 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. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's perfectly fine. We do record the show every week and it is then posted onto our website, and I'll show you the end of today's show where you can access the archive. Both the live show and the recordings and archives are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. We do quite a mixture of things here, book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, demos of services and products, basically anything that we think may be of interest to libraries. The Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska and for all libraries, so all types, so we will have things on the show for public libraries, academic, K-12 schools, directions, museums, anything that's a library, that's really our only criteria, library, it's a very broad topic. Sometimes we do have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on and talk about services or products or things that we're doing here, but we also bring in guest speakers to join us, and as we have this morning, sitting with me today is Tom Ralthus, who's actually from state of Nebraska too, so he's from the Nebraska Information Technology Commission, and remotely on the line with us from all the way on the west coast at the moment, is Carson Block. Good morning, Carson. Good morning. And they're going to talk about the toward Gigavit Libraries project that Carson been working on along with a lot of states, including Nebraska, as one of the testing areas, pilots, yeah, states. So I think we're going to start with you, Carson, and take your way and tell us about what we're doing. Outstanding, thank you. Thanks for joining this morning, and today it's so wonderful to keep spreading the word about the toward Gigabit Libraries toolkit, and so because of the audience for this presentation, I'm going to give you kind of a complete picture of what the toolkit is, including what it can do for you, including in a personal level. Some people have taken this toolkit and used it in their houses, so it's pretty awesome. Yeah, so, but I'd like you to see the full picture, because it is an interesting sort of process. My name is Carson Block. I'm a library technology consultant, but I actually have worked in a library. I've worked in a lot of libraries. I've been working in libraries for about 25-26 years now. Before I consulted, I worked in a number of contexts in libraries, all in Colorado before consulting, and I work nationwide. But in Colorado, one of my jobs was as a staff consultant for one of the regional library service systems that existed at the time. My role was in Northeast Colorado, and in Northeast Colorado, I worked on a lot of, I was a technology consultant working on a lot of connectivity issues, and during that experience, I got a deep and abiding love for rural libraries, and especially the challenges that they face. Yes, you heard that right. I love the challenges that rural libraries face because of the impacts that each have in the community. There's also this incredible advantage to being a small library, believe it or not, because I know there's a lot of disadvantages, but one of the advantages is when you get just a little bit of information that can improve your lives, you take the ball, and you run, and you make things happen. So this is what's been gratifying about this project, because this is what it is exactly designed to do. You can learn more about me by going to my website anytime I'm visible, so I won't go into that, but specifically for this project, it was just the right thing and things that I love. I don't want to go further without talking about our project staff, though, because the three of us were the core project team for this project, and I'd like to say something in tribute to James Worley. James was one of the project managers who worked for Internet2, and I'll talk about Internet2 in a moment. James passed away late last year quite suddenly, but after some illness, and so we missed James quite a bit, but he was heart and soul of this project. Also, Susanna Spellman, who is flourishing and doing so well, Susanna left Internet2 right before the end of the project to work in the private sector, where she has a lot of experience and success. But the three of us formed the core team for all the work that you see, and I don't think this would have happened in the same way without our three personalities kind of power team unite and making this happen, but there were a lot of others who helped. Before I talk, I'm going to play a video. Doesn't that sound lame? I'm going to play a video, though, because this video is so important to spreading the word, and this video is something that you can use to refresh your memory as to what the toolkit's all about, as well as to tell others about it. It's one of those explainer videos that's so popular right now, so I'm just going to hit play. 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 U.S., 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, 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 can 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 or 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 those common technology issues in your library. So, it does cover a lot of ground, whether 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 and 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. And that's the toolkit explainer video. And it covers everything so we can just take questions now. I'm just kidding. I'm just going to talk a little bit more about what we have happening here. One of the tricks for the embedded videos is getting to the next slide, but I did it and I'm so happy. So I'd like to talk a little bit about how the grant was formed. So, IMLS, are the Internet 2 contacted our IMLS for a grant application to perform this. This was based on a lot of discussion in the library community for the need for better technology. So, Internet 2, if you're not familiar with them, they're basically a network. Back in the day, it was created as the next generation Internet connecting all sorts of higher ed institutions at super high speeds. Today, it is evolved into something more of a community of what are called anchor institutions and different providers of connectivity. A lot of times that they're serving a lot of public institutions like schools. And Tom will talk a little bit more about his connection on that part of the world. The school networks, though in the library networks, sometimes talk to each other. Sometimes they don't in terms of interacting. It just depends on the state. But as you can see from this map, there's a lot of nodes or locations for Internet 2 serving public entities all over the country. And they also have something called the community anchor program, and that's where James and Susanna were affiliated. Now, the grant was a $250,000 grant from IMLS, which is the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It was awarded to Internet 2 in the spring of 2016. It was a three-year grant to develop training curriculum and assessment material, which was what we called the toolkit for library broadband infrastructure. We were targeting very rural and tribal libraries, and our partners included state library offices and what are called R and E networks, which are research and education networks. We wanted to pilot it in at least 30 libraries, and because we were efficient with our funds and we had such great support from our partners like Tom and Holly in Nebraska, we were able to go to more than 60 libraries to pilot this. It was so