 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week as we are doing today, and that is then posted to our website. And I'll show you at the end of today's show how you can navigate that and get to all of our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you who are not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries and other states made just because the state library. So we provide services to all types of libraries in our state. So you will find things on our show for all types of libraries. Topics for Publix, academics, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Anything in any type of library are really our only criteria that it is something to do with libraries. Something libraries are doing, something we think they could be doing. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come in and do presentations sometimes about resources and services we offer here. We sometimes bring guest speakers talk about cool and interesting things they're doing across Nebraska and across the country. Before we get into today's show, I just want to do a quick little aside and talk about our Library Commission website here and how what we are doing here at the Library Commission to help our libraries during the current COVID-19 pandemic. We have here at the top of our webpage a post that is pinned here we'll always be here at the top about the link into the resources we have. We also have a list we are maintaining, attempting to maintain as best we can about libraries that have closed, have opened, reopened, special accommodations made, Wi-Fi in the parking lot, curbside pickup. Now, of course, things added to their two libraries are re-closing because of opening too soon and new outbreaks come up. But we try to keep that up to date. There's a form libraries can fill out. We also have staff here, multiple staff that monitor social media and news reports and things to try and keep it as well up today as we can. If you are a library, check your status there. Let us know if anything needs to change. I just want to show you here on the post we have here for the resources. There's a link to our list, a link to the form to use to report to us. And then some specific resources we've gathered, depending on what you might be interested in homeschooling under five minutes, but specifically the page about libraries. I wanted to highlight this is for any library, anybody can go to this, of course. There's a lot of resources here, anything we've found out about there that ALA is doing, IMLS, CDC, anybody doing things, OCLC, webinars, resources that are out there, we try to add to this as we learn of new things. Many, much of this is for any type of libraries. Some of it is specific to Nebraska libraries about how to host meetings that have been Nebraska specific statutes of some example policies from libraries here in the state. If you're looking to see what you want to do, all sorts of other resources. So I just want to make sure our libraries know this information is here. Let us know if you need anything else. If you are from, not from Nebraska, check your state library or state library association. They may be offering the same kind of resources for you. So now I'm going to hand over presenter control to you, Carson. Thank you so much. Here's slides up. So onto today's show, should be able to show your screen. There we go. And it's finished. Whoops. That's all right. I'm just going to let it go through its paces. I love how it'll pop up a dialogue box sometimes. Here we go. There's the full screen. All right, so today we are talking about the toward Gigabit Libraries toolkit. And we have a group of people here who've been working on it from, and there's a show we did about this last year. I think how you mentioned it was in March was when you guys were last here. No, no, the inception was in March. Oh, OK, yeah. We did do one at one point. We did do a previous one. Yes, last year, March 6th, yes. So this is a follow up to the previous one in March or 2019. It's a great resource for people, but for libraries to use. But I'm going to let you guys introduce yourself as you get to your parts and everything and just tell about what's going on now. That sounds good. So we'll we'll kick it off right now. We are really excited. The last time that we gave a project update, I remember calling this in from the road, presenting it from a hotel room. Not now, it's so nice. I'm actually as close to Nebraska as I can be. And I but first let me introduce co-project manager on this project, Stephanie Stenberg. Hi, everyone, I'm Stephanie Stenberg. I am the director of the Community Anchor Program at Internet too. And I'll tell you a little bit more about what that is in a minute. Wonderful. And I'm Carson Block. I'm a library technology consultant. I've been working in libraries for getting close to 30 years, I think now. I've been a consultant for 10 years. I'm based near you in Fort Collins, Colorado, but usually travel all over the country helping folks. We also want to give a nod to our founding team. Susanna Spellman was part of Internet too. At the time when this project began, Susanna has gone to the private sector and is doing a wonderful, wonderful job there and also to James Whirly. James Whirly, unfortunately, passed away just as the original project was wrapping up. James is close to all of us in this project and close to our hearts. Someone who we miss dearly. So we're going to start by playing a video on the video about the Toward Gigabit Libraries project. I we want to play it for you because it frames everything really well. This is actually it's gone viral in terms of a library video because it's been played a thousand times. This is a lot, right, for a library video, but it covers everything. It's also something that you can come back and look at later to remind yourself of all the things that we're going to talk about today. Whoops. That is really funny the way it does that. Let's go back to let's go back to this. And sometimes the Google slide will go it's playing it. Let me let me get that up here again. Sorry about that. We're going to just going to blaze through these again and see if we can get this to play. There we go. Yeah, didn't we test it? Welcome. This video is designed to give you an ultra quick overview of how to use the Toward Gigabit Libraries toolkit. You'll be up and running in no time. The toolkit is a free open source technology learning diagnostic and advocacy tool designed for public and tribal libraries in the US. But the toolkit can be used just about anywhere in the world. The toolkit will guide you through a series of questions about your technology environment and provides you with all the information you need to answer the questions. The toolkit is an excellent way to diagnose and fix problems that you may be having with your library technology. Some libraries have found it especially useful in preparing for e-rate requests, budget cycles, and even in helping open up lines of communication between library staff and tech workers. Best of all, you do not need to be a techie to use the toolkit. Well, it's always helpful to have someone with technical knowledge to assist. This toolkit was piloted with