up. We have a lot of questions about the way you are checking them out. And one of those comes from Amy asking why the Kindles are only going out to adult patrons. Is it the cost of the device itself? Or are there other concerns in checking them out to youth? Steven I think that is a really good question. That is also something that is kind of on the table right now. I have seen email conversations going back and forth about where are we at in terms of moving this to maybe the teams because what we are going to talk about in the iPads and Chromebooks section is that we do actually allow teenagers 11 to 17 to use our devices in the library. But this is a portion that we are not, I guess we are just not comfortable with it right now in knowing that I guess there is probably more fear that it might go out and come back, more likely to come back damaged I guess. But on the other hand we are also seeing adults check these out for kids in their teens because they want to read something that is on these devices. It might just come down to the responsible party. If it falls on a kid that is going to really hurt the kid because they have a $7 fine they have to pay, and then they can't use their library cards because they are responsible for it. Whereas if we give it to the adults, they are an adult. So part of that is the responsibility and part of it is I think a little bit of the fear. Now to follow up on the responsibility part of it, are you using any kind of loan agreement form that patrons have to sign or how are the policies spelled out for them? This is a question from Jennifer. That's kind of a great question too. That was something I kind of pushed initially and it seemed like the branches kind of just didn't want to deal with that. I think we are kind of just a little bit more casual in the sense that we know the people. I mean just like everybody knows their patrons, we know a lot of them too. A lot of that conversation just happens casually over the desk. There haven't been a whole lot of detrimental incidents that have required a need to have a signed agreement because they know that if this does break, it's $70 that goes to their car regardless. There is that mentality with people that think, oh, if the technology breaks, for some reason they don't think they have to pay for it. We've seen that too. Whereas books, if they damage a book that seems more likely to be something that they would want to pay and know that they need to pay. So we do talk about maybe that if this breaks for whatever reason, there is a $70 to $80 fee that we have to charge to your account. But our policy is kind of just lined out in our checkout policy for tech devices that we can show them either on the website or at the desk. But no signed agreement. To change the direction here a little bit, we've had a couple people ask, what do you include in your sanitization or your tech cleaning kit? What types of things are in that kit that you use for the device cleanup? Yeah, great question. I would say just a few things. Get those electronic screen wipes or just a microfiber cloth that you only use for that kit that you can put a little water, dab a little water on the corners so you can wipe the screen and then dry it off just a little bit of water. Get maybe some non-chemical or environmental friendly sanitizer wipes to wipe down the cases. Again, a lint roller if you have bags because they will come back with animal hair. And again, for breeze if you have them coming back smelling funky, you'll need to spray them and air them out as we have had to do. That's for all tech I think is anything that you loan out like that. Right, right. Yeah, we had a lot of questions about that so thank you. A little bit more detail there. And then one that's on the technical side of things because I'm seeing a lot of questions that relate to how you're purchasing the titles. So are you purchasing multiple copies of the title like one for each device? Or how are you handling that distribution of titles across multiple devices managed through the single account? Yeah, that's an excellent question. So the difference between how we're doing it and the way you would do it with Whispercast, if you're doing the management system like we're doing where you just sign up for one Amazon account and manage your devices, you do have the ability to like most Kindle titles be able to load the title on up to six devices unless the publisher tells you otherwise. Now I've been to workshops where libraries have done this way. They've actually done this model and they're like, yeah, it's fine to do it that way. And then there's people online that have said it's not right because you're kind of breaking their terms of agreement. So probably where you stand on that, that's kind of up to you to decide. But with Whispercast, what you're going to do is you're going to end up doing is purchasing individual licenses for eBooks not at like the rates that we get from publishers for like our Overdrive collection, but you're going to purchase individual licenses for titles that you send out to each of your devices through the Whispercast method. So I mean, I guess that's the difference. I don't know. I guess when we talk about struggles, that's where we have a hard time managing because everything