incredible. The process that we used, we wanted to make sure that we were doing a good job, because there's nothing worse than somebody coming in from outside saying, hi, I'm here from the government, and I'm here to help you. We did not want to do that, and so we wanted to make sure that we had lots of stops to make sure that not just the toolkit itself and the content of the toolkit was good, but that it was also a useful experience for everyone helping us, because we needed to of course reach folks who benefit this the most. I don't know about you, but I don't know of a single library worker in the country, no matter the size of the library, who has lots of time to do something that isn't useful to them, so we were very cognizant of that, so we had lots of check-ins. The the core team, we came up with the initial draft of the materials, and then we had what's called a subject matter expert, that's what SME stands for, a subject matter expert workshop of folks from all sorts of different library institution sizes, technical abilities, we had tribal representatives, everyone that we could get to come in and tear that toolkit apart. We said this is our best first chance, please come in and just rip it apart, let us know what's not working, what you don't like, and that is what we kept on through the entire process of the toolkit development, as we received feedback, we made iterative changes, because our goal was not, you know, not to be right, our goal was to do the right thing and to make sure this toolkit, if possible, could stand on its own as a standalone tool. So we continually updated the materials based on the SME workshop and then the pilots, of course, and then we finally, you know, finalized it and we released it into the wild last year. The toolkit is actually does three things at the same time, it's an educational workbook, it's also a self-assessment tool, and it's an advocacy platform, and these things all work together really well, because the more you know, the better you can advocate for yourself and for your needs. To know where you're at or what you know, you need a way to assess your current technology resources. So it was important that this did all three things at the same time. The toolkit components included a technology inventory of broadband connection, wired network devices, services, support, broadband funding, etc. That's why, if you look at it, it's kind of thick, because we tried to make it as small or as thin as possible, so that it would be user friendly, and we have found that it is user-friendly, but when you first look at the toolkit, if you download it and print it, you're going to go, you might go, oh my, that's why that looks like a lot to wade through. There's a lot of content there, but please don't be intimidated by that format. In case you open it up and get started, you'll see that it's not intimidating at all. Our process that we use those, we needed to make sure that we had the right folks to talk to, and there are so many right folks to talk to. It was so hard to settle on the ones that we did, but the ones that we did were excellent. The other thing that we wanted to do, and this was based on some experience I've had with similar programs in the past, is we did not want to visit someone who didn't really need our help or assistance. While it's important to test the toolkit, we wanted this to also benefit directly the library that was helping pilot us. We wanted to leave some value there, and leave some good things there after we left, and so this was part of that. So we did have an intake survey to make sure that we had an understanding of our pilot libraries and could really drill down on what the needs are. We did our visit, and during our visit we did the toolkit process together in partnership with our local partners, and so that was Tom and Holly in Nebraska, and we had other different partners in different states that we visited in different tribal areas. We also created a broadband improvement plan. That's where the rubber meets the road. That's the suggestions for things to do in both short-term and long-term chunks, and then that completes the process. Now the approach to the toolkit is, again, it's one that we developed over time, and the idea is that we're asking, through the toolkit, we're asking questions in specific categories, and then we're giving the resource to help you answer that question all contained on that same page. Now some of the stuff you would need to follow a link, a web link, because there's richer information, but we tried as best as possible to make sure that the question was answerable by what you could have right in front of you to at least get started. So there's a question, there's choices to answer that question, and then a resource right with it combined to help you answer that question. We visited a lot of places, like I said, we got to see twice as many as we budgeted for, and that's just because of the just the wonderful partnerships and teams that we formed. On this map you can see all of the public libraries in blue and all of the tribal libraries in kind of an orange color, and it was important to visit both. A lot of times if we're in a public library we might not be familiar with tribal libraries and vice versa. They have completely different needs sometimes even though our core missions tend to be the same. The needs and the environments, the resources are all different, but we're all trying to provide service to our community through technology. I wanted to share some survey results, because these are awesome, and this is I think will prove the point that we hit the right people. As you can see that most of the the folks that we worked with were standalone libraries, so even those that were part of a library system, this wasn't like a large or a significantly like a well-healed to the library system, but most of the folks were standalone libraries. The other thing is that as you can see from this chart, technical support is not at the top of availability for most of the folks, and it's like that's perfect because that is the situation that we want to address in the best way we can, so we want to work with folks who don't have a great deal of IT and tech support. We also wanted to check in on the experience that people had, and as you can see more than just just a little over than 50% have limited experience, 44% no experience, and then that little tiny sliver folks felt very experienced in terms of their broadband and technology in their library. We also asked about hopes and dreams because again the reason we have technology and libraries at all is to serve the needs of our community. It's there as a tool to serve folks. Even when it gets shiny and it gets awesome and cool at the bottom, at the end of the day, the purpose of the library is to serve community needs in a way that's unique to that community and specific to that library. So we wanted to check in with what people wanted to do, and I think if you look at these quotes you're going to see things that may ring true for you or at least for others that you know. It's a lot about access. It's a lot about bringing up our communities together. A sense of comfort and mastery in using technology, a way to even the playing field in terms of rural and urban when it comes to competing. There's no reason when you've got connectivity that you can't do anything anywhere these days. But you need the connectivity, opportunities, employment, et cetera. You might wonder, so what did you find of those 60 libraries? These are some of the top issues. Insufficient bandwidth for sure. Just