more than 60 rural and tribal libraries in 11 states to ensure that it is as simple as possible for you to use. The toolkit is divided into several key sections covering the types of technical challenges you're likely to encounter in your library and ways to solve those challenges. In the technology inventory section, you will find and understand some of the key pieces of the technology inside your library, including your network, computers, and other important technology components. This inventory will help you understand what sort of equipment you have now and provide a basis to determine if you need different or additional equipment for the future. In the broadband services and activities section, the types of broadband services and applications are discussed in order to ensure that you have sufficient bandwidth to support patron and staff use of various devices and applications, both today and into the future. Technology in libraries is more than just a collection of gear, people, including library staff and those who provide technical support are just as important. In the broadband technical operations support section, you will learn more about the people who help make technology available in your library and determine if there are any areas where you could benefit from additional support. Technology expenses are important budget considerations for all libraries. In the broadband funding section, you'll learn about several opportunities available to help provide funding for your library broadband connectivity. The topics listed in the additional resources and best practices section are designed to provide you even more insight and resources into improving your library's broadband connectivity and services. You may find these items helpful in gaining a better understanding of your broadband connection, data network, and computers. The toolkit also has a handy glossary section at the end for quick lookups of technical terms. And don't worry about completing the toolkit from end to end. It is designed to address the most common technology issues in libraries, so it does cover a lot of ground. You may need to only work through the sections that are the most important to you. After you've completed the toolkit, you can use another document called the Broadband Improvement Plan to create your own long term and short term strategies to improve your technology. Wondering how to find the toolkit materials? Everything is available at our website. The toolkit is free and open source. And if you like, you are free to use anything from the toolkit and mix it into other documents. This may be especially useful for state library organizations, rural and education networks, library consortiums, and others who would like to customize the toolkit materials. After you've used the toolkit and the Broadband Improvement Plan, we would love to hear from you. Click on the link in the comment section of this video to share your experiences. Now grab the toolkit and make it your own. So what's really funny about the message in there is we of course created that overview at the end of the project to make sure we spread the word about the availability of this toolkit. A lot of people used it and no one really told us. They just took the ball and ran with it. And so we're delighted with that. Before we go on though, we want you to know more about the team that we have and the organizations coming together to put this together. And so I'm going to hand this over to Stephanie to talk to us about Internet2. What is Internet2, Stephanie? Yes, what is Internet2 and why is it involved with libraries? Well, I will tell you. So Internet2 exists and you probably have used it before but you don't even know it. Internet2 is basically the high speed internet backbone for higher education and community anchor institutions like K-12 schools, libraries, museums, state and local governments, and healthcare systems. It's a member driven advanced technology community. It was founded by the nation's leading higher education institutions in 1996. And really Internet2 is more than that internet backbone. What it really is, is that community. It's a collaborative community where the United States research and education organizations can solve common tech challenges and develop innovative solutions. So that's showing you a little bit of our routes there. And then specifically where Internet2 ties to libraries is through the community anchor program. And that's what I'm the director of. So as you can see, we have some connectivity statistics. We connect a lot of the smaller four year colleges and universities, community colleges, K-12 schools, and public libraries across the nation. It's about 25% of them throughout the nation. We connect state and regional research and education networks like Network Nebraska that serve over 100,000 of those community anchor institutions. So in addition to serving libraries through IMLS funded research, we also help K-12 schools in a lot of ways. One of the ways is we provide distance learning through our presidential primary sources project where we connect schools and libraries with presidential historians and museums to learn about our nation's presidents. So that's a fun program we run. And so I'll tell you about our toward Gigabit libraries initial grant. Or oh, Carson is. Well, we can we can both do it. So this started out back in 2016, spring of 2016. Internet2 was awarded this grant and James and Susanna had gotten ahold of me to be part of that since I've done a lot of work in rural communities and around connectivity and training and stuff like that. So it was a $250,000 grant. It turned into a three year grant to develop a training curriculum and a self-assessment material toolkit for library broadband infrastructure. And of course our target, our audience, very rural and tribal libraries. And our partners included the like represented in Nebraska. We're going to talk a little bit more about that. We started off strong in Nebraska with joining together state library offices and these research and education or RNA network. We had a project goal of reaching at least 30 libraries to pilot this idea in because it was just an idea. We were stingy. We were able to reach at least 60 because we watched our budget and we knew that the best effectiveness for this toolkit happened by getting out in the field. So we made that happen. And so a little bit about how it was developed is we brought together subject matter experts from rural and tribal libraries, state library agencies, and we kind of got together, I mean, literally got together in a room for a day and a half and hammered out needs, details, approaches, ideas, and things like that. And these SMEs or subject matter experts stayed with us as to consult with throughout the entire projects. And and what we did is we updated the materials based on the input we received. And so as soon as we heard we were actively seeking how well things were working or how they weren't as we did the pilots and immediately that influenced the toolkit itself. And then finally we finalized and released the toolkit into the wild. And that's where it is now. Now the toolkit itself, I'm going to recap some of the stuff in