has to be done manually. We don't know what goes on to each of the devices through the cloud. We have to manually look at each device and say, oh, this is on here or this is on here. And one thing a rifle is going to face right now, they're going to be moving into 10 or 12 Kindles. And if they have multiple copies out on a device and somebody wants to get it on the 9th Kindle, they won't be able to do it because they reached their maximum checkout limit. So that's why I kind of want to push towards the management system that Amazon has in place just because it's a little more streamlined and probably more kind of legit I guess is what I'd say. But I've heard arguments from libraries on either side. Yeah, good. All right, well that gives us a little bit more idea of what you've been doing so far and again maybe where you're going with it next. Now as far as where we're going next, we do want to make sure to get to the other aspect of this which is the tablets and the laptops, the Chromebooks. So we're going to go ahead and move on right now. I know we have a lot of questions that we weren't able to get to yet, so we'll try to get to more at the end and just a reminder that we'll also follow up with email if we're not able to answer your question live. So Stephen, thanks for sharing what you have so far. Now before we move on, I do have just a couple of quick items to share with everybody. And again, these will be in the archive. First of all, our friends over at Web Junction have a page that shares some samples of e-reader policies and procedures. So I'll include a link to those in the archive. And also we found a few library examples that we liked of different sizes and we'll include those specific examples as well where they have details on their website about what their policies are and in one case I think they even have an example of their loan agreement. Also, if you're looking at how to purchase devices at perhaps a discounted cost, I just wanted to let you know about two options through TechSoup. One is JourneyEd. Which is a technology store that provides discounts to educational institutions. And now TechSoup members can access JourneyEd, which means you have access to over 5,000 products which includes some iPads, laptops, and accessories. And there's more information about this on the TechSoup product donation program page. Another opportunity for some discounted technology is the refurbished computer initiative also through the TechSoup product donation program. TechSoup works with agencies that refurbish computers and then sells them at a steep discount. And this includes laptops and tablets as well as desktop computers which we're not covering today, but good to know that's an option. And all those devices and computers come with one to three year warranties so that's a great opportunity as well. So those are things you can look for more information on the TechSoup product donation page. But speaking of all of these other types of devices and how you might manage them for checkout within your library, Steven is going to tell us about his experience with iPads and Chromebooks. So Steven, I'll hand it back over to you. Hey, it's me again with the sideways photo. So welcome back. So let's go ahead and get right into the content with iPads and Chromebooks. So this is a newer initiative that we started with iPads probably about the end of 2013 and with Chromebooks kind of at the end of last year moving into this year. And so when we talk about why we brought in iPads and Chromebooks for our libraries, why we chose those versus anything else is one, they're the IT technologies. These are the things that obviously you see that are real popular out in the world, the Apple iPad, the Chromebooks that are making kind of headway into the portable computer world. So we wanted to bring those into our libraries to help give access to patrons so they can experience these technologies and learn about them and what they offer. We also want to not just offer it to our patrons, but to diversify, I can't talk anymore, to diversify the library technology we provide not just for learning purposes, but to also lower our library costs. We're moving into a season where our budget is going to be a lot tighter, so bringing in technology that's a lot cheaper, but still meets the needs of patrons and how the use technology is going to be very important for us moving into the next few years. So that being said, let's talk about iPads. With iPads, when we started kind of two years ago in Carbondale, we started with the expectation that we would have these devices for adults to use. We thought, okay, this is the technology, this is what the professionals are using in the work field, and adults are wanting to learn about and see. This is what we're seeing come in in terms of questions about these devices, and we just figured all these adults are going to come in and use them. The reality was, the adults came in with their 5, 6, 7-year-old kid, checked out the iPad and handed it to their child while the adults sat in the corner and read a book while the child was sitting there next to them playing games. So that kind of resulted in a policy change for us. What we saw was that there was a bigger need from not necessarily the younger kids. We're