bandwidth connections that were too low even for a single user, let alone for a library trying to serve multiple users. Found lots of data wiring issues. You know, there's a misconception that once you install the wire you're done. Well, you know, in some cases that wire wasn't installed very well to begin with in other cases. It was not adequate for the way that the library had grown or the way the library needed to do things. We saw a lot of inefficient network setups. You know, building a network is usually a combination of boxes that are plugged into each other with wires or they're using wireless technology to connect those boxes. And there's optimum ways to connect that so that they work really well together and there's ways that are not so optimum. So we saw a great deal of network setups that could use improvement. We saw lots of old and obsolete equipment. Again, I think on the network side, if a network's working it's kind of invisible, right? So we don't really think about it that much. And even in larger institutions, not just in small and rural and tribal libraries, not everyone knows that you need to replace things. There's a useful life for equipment. There's a duty cycle and so we were able to spot that. Lots of poor Wi-Fi coverage, of course, and that's a that's a common challenge but it scales, right? It scales up and it scales down. But Wi-Fi coverage, especially as demand for Wi-Fi goes up, has been an issue. And then also not participating in e-rate. And that was significant now because of with the changes a few years ago and the e-rate structure, there's more money available to libraries to do infrastructure improvements for those wishing to participate. So in some cases this made the difference. As we were going, like I said, we had so many wonderful partners. We took feedback and we kept this massive spreadsheet. Every piece of feedback that came in, even if it was a question that came up before that we felt we had answered, the team would consider and look at it and decide if we should make a change to the toolkit or leave it alone. And there were some things that we went back and forth on as we went forward because as a goal of having our materials as clear as possible, being challenged in this way was the best possible thing. And it helped reinforce some of the decisions that we made going forward. If you're not a technician, this is this is like a common joke. But if you're not a technician, you can ask the question, how many technicians does it take to screw in a light bulb? It takes five. One to screw in the light bulb and the other four to tell you how you could do it much better. So I know it's an old joke. But the point of that is that we want to listen to all of those five things and then ask ourselves, not from the technician's point of view, but from the library's point of view, but what makes the most sense? Because sometimes there's a technical solution that is superior. But it might be too hard or too much to ask of a we're thinking of a solo librarian on the plains of Nebraska, right? And it's like, do they want to deal with having to even understand this concept or did they just want to get it fixed? So that was one of the things that we used as a measure. And so that tension throughout the toolkit was super healthy. It was very good because it made us challenge our assumptions and it kept our brains active the whole time as we were trying to do the best job that we could. We wanted to make sure that we were doing a good job. So we asked questions all along. I wanted to share some of the we had a survey that we sent to participants after the experience and we were delighted to see that we were being effective as a community and this was all of us in reaching our marks. Understanding the satisfaction for increased understanding. Those are great numbers. Those are super great. Knowledge increased in some almost across the board in things and broadband funding, use and activities, network devices, wi-fi, computers, the wired network, the connection, etc. What we saw was just a general increase in the folks feeling more knowledgeable in key areas. The overall experience with the pilot program was so good to see that reflected because again we know how hard it is for folks to stop and then have this visit with people. You know we're taking over your life for like half a day and nobody has half a day to do anything that's not worthwhile. So we were happy to see that folks felt that that time was valuable and then of course this is my favorite one. Would you recommend this? It was quite good to see because you know again there was for me having worked with a lot of rural libraries directly. I know that if we're not you know if we don't walk or talk it's not going to work and it's not it's not good for anybody and so this this is actually the one that made me feel the best because I don't know anybody in library land that's going to recommend something that doesn't work. So now a little bit more about the toolkit to go back. We talked about the structure in the process. The kit is broken down into these areas. The first is a technology inventory because you have to know kind of you know what you have and what shape it's in before you can know what to do with it and in this one we looked at the broadband connection network devices the wired network and power wireless network and power and computer and user devices. In the broadband services and activities section we looked at the needs for bandwidth. Things like hotspot lending internet filtering and different services that might ride in that. Broadband technical operational support is the next section because we know that that is a an uneven area throughout rural library so you know is there staff available for technology support training resources are they available is there tech support from your internet service provider. How is the service with them and are they you know are they good with helping you. Also broadband funding looking at prices and what things costs and what discounts and other ways that you might have available to you to the funding you need. We had a lot of things that didn't make the toolkit but they were important so we had to have a section on additional resources and best practices that covered a lot of things outside of the scope of the toolkit and then one of the favorite sections from people around the country is the glossary having a place to look for common terms that that that come up and so that's the overview and frankly i think that's enough of me talking the best thing to do now is to talk to one of our wonderful partners and say so how did it actually go how is what were the actual experiences so tom are you ready to to hop on and chat a little bit. Sure it would be fine. Excellent so we'll do we'll do a little Q&A and we're so sorry that that your partner in Nebraska Holly is not not able to to join us hollywalts of the. Not on the road today yeah unfortunately but yeah but we. Your question about the project or as as you and she's actually i believe that's her in the picture there in the top one yeah that top picture there in the back is holly on the left there is tom at one of her and you know which library that is. That should be Weimler. Weimler are awesome. That's that's that's wonderful yeah and Susanna is there with you too it's nice to see uh Susanna. Tom how and maybe you can also speak to your record your recollection of of holly's perspective as well the teamwork approach that we had in Nebraska that it's one of our best examples of this. How did you first get involved with okay. Well uh and