the video, but we can talk a little bit more directly about that. It's doing three things at the same time, and it's doing a pretty good job of it. On its face, it's an educational workbook. So if you're in a small library, you downloaded the toolkit, you might be put off a little bit by how thick it looks. Don't worry. It's once you open up the first page, you'll see that it's not scary, but it's supposed to be an educational workbook. The other function is that workbook to be a self-assessment tool. So any library, whether you're rural or tribal, can use this information to assess your technology conditions. The other is to be an advocacy platform because the more you know about your technology, the more you can advocate for improvements. And frankly, we all need improvements to our technology. So we wanted it to operate on those levels. So the toolkit components and process, we had these different areas. And I'm going to go over those. They're listed right here, but I'm going to go ahead and go over those right now. First of all, though, the way the toolkit is structured is probably its greatest strength. It's kind of like a test in which you're told the answers to, right? So there's a question that's around specific area of technology, such as on this first question we're showing here, what type of broadband connection do you have? And there's several different options that you can choose. DSL, cable modem, fiber, wireless satellite, or other. And then the question is followed by information that you can use to answer the question. So it's not a test of your knowledge. It's a way for you to learn through this Q&A approach what your technology is in your library and how what you might need. The tool itself from the beginning has been a free open source tool. And I was laughing at the end of the video because I said, right? We said, please let us know if you use this. We want to hear from you. People just used it. Who has time to tell us that they're using it? And so we've been able to kind of keep tabs, but we know that there's a lot of use of this toolkit that we don't even know about. This is super useful, though, in preparing for e-rate requests and budget cycles. And especially as a tool to help and open communications between library staff and tech workers. And when Holly and Tom share their experiences in a moment, they can talk a little bit more about that. But this is one of the strengths that we found is that the toolkit gave a common vocabulary and common knowledge to both library people and tech people. And sometimes for the first time ever, they were able to talk directly about the same thing at the same time. So it was very, very powerful. Also, the toolkit itself, it has to be the size that it is because there's so many different possible situations that you might have in your library. We need to make sure that that's in the toolkit, but you don't have to do the whole thing. You can just do the things that you need the most. And it was written so that if you don't need to be a technician or a techie to understand it. It's written in plain language and it's accessible as we could be. So about the tool, the first section is a technology inventory about the library. And I don't know if you've ever done a tech inventory before of your library. It just even by walking around and counting stuff and making note of what you have can be a very powerful way to put this front of mind. And of course the toolkit is going to take you well beyond that because we want to know how it's working as well. You want to know how it's working as well. And so the toolkit guides you through your broadband connection, your network devices, the things that make your connection work, wired network and power. Power is very important and especially in older libraries. We just didn't have enough, we never envisioned a time when all patrons would need to plug in their mobile devices when it came in. So a lot of places need help with power. Wireless network and computer and user devices. The next section is specifically about broadband services and activities. So this includes the need, the bandwidth needs that you might have. Things like hot spot lending, things like internet filters and different services that you might be, other services that you might be offering. The next is super important because this is where the ball gets dropped so often and this is technical operational support for your technology. And so this is a place to inventory and really think about the access to and the quality of your tech support. So that's the folks available, staff training resources, technical support that you might get from your ISP. Some questions about their service request and your relationship with your ISP. ISP stands for Internet Service Provider and also talking about things like service guarantees, understanding what you're promised from your service provider, and ways to see if you're getting what you were promised in terms of the performance of your connection. Usually this comes up at first but it's not first, it's just one of the things that we have to think about and that's broadband funding. And we want to make sure that everyone knows what they're paying and what they're getting for what they're paying but also entering things about e-rate. And e-rate of course is a universal service fund that offers discounts to libraries and schools based on the percentage of school lunch program in the community that serve. And so in some cases, especially rural areas, there are significant discounts on not just the connection to the internet but also the internal equipment, the routers, the switches, the wiring, etc. That can be made available. And we also talk about other funding sources to consider. The final section is a bunch of links because in the process of putting the toolkit together, of course, there are many many tentacles to this octopus of connectivity and technology. And so we want to just round up things that would be helpful at least as starting points. And this would be e-rate, content filtering, additional broadband resources, free technology training at the time, data backup, and internet use policies. Now I've got to say in every part of the toolkit, especially the first parts where we're asking questions and answers, we were very conservative over what links we shared because of course on the web links disappear overnight. And so we wanted to not have too many links there. Part of our new grant that we'll tell you about in a minute is actually updating because this section of the toolkit actually needs some updating. Resources are still available but they've moved. We figured that would happen but nonetheless keeping up with that is difficult, right? And then finally for folks who consider themselves newbies, it's really powerful to know what a word means, right? So we've included a glossary that will help with the most common and the most basic terms. Something that is aimed at our worker in a small rural or tribal library to quickly look something up as they're having conversations or as they're learning about their technology. Now we had so many site visits, right? We had these 60 site visits and this is a picture again of where we were able