not going to check out an iPad to a 5-year-old, but there were teenagers that wanted to come in and use the technology. They were familiar with it because it's in the school. They had homework to do, or they just wanted to play games on these mobile devices that they don't have at home. So we changed our policy to also include teenagers ages 11 through 17 to be able to use these devices in library use only for both the iPads and Chromebooks. So these do not go home. These are for in-library use only. So that has been probably the biggest thing that has helped us make this a successful circulating program with the iPads and Chromebooks, kind of the turning point. In terms of setup, we'll kind of go back to where everything started. When we looked at our funding, I'll come back to this later a little bit later, but our funding comes from our tech budget. So taking away traditional laptops or laptops and Windows computers, and supplementing it with iPads and Chromebooks, with the iPads we went through macprofessionals.com is our vendor. So they basically gave us a quote and helped us set everything up, sent it here, and gave us training to kind of get started. Everything is managed through Apple's Configurator System. I will talk about that a little bit more in depth than a little bit. And then on my end what I've done, once we've kind of had everything set up through our vendor, my responsibility was to learn the system, know the system, create a detailed staff guide, and also do staff training at each of the branches. So that was a big part of my job this past year, is getting everybody up to speed when we launched these services. When we did launch them with our marketing, we had a newspaper article, we had live demos at the front desk, we had posters, all sorts of things to let our communities know that the libraries now provide these devices for use. So looking at the pictures, the top left one is kind of what it looks like in Carbondale. They're 10 iPads. And if you look at the cool color cases there, you can probably see why those iPads were a big draw for little kids. They're bright and they're fluffy and all sorts of kid-friendly looking things. So you can see why parents were handing them to the kids and why the kids wanted to hold them. And it's very accessible for them to hold because you can see they have handles all around the device itself. But it also ensures that if it drops it will probably not break. I'm talking about the policy again, in library use only, adults that have library membership and good standing. Keens, when they come in we have to get one-time verbal permission from their guardian. So that's kind of the only caveat is that they have to bring in whoever signed them up on their library card. They come in, we have a little spiel that says, if you agree to this, your child can use the iPad and here's the consequences that they break it, so forth. And then if we get that verbal permission we have a macro in Sierra that lets us put a kind of a pre-populated message that says they approved on this day and we can put that into their library account. And then these iPads and Chromebooks are a two-hour time limit used per day. So that's how much time they have with the devices. One thing we wanted to do with the iPads is we wanted to train staff to be able to empower them to make the iPads their own. So that means they also know how to download apps to make their iPads branch specific for whatever they're doing at their branches. I'm not the one who puts all the apps on all the iPads and makes them look the same. It's the branches that do that on their own. So what's been cool about that is in Carbondale, for example, they have a really awesome gaming collection and an awesome early literacy collection. So when they saw the kids were coming in, they figured, hey, let's get some of these apps on here that would be tailored to what the kids want and need for these devices. Kind of the drawback of this is that not every branch is the same. Some branches are a little bit more resistant to tech and they're not as likely to develop it and go full out as like Carbondale did or where Rifle was doing. But we're helping them kind of catch up and get up to speed with this process. In terms of security and privacy, this is my headache. So even though you have a management system that is through Apple and everything set up all nice and pretty, I will say that Apple Configurator is a bit of a headache right now. And if you kind of look at their software in the Mac Store because you do have to have a Mac computer with the Mac app store to be able to have this Apple Configurator software that manages the iPads, this particular software right now doesn't have a very good rating. And I'm surprised because this is Apple providing their service. But as they do update, it seems to kind of get worse over time. So if you're looking at doing it this way and managing it through Apple Configurator, you might want to just kind of keep an eye and see where they are at with developing the Apple Configurator software. At the top of the screen you can see there's that exclamation point. I see that error like all the time or I get an email or a phone call from the branch that says, hey, Steven, iPad 4 has an error. Let's figure out