by the way thanks Carson for the intro uh I had had a relationship with internet too and James early and Susanna dating back to the mid two thousands so as Christa mentioned in the intro uh one of my job roles Nebraska Information Technology Commission another had I where is helping manage the statewide network for schools and colleges and three library systems by being part of network Nebraska like 41 other states these networks also joined the internet too which was uh that you know the principle of the impetus behind the grant program uh how we can better reach rural areas and assist our library counterparts in better broadband whether they connect to the statewide network or not so that was my interest in Nebraska we're very fortunate we have uh 244 school districts they're all connected by fiber to the state network uh we've been able to bring down their internet rates by you know amazing amounts and that they're all working closely together but our small rural libraries are quite the opposite many of their bandwidth supply their providers the costs that they pay and their participation in need rate would be considered on the other end of the spectrum from where our school districts are at in Nebraska and that may be true of other rural states needed it yeah to uh participate in the toolkit pilot because um we're nothing without our public libraries in rural Nebraska and uh another interest of mine is what is called the homework gap so again our students are well cared for with technology between 80 and 3 p.m but when they leave school and they go home we know that between 15 and 20 percent are without internet at home and therefore they return to their rural community center and either go into or sit outside the library for internet so it doesn't do that much good if if the supply is not functioning properly for the bandwidth isn't high enough right so that was the backdrop for my participation and then the relied on the library commission to name the five pilot libraries that were part of the brask effort the pilot visitations and they range from northeast Nebraska to southeast north central and western so the communities ranged in size from 1,100 to 8,300 population one of them being 8,000 we consider that a medium to large size our definition of what is a small library in our rural states is much different than even imls's definition but they were certainly all under 25,000 and it was uh it was a good opportunity and experience for me to be able to spend some time as karson mentioned three to four hours in our intake interview using the toolkit at every library as we went from place to place and finding out the state of their internal connections as well as their external and how high a need there is within rural Nebraska and many other states now what were the communities that for those who don't know that we do the pilots for the nebraskans on the call you'll recognize some of these communities out the better quarter back and send a gearing valley wall hill and weymour yep so the weymour is in the upper left corner i believe that's the valley location in the lower right who happens to have a special reading room in a bank vault which is where the remodeled building is so it was pretty amazing as we went from one location to another and see that not only the infrastructure but also the physical structure of the library that they are working with yeah we're trying what they have to work with physically to get all this on the wiring upgraded and where can they even put in these computers or cables or whatever you need yeah exactly and karson i've got more to share but you might tease that out of me with some of your questions well i um i would like you to uh actually i'd like to to to keep um talking about this track that you're on right right now instead of going to the canned questions because what what this reminds me of tom is how delightful it was to meet you and holly and especially how invested um you became personally you became it holly was as well in and actually sleep the issues that that we were discovering on the site visit that we were together with as well as the ideas that that you had generated and looking for opportunities for collaboration and i think that's that's that's what that was my takeaway from Nebraska was not just the good work that we were able to do together but the the spark that came from it well funny you should say spark part of the hours of windshield time that we had traveling together and i really didn't know holly very well prior to the project but it turned out that we had you know a shared passion for rural Nebraska she has many many dozens of library visits for from a previous grant effort right we had one of the b-top grants through i am less years ago where we installed um computers and and furniture into libraries and she was actually that's actually how she ended up with the library commission the basketball library commission she was hired to be part of that project um that specific grant project and then when that ended um what we actually heard around as a permanent staff person here and she has a little bit different background from a typical state library person and she has a computer science degree and my degree in preparation is in education science technology and ad net so uh when you talk about team chemistry i think we presented some really good compliments to each other i had the you know the large scale macro technical background working with all the telecom and cable companies in Nebraska dealing with fiber procurement cost of internet and holy ed boots on the ground experience in a relationship with every library director that we met and so we were able to go back and forth uh during the pilot phase with the interviews and the projects and what one of us didn't know it was a high likelihood that the other one would so that is how we descended on these five locations um just talking quickly about their bandwidth uh the five pilot sites that i mentioned deal with five different telecom providers and they have bandwidths ranging from basically three megabits off of a water tower to 100 megabit uh via a fiber connection so there is great diversity even within those five and it it has nothing to do with their geography necessarily it more had to do with how a particular provider has made investments in a particular community over time and the water tower example um is a community that's in high need so even though the school might be gigabit fiber that did not expand to the rest of the community and most of them are using either satellite internet or shared internet off of fixed wireless from the water tower which is exactly where the library got their internet so their findings were at five o'clock when everybody came home from work the library internet went to almost zero you know so they were using it for the same connection in the whole town so that led Holly and I to think about the sparks grant with iMLS and we proceeded to apply and were awarded $25,000 to work with five libraries and then we added an additional and we're able to connect each of those libraries up with their gigabit school partners and now we able to drop in over 100 megabits using homework hotspots within each of these libraries so of the sixth that became part of the sparks grant only one of them came from this initial toolkit it's five more libraries in addition to this so between the two grants we're able to reach you know 11 different libraries raise their technical expertise and also in some cases quickly drop in much faster bandwidth to supplement either cable or DSL internet that