to go. The blue of course is the public libraries, the orange are tribal libraries. Even though I think in Alaska there's a little mix of those there. We took information as well as we were going because we needed to know how we were performing and we also wanted to make sure that we were hitting the right libraries. So you can look at a map like this and go, oh cool, so how do I know from this distance if that those are the right sorts of libraries? I've been, because of my experience in working with rural libraries, I've been in situations where the most needy library perhaps was not the one getting the visit, but instead the library who was the quickest on the draw to ask for the visit was getting it. This was in previous programs and that was always regrettable to go out to a library that actually had resources, they had a technology person and they had funding and then to go out and spend time with them and because of that I wasn't able to spend time with someone who had nothing, right? So we wanted to build that in from the beginning to make sure that we were addressing the needs of the folks who needed this the most, even though this was just a pilot at the time, we wanted to make sure we were hitting those libraries. So as you can see, most of the libraries that we visited were not part of something bigger, so they were their own standalone thing. This chart indicates that the frequency of IT and technical support for the majority of the libraries was at the bottom, right? It wasn't huge, including none, right? Including that green slice that says never, but as you can see most of these libraries were in needs. The other thing is asking the library staff who we were working with, what is your current level of expertise around this? And as you can see, most of it was no to limited amount of expertise, so that means there's a lot of need, right? And that also ups the ante because we're talking about bringing technical information to folks who are considering themselves non-technical, and that was one of our targets. We wanted to bridge that and make sure that we we addressed that. So you would think with those, and I have to say frankly, like with the folks that we were able to target, when we visited on the toolkit, in some cases people weren't sure they wanted to see us or not. They were a little intimidated by having a tech day and having to answer technical questions. We also asked about folks experience with the pilot program, and we had so much positive experiences, right? People said they had a great time. In fact, as soon as we got there and we started working through the toolkit and people realized it was not that difficult to do, it was hard to leave. They would not want us to leave. It was like that's when the food started coming out, and the ideas of how we think we could save time in our next drive so we could stay a little longer, and that was really the best indicator that the toolkits were working. This is my favorite slide. I've never seen this before. I've been working in libraries for a long time. I've never seen a unanimous recommendation for something like this, especially something so difficult, and this is would you recommend this pilot process to other libraries? Unanimously, yes, and so as we were receiving this feedback, we knew that we were on the right track and we kept on building onto that right track, and speaking of that right track, Stephanie, I've been talking for so long. I'll give you a break. Yes, tell us what's been going on since the toolkit wrapped up. So the toolkit has just really, it's a testament to the hard work of Carson and James and Susanna and all of our partners, that it's continued to have a really great impact on so many organizations, so many libraries. You'll see, this is a list of just some of the organizations we partnered with, given presentations to, and I'll give you an example. I know the Montana State Library and Jenny Staff implemented use of the toolkit in 115 of Montana's 117 libraries, and so using that, they discovered that actually 98 percent of their public libraries serving less than 50,000 people reported speeds below the FCC's bandwidth target of 100 megabits per second. So they're using the toolkit to gather all this data and use it for funding and to plan, which is just phenomenal. We're so proud of the fact that the toolkit can help libraries all over. So that brings us to the new grant. We had the Tord Gigabit Libraries Toolkit grant that expired. It still has a life of its own, and we thought we could help bring the toolkit to more rural libraries, more tribal libraries, and actually expand it into another segment of the library population, which is the tech deserts in urban areas where they might not have the resources to do some of these things, and we are going to be just scaling up the toolkit, looking at it, making it more accessible to people, updating those links like Carson talked about, and really continuing those partnerships with people on the state library side and the research and education network side as well. So we got a ton of letters of support, which was really great, and again a testament to the great work done on the Tord Gigabit Libraries Toolkit. So you're looking at not only a list of the organizations that gave us letters of support, you're probably looking at a skeleton crew of our advisory group we're working to build right now as well, hoping to get representatives from both the tribal and rural and urban library communities. And this was such a testament again to the, I think, the importance and the effectiveness of the tool, because and Stephanie joined the project after Susanna left, and so Stephanie was part of that transition and it can probably attest to how especially at the time, like James and I, we just had our heads down working all the time. You know, we weren't, I would say that our marketing of this was not, was non-existent, you know, we were just like working and getting out in the field, and I remember when we gave a presentation to COSLA, the Chief Officers of Library Organizations workshop, and we told them about this and we got this flood of new requests to go and visit that we couldn't support. We tried and in many ways we were able to support other efforts there, but it really showed that this struck a nerve and it was worthy of this work, of this hard work that we were doing. So now, let's change our focus from all the broad stuff into something very much at home for you, and that is Nebraska. This is the map of our site, our first stops in the whole toolkit process. I did the one on the far, far west part of the state, Susanna, did the rest, and the other, the other common people in both of these, are our next guests from the great state, Nebraska, Holly Walt and Tom Rolves, and we'll also talk to Krista, who I don't think usually is pulled into this stuff, but we're going to talk to Krista too, but I would like to hand this over and we'll have a conversation style too, but I want to say for Nebraska that Holly and Tom are our dream team when it comes to the idea of teaming up someone from the state library, Holly, and somebody from an R&E network, Tom, to mix knowledge and expertise of the clients and some