what it is. So I have to devote a lot of time to working through the errors because the one thing we don't want to do is we don't want to send these back out. If it didn't refresh or didn't wipe, there might be patron data still on the device. They're signed into their Facebook page or logged into something else. So if we have those errors, we have to deal with them. There's not a way to not deal with them. You have to deal with them or you put your iPads out of commission. So just know that that's kind of a thing you will have to, at this point for whatever reason, their software is at a place where it needs to be, I guess, advanced a little bit more. So moving into Chromebooks, I'm going to talk about Chromebooks and then come back and bring them all together. These are not as high interest as the iPads. We haven't had as big of a search stats as we did with the iPads, but they're way easier to manage. If you have Google for Business, like you have Gmail for your library or your company, what's really great is it all integrates because Chromebooks are a Google product. So what you really need there is you just need access to a management license for the Chromebooks. And just so you know for library institutions, if you do purchase a license it's $30 per device. So basically what we did is we went through New Mind Group. They're a tech vendor that provides a variety of services and they contracted through Google our licenses for our Chromebooks. We purchased the technology ourselves just through Amazon. We figured the best Chromebook to purchase and then we ordered them and then we got the licenses. And because we use Google for our email business or Google for Business for our email, all of that's integrated right into the Google tools so everything is just kind of done in the cloud through our work email and Google. So it's really nice to have that. In the beginning you do have a lot of settings and a lot of setup, but after that there's not a whole lot that's needed to keep them going. I haven't encountered an error yet. Other than we had a trackpad break, a hardware issue, but the software works really, really well. If you go back and I can show you if you look on the screen you can customize your wallpaper and you can see you can put your library picture, you can put whatever you want there really. You can add things like your library internet policy and you can have them okay, agree to that before they are allowed to use the Chromebook. You can put whatever apps you want on the bottom bar. So you can have Overdrive, Kindle Cloud, anything you want that's in the Chrome app store. And the other thing that's really cool about this that's not on the iPads is it does have a timer so you can set your two hour or whatever checkout period limit on the Chromebook device and it will shut off after the set amount of time. So with the Chromebooks I give it a big hashtag winning just because it's not as big a headache. So really we are looking to push that technology and help diversify what we offer in terms of laptop internet access. We started with a few Chromebooks. We are going to move into more, like I said, moving into a tighter budget so we need to save cost on the higher cost Windows desktops, the traditional PC laptops too, and get more Chromebooks and let that be something that is also supplemented in our library. Moving into funding for both of these, this is just strictly through our tech budget, again taking away other things, putting that money towards this, having iPads and Chromebooks. In terms of any paid app content, stuff that's not free, it's just at the branch budget's discretion if they want to take it out of a programming or whatever budget they have if they want to have paid apps. So again, like the example in Carbondale with their early literacy iPad apps, they take that out of the use services fund because those are apps that are specifically designated for use services. When you are looking at your funding, one thing you want to consider is a two to four year technology replacement plan. Typically, I think this has kind of been anywhere from five to six or seven years just because traditional Windows stations tend to last a lot longer. The technologies like Chromebooks are a lot shorter lived, one in hardware just because they are not made as maybe durable than as traditional PCs, but two because these type of devices also have what's called end-of-life policy. So if you ever look at end-of-life policy on a Chromebook, you will get a month and year of when Google will stop pushing updates to the device. Once you reach that month and year, Google basically says we are not going to give you the latest update of Chrome OS, or Apple is not going to give you the latest version of iOS to your specific iPad. So that's what we are looking at with our iPad 2's right now. Because they are releasing iOS 9, we are lucky enough that they are putting out on this iPad 2 again this year but probably next year not as likely just because they have a whole lot of new devices coming out. And it's going to be in our best interest to do that because having the latest operating system and updates will provide a more secure experience for the patrons. I've already kind of spoken about a lot of these challenges throughout how not