they're using with their patrons so and we have many more ideas than we have time yes or or what we can do and help change the landscape of Nebraska we hope all of your pilot states are having similar experiences that if you know introduce new concepts new team chemistry getting our state agencies to work more closely together and then really create a positive effect for the libraries that are most in need we saw that in some places and in some places it wasn't as strong because the connector or the the motivation to do so was a little bit harder Arizona had a similar experience that that you and Holly had in terms of teaming and being able to to resource together in a powerful way I think what we saw more often than not was was more like a micro example of this because you're talking about two agencies collaborating and finding new opportunities to serve a lot of people the toolkit sort of as a venue or libraries that did have some tech support but they weren't talking with each other and so being able to sit around and talk about these issues together have a shared vocabulary was also very powerful on on the micro level and so I think that was what happened in most of the places there was tech support on the but the the differences between some of the states where where you had extreme like you too are awesome and have vision and the juice to be able to pull that vision off other states struggle with that and it made us think about how just how I've spent actually is and is it possible to cultivate in the future so that's where my brain is right now it's like how how do we get that going a little bit more strongly and sometimes I think it takes just the time and just keep pushing for it it doesn't always work the first time through I mean this the Sparks grant and the the toolkit here are huge success stories but I can tell you Tom has been coming to us at the commission for years before you did these with ideas about how to get this the library is faster internet how to get them onto this backbone that's already in the state and it just wasn't it just wasn't happening yet there was just too too many hurdles convincing the school the libraries of that this is something to do cost potentially issues and but he just kept going away at us and it wouldn't go away and it was great ideas everything but it was just getting getting you know figuring out the exactly you know on the ground how do you make this work out and then finally the Sparks grant I think was the first thing I'm not sure which time which the timing was that the Sparks one compared to this one you know first this was exactly two years ago okay this month that we did most of our travel in Nebraska was one of the earliest pilot states and then things are finally coming together that we're figuring out how we can make it happen convincing the libraries to do it I know Tommy's presented at our state library conference for quite a few years before we actually managed to get some libraries who are willing to actually yeah and one thing you know I'm a typical well maybe not typical taxpayer because I plugged into some of the technological things in the state but who knew when you look at the numbers of our 260 libraries in Nebraska and you can pick any state and then start looking at their self reported bandwidth and look at their providers and look at the cost that they're paying right it was like a revelation for me to to learn that because I deal with schools and they're all fiber and we try to bring down their cost so they can buy more and it's more affordable that within 12 blocks of these same community anchor institutions sat another public entity a public library that is quite the reverse yeah in most cases other end of the spectrum regular schools getting and I considered that a major unknown that was I go we need to tell the story and so we're using other efforts within the NITC and the education council that I work with and remember this wraps back to digital inclusion and the digital divide and the homework gap and while our rural entities both residents business farms and public libraries are somewhat stuck in time with their infrastructure there are some notable positive exceptions but in general they've had the same infrastructure and speeds that they had five years ago in the same five years in Lincoln Nebraska every house now has access to fiber they now have a minimum speed of 300 megabits which is probably 20 to 50 times faster than any library that we visited and in the meantime their their cost went down and so that's normalcy in a rural or excuse me an urban environment and their libraries are also fiber we're also connected to this statewide network but there's a huge chasm between a community of 300,000 and 3,000 or maybe 300 and so it can't just be a local issue Carson you can tell I'm on my soapbox it can't just be a local issue because the local fruits and their libraries have gotten them where they are so I think we need more you know also a statewide effort and there's also federal dollars available that we're not taking advantage of through the ERA program and I think we can approach that in a more systematic fashion so I hope those dreams for Nebraska are also reminiscent of what you're seeing in other states Carson yes the they they are but you're especially strong in Nebraska I just want to give props I want to give props to you because the in many cases in other places sometimes the the spirit is willing but it's really hard to negotiate through and that's part of what I was trying to talk about with the advantages of the rural landscape versus some of the larger urban I think most of us are smart working libraries and know what the right thing to do is there's layers of politics in many organizations that make it it's just it's just how it is and it's very hard to make change in rural areas we can be agile and especially agencies serving many rural communities we can see ways to be to be agile usually the biggest hurdle is availability of funding or availability of infrastructure like trying to figure out how to get infrastructure yet and and it takes thinking and creativity to look at existing resources that's what I admire so much about you Tom is is you're really good instead of saying well how can we dig some new money out of this or that you're like hey have we maximized what's on the table right now that is such an excellent strategy and I admire that you're thinking in your actions in that area because that is right that's the way to do it and you know the sparks grant was a good example and again microwave big space bar was was a limitation right Nebraska we didn't know we were had so many trees until the start trying to plot a site visible pathway between the school rooftop and the library so in a couple cases and this would be true of any partnership that develops in a rural area if you can't get that connection you find a way so in one of the sparks library situations we used a public safety tower as a relic so the school library couldn't see each other but they could both see the tower so you know a little permission in a small community and Bowenby Hall they dropped in at 120 megabits and they had 20 previously in Wymore that particularly challenging community we ended up using a public power district to help us plant a telephone pole in the yard of the library that was big enough to see over the trees of the mayor's house that just happened to be strategically barricading between the pathway to the school rooftop so these all go kind of dovetail with your action plan concept Carson within the toolkit is okay we know that