of the technology, and to use that to be a very powerful team, and in so many ways Tom and Holly set the standard for how this could work and how it should work, and this is baked in to our next grant, and this is going to be formalized in making formal relationships here where they didn't exist. Stephanie and I want to thank you both so much for just being who you are, because you didn't do this on purpose. You're just awesome people and you did do it on purpose, but it's because you're awesome people and it happened. I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth here, but thank you for doing that, because it has made a huge difference and it set a standard for others to follow. So tell us a little bit more about your experiences with the toolkit. Well, I'll start as working with Tom was great. He actually approached me to be included, the library commission to be included in the grant, and we started out, I guess I would call it, and I still see it that way. I reviewed the toolkit last night and it has improvements. It has some things that do need to be updated in it, I noticed. But we started out, and I guess when I was visiting with Suzanne, my comment was it's like going to the library and being around the kitchen table, and that's how we really presented it. I think Tom and I, you know, even though I don't have rural roots, I feel like I can communicate in that level. And so that was wonderful experience. I found it to be pretty detailed and for getting enough information to provide to the library to say, yeah, I can answer that question. And the other piece, I just kind of came upon it while we were listening, is I also think sometimes when you have somebody from state library or a tech person come into a rural library, right away that library director says, I don't know anything, just go ahead and do what you want. But to come in, for the two of us to come in with a tool that was developed by somebody else that was to be helpful, to help them to understand and empower them to have knowledge about their technology was, I think it was also an asset for us instead of having our own homegrown material to do that. Anyway, we give Tom a chance to visit too about this. But as a team going in there too, we have some great stories in Tom. I hope you will potentially give a highlight of your story in Atkinson, Nebraska. There was interpretation in the beginning and most of the time we visited with one librarian or two librarians and Tom had a staff colleague came along with him one time to the visit. And then when Carson visited with Gearing, it was wonderful. We had all four of the main library staff working with us in the basement, going through this workbook had an absolutely fabulous time, but they've learned so much. And all in all, as they learned, it is, as Carson said, it's almost like they don't want you to leave. So that's a testament to how it's put together and it can be delivered. Tom, do you have some comments? I sure do. Of course. So you don't run over 1500 miles around the state with all that windshield time and not have some stories to tell, but one of our library candidates who shall remain nameless, told Holly in confidence before our arrival, I'll do this on one condition as long as you don't do anything with e-rate. And so okay, she whispered that to me so I'll take that on as a challenge. We sat down at 9 a.m. at this library and by 1 p.m. she had updated or acquired her FCC number, reactivated her role in EPIC, the e-rate portal, had just signed an agreement with the vendor. I found a contact. She negated that agreement, floated a Form 470, and 28 days later she had a new expanded service with 70% discount. So that was in one 4-hour, and it didn't take that long, took about 90 minutes, but it's really the power of the toolkit, earning trust, and then giving us the ability to sit down one-on-one with a library director who may be harboring either fear or resistance or previous experiences that were not great. And we know that this is doable, right? Because we do it on Network Nebraska every day. We have 293 fiber connected entities, all of our school districts for fiber. So I looked at libraries as this is an important challenge for rural Nebraska, because education is in my job title. Our homework app in the state, probably 30,000 students without any internet at home. They drive into town. They go to the library parking lot and they're greeted by, in many cases, less than 24 megabits down. So it's not acceptable. So let's, we've got a lot of work to do. Holly's not going to be allowed to retire. Chris is going to be doing a lot more training, but our job and we have some other exciting projects to quickly highlight is to get more libraries connected with fiber and the toolkit's an important pathway to that understanding. Because that's why I've included the toolkit in my e-rate training since it was put out. So last year, the year before, as soon as I knew about it, it's part of the e-rate training that I do every year for our libraries. It's on my e-rate website. Go here, figure it before you start anything. Go here and figure out what you got. Figure out what you could do and then bring that along with you when you go into looking for applying for e-rate and what you might want to ask for. And I just want to mention one thing too. It's the relationships in my mind that you build as a agency for the state because oftentimes it's edicts and things that come down or they're asking you for something again. And we were offering that and an example of that was what I was visiting earlier with the the rest of you about that are a very first library who worked with the toolkit. She was very first and she was pretty anxious about things. Although she did service cookies and I think some popper juice when we were there which was wonderful. We went on, Tom and I have worked with an IMLS grant for the we called it the Sparks grant and it had a long name and Tom might be able to state it out but basically it was using a fixed base wireless from the school to the library for a hotspot and then we had two computers desktop computers in the hotspot. This this library she also was a part of that you know very easily and she attended our workshop yesterday because she's getting ready to retire and I said to her I said don't retire before we get we're able to get fiber to that library and she says I think I can do that I'm going to stay on and then we find out between Tom and I in a conversation later that we both told her the same thing we said they'll name that library name that library after you when you do that so ironically we do have a same wavelength but what I think is important is that relationship that you're you're able to put together because all that other stuff is in there and it happens and they do know this information and and I've also used it for continuing education it's offered on their own and then in the beginning of the year we hired another individual not a new position but redefined a position to work with basically it's category 2 because we know if we bring fiber to these libraries that's great but a lot of them have very old network equipment we had a library that has got fiber and then we