all the branches have perceived this as equal. There has been some tech resistance and some have just embraced it really well, being able to keep up on updates with Apple, Configurator, all the issues that kind of come with that. But as you are going to look at all your options, and especially if you are going to PLA next year, look at all the vendors. If this is something that doesn't seem appealing to you because of the things I have shared, you might look at vendors that have dispensers. There is iPad dispensers that are out there. I've heard with iPads that there is cloud management options. And one thing that we are moving into is letting our tech support consortium actually take over our iPads and Chromebooks. And so he's been talking to me about maybe doing some sort of cloud management system. I think it's called Airwolf. I'm not 100% sure. But look at what's out there and see what kind of best matches your needs and your staff time and the budget that you have to contribute to this. Another thing is the perception that if you move to iPads and Chromebooks, a lot of the classic tech that people use are missing like CD-ROM drives in Microsoft. And you still might need to provide those, maybe have an external CD drive. Even if you tell them the perception that yeah, you can use Microsoft in the cloud or use Google tools, patrons don't perceive that the same way. So it's still good to have traditional type PC technology to offer in addition to Chromebooks and iPads. I'm going to jump in here because we've got a lot of questions. I do see that, yeah. And I want to make sure to answer some of them before we have to wrap up. And I know your next few slides are ones where we can kind of see what's on them in the archive. So if you don't mind, I'd like to jump to do some Q&A at this point. Of course. Yes, definitely. And then we'll give you a chance for any last words as well if you want to think of anything you want to summarize. But we certainly have got a few questions. First of all, what was it about the Chromebooks that made you choose that type of device over another laptop? And did you look at just regular laptop checkouts as well? That's a good question. I guess I didn't mention that. We actually do have traditional PC Windows laptops. They just do not work very well. And I think part of that was on our end for marketing. But because we also have the traditional desktop and the traditional PC Windows laptop, we wanted to bring in something a little bit different and again to diversify the technology and to cut costs for us. But something that's relevant to what's kind of trendy in technology today. And if you ever Google what is Chrome OS on YouTube, you can kind of see the purpose of why Google created Chrome OS. They saw basically, you know, most users, they get on a computer or a laptop to get online to do something. Not so much to use an app that's installed. Their whole thing is to meet a need for most of the users that do the typical thing when they get on a computer to get on the Internet. So that's kind of why we wanted to do that is bring a technology in that meets users' needs on the whole scale like that. Great. So it sounds like it was the more popular choice in your community which is definitely something to consider, an important thing to consider. Now another question that we've gotten kind of variations on this is how do you prepare staff to be able to do the checking in and checking out? And also what is involved with that process from the staff side and how time consuming is it for staff to be able to check in and out not just the Chromebooks but all of the devices you've mentioned? Definitely. I think the biggest thing if you're the person managing the technology is to always consider that tech anxiety that a lot of staff have. Patrons are going to have it too, but to ease that anxiety just comes through training. So it's going to vary by library to library. It really depends on where each library staff member is and their tech expertise. If they are really low on the totem pole, you're going to want to spend and dedicate more time with them until they feel comfortable. Because if they're not comfortable, you're going to have resistance from the staff in addition to not be able to provide the most optimal customer service with the technology. So it will vary by library and by the staff that you have there. So that buy-in is really important from the beginning, having the buy-in from staff and also having the time to make sure everybody feels comfortable at whatever level they're at. So it's very much a differentiated thing from library to library from staff member to staff member. So you do need to spend some time initially in the beginning to get that training down until everybody feels ready to go. Yeah, and are individual staff members responsible for the wiping of the devices and resetting them, or does that fall to only specific staff members? That's a good question. That's all automated through – for the iPads and Chromebooks, that's all automated through the system. They just have to kind of clean the screen on the iPad, wipe down the Chromebook, and plug it back in to charge. And then the management system takes care of that. But then if there's errors, they have to report that to me. You