our bandwidth is inadequate what do we do about it we do now yeah you know we have an upgrade path with our provider can we afford more can we make better use of e-rate could there be community partnerships where you know the school superintendent library director are willing to share bandwidth like we did with the Sparks grant that was only $2,500 per community so those things are well within the reach of many of these situations they just need to think creatively exactly Robby's here how would I put my questions anyone in our yeah anybody if you have any questions or thoughts on this type into the question section and you're go to webinar interface or if you have a microphone just say I have a microphone and we'll unmute you and you can ask your question that way I know we've got people here from our Nebraska libraries but also people from out of state so this is you know we're talking a lot about Nebraska here because what we did here but as you saw Carson's map this was in lots of other states as well the pilot projects for this and now it's available for anyone and everyone to to actually see it so I saw some Texas if you're out there you know show us your representative and get online yes six state library archives yeah did you do one in Idaho too because some of the Idaho Yeah we we did do we did do Idaho as well yes they're awesome you know they were talking about it so go ahead and take the questions if you have them or any if you were involved in any of these pilots or if you've already looked at the tool because this as you said this went live well public you did everyone last last fall or earlier in the year obviously that was early this early fall of what went out and and I know that the state e-rate coordinators a lot of those folks have grabbed it and have been using it I think some see who was it someone's already remixed it because we have the creative commons licenses like take this and and use it into another format let's grab that and created the whole little thing it was New York and New York was not one of our states but New York has a lot of rural and small libraries a lot of small communities in in parts of the state that aren't the city so they've they've remixed it I saw a screenshot from someone's presentation for that the and just trying to oh Kimber the Kimber connectivity consortium in Pennsylvania they're they're doing some work with with that I might drop in a webinar such as this to assist with that the scenic we're going to be a presentation at the scenic conference about this as part of a group of other IMLS grants and the scenic is is in California and it's a an organization that's worked with the California State Library and another California organization to provide a high speed bandwidth to every library in the state so it's when I say high speed their target I believe is is one gigabit connection despite you know at minimum that's like the baseline so of course some of the larger libraries in California more than that because there's a lot of people out here in California and a lot of people to serve but there's also a lot of rural areas in California that if not if you're not out here you don't often think of of the smaller places and places that also need connectivity yeah I think I don't really think of the big the states that have the biggest population as well the big population everywhere and it's not like New York and Texas and California that they go it's just all cities and no I'm from New York it's there are rural it's just as rural there and the smallest towns as there is here in Nebraska there's just not as it's just not as much but they're still out there and they're a little 400-500 population sort of towns needing the and not having that fast connection yeah right well one of the fun things I think in New York is you don't have to drive so far in between little Hamlets they're right next to each other one right after another yes it is true Nebraska it's like okay I've got my car I'm driving here it's going to be a little while I'll be there in four hours no problem yes yes yes yeah for as for E-Ray yeah I'm the state E-Ray coordinator for Nebraska actually yeah yeah and um I did last fall when I did my training because this had well obviously I was keeping an eye on it because we were involved as soon as it was live I added that into my workshop into my slides as after talking about the different things you can get E-Ray discounts on and I said and if you don't have a clue because this is this is actually is the part where a lot of our libraries kind of lose the lose the idea in applying for E-Ray you can get an E-Ray discount on construction and equipment and not just your monthly internet cost but getting this these things set up for you in the first place you do need to operate and people kind of lose it at that point of well but what and how do I know and I get so many questions of well what do I have what is my router or or my whatever and I'm like I don't know that but here's this thing that you can take now and figure it out and what you do have and that's why I love what you're talking about in the toolkit the um it's not just filling all these answers it's explanations but what these things mean definitions of this is what you're looking for and if you don't know talk to this person in your town or find someone who knows the IT has that skill and they will show you where this piece of equipment is or what you're supposed to be looking for and how it connects to something else so it's it's not don't be scared of it I I'm people it's you know it's you know it's technology it's a tech plan it's whatever and I don't even know what to do it guides you through it all I'm so it's so good to hear that because that's the true test of the toolkit is you know because that's what we tried to do right everybody gets to choose whether or not that actually happens because we all have different levels of knowledge I do know that in my experiences with this toolkit specifically folks who had not had thought of technology as a black box as soon as they realized it's they can understand the components and how the components work together it became like anything else in their life and they could make decisions about it especially how to approach it and I think that that's probably the most powerful surprising thing that that people have is wait a minute you're telling something that was mysterious is now more clear in plain language and now that I know what it is I definitely have opinions on how this fits on my my priorities and how I want to do things so I think that that's in our highfalutin way we're like that's our piece of advocacy and we can talk about advocacy as the ultimate outcome of that because that's what happens but I think pre-advocacy is just having understanding what is this thing and then being able to on the cuff talk about it have your elevator speech the first part of this that to detect to look at this figure out we have and then it does what I thought was interesting that I think I didn't expect was that extra part about funding it's not just what I have but now that I know what I have what are the ways that I can get the money to get make it better and that's where you end up talking to your stakeholders and your mayor and your board members whoever in the county in your area might be in charge of the money or able to influence the the influencers there and once you know what you've got you can more easily explain it to them and explain why they need to increase your budget or why you need to have the help to apply for this grant of some sort or figure