investigated and had a 10-year-old router in there and because they couldn't figure out why why aren't we receiving this inside these are those basic things that a non-tech person may not know and so we didn't use a toolkit for that but that was this is the kind of an idea as preparation for as we move to fiber with some of our you know as Tom said we have other projects that are going on to within the state. Yes and before we talk about the Sparks grant I actually wanted to ask you both about all three because this has this folds into to e-rate as well I've been working I've actually been I've been supporting the toolkit since the grant ended because people have been using it they need things done and I was working with two states recently with CARES Act funding to receive CARES Act funding library needs to also comply with SEPA the Children's Internet Protection Act and so there was a lot of stress around this in some of the clients I was working with because based on library policy they had rejected any compliance with SEPA with this funding they needed to understand a little bit better what SEPA compliance meant and so using the diagram that the network diagram part of the toolkit I was able to illustrate very quickly you know number number one to say sorry this is part of it the difference between now and in the past is that the filtering systems work better I was able to do a quick survey of my folks that I know to look at performance of filters but to get that out of the way and to go back and say here's the deal if you want the CARES Act funding you do have to rely on that and so now if it's that it starts with a policy decision now the technical support or the technical piece to support the decision would be how does filtering work and so I was able to show how the diagram could illustrate the three major types of filtering approaches and what would be feasible or unfeasible for a particular library's situation so I just want to show that really quickly but I would love to hear other examples where you've been able to use that basic concept or maybe it wasn't useful before to a person and all of a sudden it became really important to understand how this stuff works well I think you're you're correct and for for us at the Library Commission we are primarily hands off on filtering that you know the that we yes filter and you have to filter but we aren't doing any types of recommendations I do have an idea I haven't and you'll hear it first here but we've been toying around with the idea of my my new colleague and I is that we would like to see pockets where we have a library who's using a filtering system and they're happy with it and have them do a presentation in the area to help other libraries to see what they do and what they use as opposed to keep you know do not have the Library Commission necessary endorsing anything so this is a concept that we're we're toying with to do with the libraries as we hopefully increase the participation in you right and there's an interesting dovetail at the Sparks Grant when the school district and library partnered and that was a requirement by the way for their eligibility we were increasing the external internet into the hotspot by 400 to 1500 so the one more example that Holly mentioned after we put in a brand new 85 foot tall telephone pole to shoot over the oak trees to the school she went from six megabits off the water tower up to a thousand meg into that hotspot nice so that is just absolutely extraordinary but the wireless access point terminating in the library was an extension of the school network so they're more sophisticated controller modules software metrics filtering policies and all that could have been applied to that wireless access point which was reasonably foreign to a small row library that has a single two band router for instance so it's not that they couldn't get there but this aspect of their network became an extension of the school and could be managed by the school district so we're going to retain that model you know obviously we're hoping for fiber to every library right but that's not going to be applicable in every situation but we could fully flush out these other relationships where the school district and library you know are within bird's eye view line of sight and we can drop a thousand meg in there with with no problem as an addition to their existing network so and to focus on filtering again about related to that is it is interesting like you say I mean there's adversity there's trepidation a lot of folks that have maybe used d-rate in the past the filtering was pretty archaic it's much different now so we would we would be offering with the sparks grant this opportunity to have this high speed internet in the in the library but of course it would be filtered and some of the ESUs or the schools said no problem um you can uh you uh we don't care if other people and other patrons use this in the library and I never heard anyone say well I I'm just upset that this is filtered you know and and they because they just wanted faster speed and I think the other thing that we've we've come to believe is with that faster speed is that a lot of libraries enroll areas and we're facing this with this idea of trying to increase the fiber um uh to the to the libraries currently in Nebraska they don't know what faster speed is and that's another thing that the sparks grant offered we were in a library and having an open house and we asked a student to say come up and and do a demonstration of what she would be doing at school and so the adults all gathered around her and they just couldn't believe how fast those pages updated you know so that's part of I think what we need to do too with you know helping the library not only understand what they have but what they don't have and yes they couldn't utilize what they don't have can please tell us a little bit and I know that we kind of tease the sparks grant but for for those not familiar with it tell us a little bit more kind of like a backup a little bit and tell us a little bit more about the sparks uh grant itself well let Tom do that please so I'm not an IMLS expert but it's a smaller grant cycle that they had in that time period for $25,000 maximum so how do you test out a brand new concept or venture a partnership against you know the three main priorities of IMLS so we selected this concept that been rolling around in our heads all the school districts are fiber within a mile to two miles is a library that's probably less than 24 meg they're both public entities drawing tax dollars and guess what they've never worked together so what if we you know promised to give them up to $5,000 for connectivity and two brand new desktop computers we knew that that would get their attention and if they would just agree to work with the school superintendent to do this short-term relationship to test out this concept Shaboom Shabang and it was six site visits the governor ended up visiting two of them and the rest is kind of history now was a short-term engagement 12 month program project and then at the end they were they were faced with the decision do we want to make this a long-term relationship do we want to disconnect they