say, okay, now there's an error. They're not responsible for dealing with the errors and troubleshooting because that's time we don't want to take away from them. That's where my responsibility comes in. So the bigger thing is to have somebody that's going to be responsible to say more importantly, is the troubleshooting anything that happens to make these things work again. If there's errors that pop up with the iPads or Chromebooks. Great. And maybe one last question. Of course, everybody's concerned with the security of the devices themselves walking out of the building, not having been checked out. So what are you doing to prevent excessive the devices, not necessarily that somebody checks it out and doesn't return it, but actually being taken out of the library? Nothing. I mean we don't have like an RFID system or anything like that. And we actually don't even have, okay, we've had one go missing. And as far as I can tell from everybody that's kind of involved in the decision-making oversight of this, it was a big deal, but it's also not like we need to do something dire for it. I don't know why that's the attitude or whatever. There might be other things that are I guess bigger fish to fry. But it's something that's definitely on my radar to say is there a way that we can prevent this? And maybe I need to look into Apple. When we move to our tech consortium supporting these, what's going to be the equivalent of Apple location finder for the iPad or something like that? But there's really not something dire that we need because we don't have that problem as big as maybe some other communities do. Okay. All right. Well, good. I know it's weird to say that about you, the exception of staffing. All right, we kind of okay. We do care, but it's not, you know. Yeah. And it's fortunate for your community that it hasn't been a significant issue. So one last question, we do need to wrap up, but is there just any maybe one last bit of advice you'd give to those on the call who are trying to start this for the first time or trying to improve what they already have going? Any last things you want to share? Definitely. You know, always start with the budget in mind. Dream big with whatever your budget is because if you dream big without a budget, you're going to be sorely disappointed in the end when you don't have the money. So that might mean looking at other options, maybe Android tablets, maybe instead of Kindles you get Nooks or some other off-brand of eReader. You have to look at things like you definitely always keep your long-term tech replacement goals as far as what you're going to do two to four years down the road. Don't just make it a, hey, the here and now, but always plan long-term. And as you're looking at devices, don't feel like you have to have the latest and greatest. Get a feel for where your community is. Take their tech temperature. Are you in a community that adopts technology right out the get-go, or are they kind of just behind the curve? And then you have to decide, do we bring in the latest or greatest, or do we have to kind of lead them gently into this newer world of technology? And just again, with staff, everybody that's going to be dealing with the technology, keep everyone informed, everyone in the loop, those that are going to be interacting with it, keep them trained until their tech anxiety is kind of just extinguished and they're ready to go to provide the best tech circulating program that they possibly can. Great, great. Well, thanks for some good advice there. And I know you've shared your contact information. We'll also be following up with the questions, so many good questions coming in today. So thanks to those of you who asked them. We will follow up with you with those responses in the next week or so. Also just a reminder that all of this will be included in the archive email and one of the other resources we'll share is a resource from TechSoup on laptop checkout programs and how to put that together specifically as well as more examples of libraries who seem to be doing a real good job at it. If you're interested in some of our upcoming webinars, just a few that are coming up related to grant requests donated in discounted technology. And then one on Pinterest for libraries coming up on October 14th, and you can find out more about these and register on our community page under events and webinars. So we'll hope to see you at one of those soon. Please stay on the line for just another few seconds. We're just wrapping up right now and I'll have a brief survey for you to tell us what you thought of the webinar today. But I did just want to mention before we go that if you haven't already done so, TechSoup for Libraries is a great resource with blogs and library spotlights available. We also have a monthly newsletter which you can sign up for to stay in touch and hear about our upcoming events. So we'd invite you to sign up at techsoupforlibraries.org. And that's all that we've got for today. So thank you so much for being an excellent audience and being so engaged with the questions. We'll get back to you. Thanks to ReadyTalk for being our webinar sponsor today. Steven, thank you for sharing such wonderful and detailed information with us. And to all of you, have a great day. Bye-bye.