out how to use you really turn right exactly so Carson and if I would have guessed your next slide would say where do we go from here but if you have one comment that someone did say that I do want to share and it was actually right at the same time as you were talking about this is kind of funny I saw this pop up and you just mentioned this that this library says my library is picked last year as one of only five in the state of Pennsylvania for a study by Kimber Associates for the broadband study yes yes yes so yeah so one of those libraries is on and that was just so is that has that been done is that still being worked towards that I believe Kimber is going to launch that now I one of the hard things the grant is you know once it's over we lose like day to day touch with what's happening so I may I don't want to be speaking out of turn but I think the idea at Kimber is they they're they're they're piloting this further and customizing it because they've got a lot of network expertise that's what they do right and so they're they're targeting for the needs that they have so I'm really happy to hear that that you're one of the folks working with Kimber and I hope that it's a good experience for you as well because it's still in the works yes so there's there they've been picked and it's still working on getting going yep I know I'm good go go go do it we need more of this done more research yeah so it's great Carson that the toolkits in production level it's linked to creative comments it's public domain and usable downloadable by all but if Holly were here she'd be talking about the library commission's ideas for the toolkits to live on I think Chris is going to I'll write some of that into your box yeah yeah um yeah Holly Holly Wolt is our one of our IT people here at the library commission and many of you Nebraska libraries as we mentioned would know her she's been out there for other grants the B-top grant we had the Sparks grant currently working with the we have a maker space grant going on now we're on this but she's involved in all these things and but related to the toolkit she would actually just talking to her on the phone about this on Monday and she wants she's going to plan on doing some sort of monthly regular sort of like office hours online for our libraries where she would just set up like go to a webinar session like this for anybody to come in and talk to her to help them complete their toolkits so rather than having to go like I'm on a travel around the state to 20 different libraries they can just log in and live chat with her on a regular basis and get the you know figure out what they need to enter if they have questions you know like you said there's a lot of helpful stuff in there and glossary and everything but sometimes she said you need to talk to another person and just hash things out and she wants to set that up and she's actually talked to our continuing education coordinator which is another Holly Holly Duggan who they're going to work on if you complete your toolkits and submit that to Holly Wolton she looks at over and said looks all good you can earn continuing education credits for actually doing that putting that thing together for your library so definitely trying to encourage and more libraries to do it just now like to get the information but to earn continuing education credits for it which then can go towards your library's your certification and your library's accreditation but then Holly's going to try and do a regular be available for anybody who has any questions about it so that will be coming we have to still schedule it and get that all worked out but wow that is fantastic good work that's great I love I love both of those concepts because the CE credits everyone loves having different opportunities to gain those and ideally the CE is rubber meets the road and I especially love the idea of the office hours capability is it was that lightning no that was just one of our lights just went out we have spotlights here for like camera lights like a talking to lights that I think would revolve just for it to be something like this let me turn that off so there's nothing else there's no fires yet Carson that is so outstanding I'm so tickled to hear about the the office hours because I know that one of the one of the things in the toolkit that you know made a difference for folks is having someone who cares and having some knowledge to help with any of the gray areas and so that's that's awesome yeah I think in a basic sense yeah she's really good at talking to her libraries as Tom said she made that personal connection by going out there and visiting them and it was kind of interesting we've talked about that she she after the b-top grant her original reason for being here she came and talked to a lot of us here at the commission and had a different kind of I don't know if it's a different view of how libraries are doing out there we have a lot of staff here at the commission we can't always get on the ground into all the libraries as Tom said there were 260 70 public libraries out there but we're the library the commission for all libraries in state too so those aren't the only ones we serve and we don't always get to be in their libraries and in that grant we had 140 something libraries that she because we're inputting we're installing equipment and increased broadband and furniture and whatnot and she physically went to all of them which was a huge thing to to break that connection that personal connection there and she be able to bring back ideas from them and now there it's helped us just with everything else we do now they're more they're ready to jump on anything that we kind of suggest to them a lot easier I think that hopefully did to the spark strength now that's kind of a big deal would you repeat what you just said that's a big deal the which part you said that that they're listen that your client libraries have a they're listening a little bit more carefully at the suggestions that are coming and I think and I've that that that came out because I you know I work for you know quasi governmental like state agency and I know what it's like again to come in and and have credibility with with local staff because he has time to do things that are not not valuable and so I'm sorry I just caught that and I'm like that's real that's wonderful because that's building a trust relationship that benefits the library really benefits patrons it's really what you said very beginning about we're the big government coming in and telling them what to do and they hate that they you know 50% that they hate that they don't want to know they don't like that but and but we're not that I mean we are a state agency but we always have our libraries are different than a lot of other public organizations and schools and things and we're here we really are here to help that's our whole job is to make your job easier at the library and we do put out a lot of great resources and things but I think getting physically into those buildings and because only because we had this huge grant where she could travel to those locations it made that little end and now she can call someone who she visited from those grants on the fly and say hey we want to get you on the sparks thing you're going to do it oh all right yeah oh it's so wonderful anybody have any other questions any comments anything anyone who's used it nobody said they've used it yet but that's that's okay yeah if this is your first entree please grab it and use it we'll definitely be pushing it more it's going to be in we're going to be doing