obviously get to keep the computers and they could keep the connection but that was something they were faced with then in 2019 so anyway that led to the next project that we've been working on which is the Nebraska special construction matching fund won't go into all the build-up details but the public service commission has committed a million dollars over four years for Nebraska to become the 25th state to allow the 10% match on special construction of fiber Kristen Holly are doing that training right now from the library commission and we're recruiting participants will bid their circuits this fall and then July 1 2021 will be the first service start date on the new fiber for as many libraries as express interest so that kind of jumps over sparks but it's it leads to something much larger and much more promising and I just want to mention again this idea that a lot of rural libraries have no idea what they're missing and it just applaud there are three of those six libraries that are working in the workshop and they've said it they said you know we like working with the school it works fine and in fact one of them was mentioning the possibility you know that maybe that small school district school in town is going to move out into middle of a cornfield what am I going to do then for fiber because my community loves it and so we were like well then you can have a backup because you can have the school still and then you can also go ahead and apply and get fiber directly to the library one of the other participants she just said I really want to have that I love it I want to have it but I want to have control of it so these are just beyond I know we've hijacked the toolkit but what I want to say is I do think that that has a lot to do with why I mean I used the toolkit and worked with the library that was out west that I just was talking about I went through the toolkit with her also and so I've gone out when I've gone out to do things often independently I just talk about that and again I would endorse this whole modular part of it because sometimes you show up somewhere and they don't really care about this but they want to talk about this you know Oh you did not hijack the toolkit this is the purpose of the toolkit because so many people could not even get started right even started thinking about an advanced project such as what sparks help spark and other things that have happened and even this idea of thinking about e-rate in different terms instead of looking at it in black and white to say okay so first we have a policy decision to make as a library the crate do we filter do we not filter that is a policy decision if a decision is made that filtering would be acceptable then or in the part of exploring the policy what are the possibilities how does this actually work what does this do right revealing that is the basis for wise decisions and for strategic decisions and so this is absolutely this is where it went behind our wildest dreams is to see how everyone took the ball especially Nebraska let it do and stuff I want to take you home Carson I want to take you home that's actually the same thing is that the toolkit is actually this the base the beginnings of all of this of either go deciding to do e-rate getting faster five or whatever we this is why we have Holly and um and which we're talking about Cynthia our new staff and that department we have for years here at the library commission you're talking about how long you've been in life I've been at the library commission gonna be 20 years this December and we have always had libraries asking us can you please help us with our technology we don't know what we have we don't know and we never had the staff to do that we never had we have our own in-house IT people that's for us but um it was just something we had to say I'm sorry we just don't have those resources but here's some here's some here's some information or see if you can find someone local or something um but now we do have the staff we're you know okay things get to be adjusted some years and now we have the toolkit that we just push out and tell listen use this contact us talk to Holly talk to Cynthia they will guide you through this I push it in all my e-rate trainings of even um the opposite sometimes of what you're saying Carson I say did you know your library could save 80% off of your internet bills what wow well let me talk to you about internet and e-rate and look at this toolkit and talk to your community and convince them that it's okay filtering is worth it and I can teach you how to do it where nobody will even notice that anything's being filtered it's it's okay think about the money I know it sounds kind of crass but that's not at all and it's it's so appropriate for us to have those different approaches right because that and this is and I think when we when we show this to especially for a small library that hasn't engaged in a decision around technology then they everyone instantly realizes it's like oh I see there's there's a couple of different opinions on how to are a couple different approaches because we I think we share many of the same opinions but there's different approaches that we're looking at as far as how to make a decision and all of a sudden what was in a black box becomes something understandable and something strategic whatever works so you bring him on board okay go ahead Tom and then I'll come in sorry I've got a run here in a minute but I want to issue a conceptual challenge to Carson Stephanie for the toolkit version two we know that if you form a municipal consortium between school district and library and they request a new build entity number then the infrastructure between those entities is all of a sudden e-rate eligible e-rate is a school and library division it should have said the school or library division because that's how it operates it does so it's you know pox on the FCC for not incentivizing this but we could be doing that much more at the local level with the extension of RNA networks the schools obviously have that expertise in infrastructure adopt the library form a consortium get a build entity number and then throw fiber gig air wireless to the library whatever and they can actually decide their own filtering policies but they would then would be a conduit from the RNA down to library instead of the library connecting on their own which can be quite expensive right so I'll leave that I hope it you know that framework could find its way into the toolkit as another option because it is a it doesn't require any rule changes that's a great suggestion thank you yeah we know you have to go we know you have to go so thank you very much for being here yeah thank you you have the good work all we'll see you bye bye thank you so much so we and we are almost at the end of our time I actually have to go pretty soon too maybe we should go to any questions that folks have anybody have any questions comments anything you want to ask about or share about what you've done in your library you could type into the questions section or just say unmute me I want to say something and you can share that way as well so the I'm all the way to see I can't see if you're typing in so let's