of those sessions and probably it's going to be part of my e-rate as a regular thing now and anywhere else and anything else we can use it and I'm I'm also adding it to our I mentioned as the student education we do library public library accreditation our libraries get accredited and then they can but they go certain process and they can get more state funding and I'm adding it to their those pages as well for libraries to figure out how can I increase my accreditation by getting better internet and I know that's the thing that they can use to do that so I'm adding it to that process as well so it's going to be everywhere you're not going to you're I'm not going to let you stop hearing about it please keep keep the comments music to my ears Carson you want to repost the link again for the download yeah let me see if I can find it if you want to go to the website you can just do that as well that's yeah let me pull up I'll be I've oh I've so many slides here's here's the short link this will turn into a different link this is our wonderful friends at internet to our hosting the link itself so I'm going to copy that over but it's www.internet2.edu forward slash pgl and if you're super hip you'll put in that last forward slash because it makes it that much easier for the lookup to happen see there's a little piece of geeky information that then people don't talk about it that much so I'm going to bring this up and I'll show you what the page looks like very quickly here's the explainer video and that's the first place if you're if you're if you want to refresh what the tool gets about hit that first it's it's like four and a half minutes long it's it's not too bad we have lots of supporting documents the most important ones are the broadband toolkit which is up here at the top and it's in a word doc format because we want you to to take it and use it and then the broadband improvement plan if you would like to see our work all the work that went in and the different things that we put together every document that we have and much of the data that we collected of course it's scrubbed the data scrub for a confidentiality of those who are responding we have it all right here so if you want to see like examples of different broadband improvement plans things that we suggest their language that we that's a place that I would suggest looking through and grabbing stuff that you can use and use it for yourself but it's all here we want you to we want you to use it and to do good for your communities with this you'll get good and now your slides to I'll always ask about this because you just show as you're going to there's a lot more slides to than what we showed today we can link to that if you have them somewhere online or yeah I will do me a favor because I'm on the road I know like no one cares but I'm a library I'm a technology consultant so I'm constantly on the road this morning I will be like running from here to do some some site work in California please get a hold of my assistant Bonnie and ask her for a pf and we'll get that to you absolutely yep and then that'll be available for everyone along with the archive when we put that up I would be there no problem right on very good all right we're a little after 11 a.m. Central Time that's okay anybody have any last minute desperate questions or comments or things you need to say get in there hey last minute we're going to Tom or just I feel very fortunate to be a part of the formal project and working together with another state agency on that shared effort I think it's great for Nebraska and it could be very good in other states that forge the same kind of partnership yeah as I said we've been very successful working together and I think it's gonna we're not gonna stop sorry keep doing more things Outstanding thank you so much Nebraska for being such a wonderful example of collaboration and and getting things done continues to be an inspiration for me so I can't wait to see what happens from here thank you thanks Carson all right I am going to pull back present your control to my screen here okay and actually I'm not sure where I can have it so I'm gonna see here very good as we are going to and I better better go don't want you to be late no that's right I negotiated with my client to be able to do this this morning and they were very nice so but I better I better get to the site and get to work all right thank you very much Carson all right all right so for everyone online that's going to wrap it up for today's show it'll be on our our live not well library commission website encompass live website which you can get from our library commission web page under we have education and training we have encompassable here but you can also just google us whatever your search engine of choice is and end of the slide so far is the only thing on the internet call this nobody take that mean and the recording will be here here's our upcoming shows but underneath that is a link to our archives and they are just most recent ones at the top so it'll be right here at the top we'll have a link to the recording as I said will be is available through our youtube channel this is last week show and then we'll link the presentation that I will get from Carson's assistant will add that as well for everyone anyone who is here today live on the show who will register to get an email from you let me know what's that ready we'll also post it out to our twitter and our facebook we do have a facebook page for encompass live there we go we got a link here for that so if you are being on facebook give us a like over there we post reminders here's our reminder login to today's show when recordings are available when new shows are coming up we anyone want to win right now we post them all here as well so give us a like over on facebook and you'll get notified there in our archives just want to let you know while we're here looking at that this is our archives of the entire history of encompass live this is now our 11th year we started in january 2009 and everything is here going all the way back there is a search feature here you can look search the entire archives are just much recent 12 months from our current up to date information just pay attention when you're looking at our recording and what date was originally broadcast on because there will be some old information in here some outdated some things that have been updated some services or products or links that don't work anymore because it's been so long but we are librarians so that's what we do we archive things so they'll always all be out there for you so just pay attention when you are looking at the archives there so I'll hopefully join us for next week's show when we'll be talking more about technology because you can always have that we've got some diverse reading health education resources coming up OER in May we're going to be talking with our newly appointed state poet Matt Mason he'll be with us here but next week we're talking about the ethics behind emerging technology this is the second in a two-part series that our technology innovation librarian in the industry is doing on February 13th she talked about what is emerging technology and recording for that is available so if you might want to watch that in preparation for next week she'll be talking about the ethics behind emerging technology so please do sign up for that any of our other shows that we have coming up other than that that wraps it up thank you everyone for being here thank you for coming on today Matt thank you and we will see you next time when we come to the slides bye