just wait and see what pops up while we're waiting if anybody has any questions the link to the toolkit is actually in our session info for this webinar so you'll have a direct link from there to it Stephanie also shared it in the chat in the system here but it'll be there in the recording and what I'm going to do now if it's okay Carson I was going to poke presenter control back to myself here absolutely take it here's the right button there we go I want to show all right there all right yes that out of my way we were talking about using this here at the commission and well we talked about the spark grant this is our webpage for the sparks grant if you're interested about it you can go to our commission website and learn about what we did do you just search for the word sparks and it comes up first and tell us what we're trying to remember what it was this is a national leadership grant from IMLS specific type of grant as he said for smaller amounts mainly for proof of concept type things which we did and we absolutely proved the concept right holly yes total success and then this is our broadband website at the commission lots of information here and under the resources section wait that wasn't all right one planning there it is we have the link here to the toolkit so if you come onto our page and look for something about broadband you'll get a link to it from there and lots of other things when you're improving your broadband and then our e-rate website that we have here lots of resources about e-rate what it is and down here under when you start getting into doing the forms the here yeah there we go the link to the the toolkit is here links also to other resources about doing e-rate so we have it all sorts of places on our site anywhere we can think of I guess that it would make sense to lead people into using it in addition whenever I do any of my trainings this is my previous trainings and recorded sessions it's in there and in the slides for everything as well too so it's all over please thank you so this is just things here in Nebraska for our Nebraska libraries open for anybody to look at but if you have another state see what your state might be doing for these kind of things too yes and everyone's doing it a different way of course because great libraries are hyper local local great state libraries are also hyper local and how they serve your specific needs and what's really interesting is some of the differences we have we can we can say we have stereotypes about Midwestern States or Western States in Wyoming and in Nebraska you're very much have consolidated and you're very good at consolidating help for libraries and pushing that out a state like South Dakota actually has war in common with a like a state in like the state of New Jersey where it's more about local control and so everyone has different challenges as far as getting this out and so I just love the way that you've that you're you're cross-referencing and you're using this as a component for other programs that you're doing and Stephanie and I are just so like so site that this is helpful great glad to hear it well it doesn't look like anybody had any different desperate questions urgently they wanted to ask right now and that's okay there's a lot of good information you got here a lot of resources to look at and you can always reach out to Carson Stephanie Holly Tom me whoever was any questions you do have so any last words from you guys thank you so much for having us and just feel free our email addresses are on those slides and you can reach out for anything any questions any feedback we'd love to hear from you yeah absolutely Holly no no no new words thank you excuse me some thank yous coming through and Carson yeah just send me the sharing link to those slides and it'll be added to our archive when we put it up we'll do we'll get it out to you yeah so thank you everybody for being here Carson Stephanie Holly and Tom who had to leave thank you everyone for attending we will be posting the archive by the end of this week this is our Encompass Live website so far Encompass Live is the only thing called that on the internet so if you use your search engine of choice and type in Encompass Live you'll find us no one else is allowed to use this name but these are upcoming shows but underneath there is our link to our archives most recent one at the top of the list here so the one for today will appear there as soon as it's processed and there'll be a link to the recording on our youtube channel and a link to the slides that Carson used well there's also a search feature here I'll mention if you want to look at any of our other or our previous shows you can search the entire show archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want to that is because this is our full archive and I'm not going to scroll all the way down because there's just too much Encompass Live premiered in January 2009 so we have over 10 years worth of archive shows here on this page so that's why we have a search feature now and a limit to just the most recent year if you want but we are librarians we do archive things and keep things for historical purposes so we always keep our information up here but just do pay attention to an original broadcast date there'll always be a date and everything that says when it was first done the show because some of the information will become updated some links won't longer work anymore some resources will change or update or disappear but we'll keep it up here for everyone as well and if you did want to see what we talked about the last time if you look up gigabit there's a previous show March of last year a couple of things about gigabit internet too but if you want to see what was done the first time when we had Carson on and Holly and Tong with that one too that's right yeah so that will be where the archive will be everyone who attended this morning and registered today's show will get an email from me letting you know when it's available we also push it out into our various social media nCump us live does have a facebook page right here's our page where we do post reminders to things because reminder to log into today's show when our recordings are available we post up here information about our presenters so do if you do like to use facebook give us a like over there we also use nCump live as our hashtag everywhere on on social media the commission as a twitter and instagram I'm not sure what else we're using now but as well as facebook so do you can track us that way as well so that will wrap up today I hope you join us next week our topic is discount shopping than the nlc we have lots and lots of companies and organizations that we work with to get discounts for our libraries you shouldn't have to pay full price for almost anything you do at your library so Susan nicely from our who handles all of these discount resources on databases and books and conferences we'll be with us next week to talk about some deals you can get that way so please do sign up for that show and any of our other upcoming sessions thank you everybody for being here and hopefully we'll see you on a future and come back live thank you so much bye bye everyone take care bye