 All right. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that 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 and it is posted, and then the recording is posted to our website later. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can get, you can see all of the archives of our shows. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, interviews, demos, software and products, things that libraries are doing, things we think libraries should be doing. We also have the Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations, but we also bring in guest speakers sometimes. And that's what we have this morning with us on the line today is Heidi Blackburn on the left. Well, depends on, yeah, let's see which way we're looking here. And Tammy Owens, they're both from the University of Brasket, Omaha, the Krista Library up there, we're voting in for us this morning. Good morning, guys. Good morning. I'm just up the street. And they're from a university, obviously a university library. And we do lots of things here on the Encompass Live, the Library Commission, the Nebraska Library Commission, for those of you that might be coming to us from outside the state, we are the state library agency for all libraries. So we have shows for public libraries, K-12, academics, corrections, anything and everything you think of, that's a library. And today we're talking about university and academics specifically. A textbook program is not for us. Heidi and Tammy had a project here and it didn't exactly go as planned, but we learned from art, these kind of things. So I'm just going to hand it over to you guys to take it away and tell us about what you guys did there up at UNO. OK, great. Thank you so much. OK, so my name is Heidi Blackburn. I am the STEM and Business Librarian here at UNO. You can reach out to me at my email, which is hblackburnatunmahaw.edu. Or if you are on Twitter, my handle is at Heidi Blackburn. And my name is Tammy Owens and I'm the Outreach and Instruction Librarian here at Chris Library and I'm at Tammy Owens at uanomaha.edu. So today we are going to talk about why a textbook program is not for us. And I'm going to talk about the project and some of its failures. And then Tammy is going to talk about how we reimagine some of our failures into better opportunities for our library. All right, so for a quick refresh for everyone who could not attend our session at Nebraska Library Association last year, we heard about textbook programs at ACRL in the spring of 2017. And I was really, really excited about this because science and engineering textbooks can run over $400 a piece. So imagine you are a student and you are taking four or five classes at a time. So being a good librarian, I came home after the conference and I read everything that I could about textbook programs at other institutions. We saw a real need at our institution for textbook accessibility for students because UNO is a socioeconomically diverse campus. And we are a metropolitan serving university. So this pilot would help us meet recruitment and retention goals for UNO overall as well. We asked to pilot the project at UNO libraries and we wrote up policies for the pilot project. So we took what we learned from ACRL's presentations and posters and from the literature and we thought we were ready to go. By July 2017, we had buy-in and we had buy-in from the library administration, including a small amount of seed money for 11 titles that we thought would theoretically be supporting thousands of students. We had convinced the other subject librarians that this program would be beneficial to all students, not just students who were going to be in the STEM programs. We had worked with the bookstore, which was the biggest hurdle according to everything that we had heard and we convinced them to partner with us. We had spoken with student government reps and they were all about free textbooks, quote, and we had enthusiastic approval from advisers who were seeing situations where students were choosing to not buy food so they could buy textbooks or not pay rent so they could buy textbooks. And we had started promoting the program through targeted emails, the campus website, library signs, the daily campus newsletter, social media, and of course, word of mouse. So you'll see a little gif here. So this is what it felt like starting the pilot in 2017. We just took a big leap and we hoped for the best. And some of you may relate to this gif. This is one of Tammy and I's favorite gifs because he had good enough of it. It's kind of funny. Very brave. So by summer 2018, it felt more like this. We took a leap. That felt really big, but it didn't really get us where we wanted to be. And when we looked up, we had to look around and assess why we didn't get there. So there are a number of reasons we decided to name the textbook pilot project of failure, which was really hard for us to admit, especially for me as an A-type person. So the first reason was that we had low, low numbers of checkouts for the number of students that were enrolled in each section. Some of our checkouts were in single digits when we had hundreds of students enrolled in that section. We also found out the classes were requiring new copies of textbooks faster than we had anticipated, so the program was not going to be sustainable. There were also a lot of student expectations about what we meant when we said pilot and students thought that that meant every textbook for every course for everyone. So obviously we were not meeting those student expectations. And looking back, we realized that the marketing plan was pretty soft and really didn't pick up any steam. It really was not the confetti guns blaring right out of the gate. And we hesitated too long to tell people about the program in a really big way. So every failure, of course, is an opportunity to learn some lessons. And even if we don't want to learn those lessons right at the time or learning them, lessons can come from our failures. So here are some of the things that we learned from this textbook pilot project. Students were verbally and enthusiastic about telling us that they wanted textbooks, but the checkouts told us that they were not committing themselves to using our copies. Assessment was also very difficult. We assumed checkouts would define our success, but we needed to be clearer on what success actually looked like at our institution. We also learned that we needed to be mindful with our communication. We had a few very well-meaning staff who caught others off guard with stacks and stacks of textbooks that showed up and signage that showed up in the library and on the library's website. And they thought that they were doing us a favor by getting their tasks done early, but it caught other people off guard because we hadn't had a chance to tell everyone who would be affected what was going on in the different stages. And so it really confused a lot of a lot of folks. We also needed all of the textbooks for all the general education courses or none. We had picked the highest enrollment classes thinking that would be the maximum number of students for our small amount of textbooks. But we missed out on serving smaller classes with students who had just as great a need for access to their textbooks. So we missed the opportunity there. And we also should have let students take the textbooks out of the library or take them to class to study with. So I'm going to turn this over to Tammy now because we're going to have to talk about embracing failure. Thank you. So I'm pretty... I guess failure is something that I'm pretty comfortable with as an outreach librarian. I tend to do a lot of things on the fly or some things on the fly. And they don't always work out, even if it's not on the fly, even if it's a fairly big project, sometimes things don't work out. We just have to be ready for that and be ready to learn some lessons and rework some things and start again. So the idea of failure, a lot of people really hate that word failure. And to me, that's actually not a bad word at all. I'm perfectly comfortable with it. And I think that that's the very first thing that people need to kind of learn from this right now. So the pilot, this pilot in particular, it died a slow death. It wasn't from neglect, but it was from kind of a lack of enthusiasm from an otherwise supportive culture. We really did need to get more staff buy-in at the library and throughout the university. And we really did find partners who wanted to help us in this low-cost textbook race that we were on. We were really fine with keeping textbooks in the reserve collection, even though we don't collect textbooks as a rule. And we are sure that if they ever make it to our circulating collection, that they'll be checked out there. So we were fine with it not working out. We know that we have plenty of new program hits. We know that we'll find something that will work. So this wasn't any sort of problem with building up, having this be like a stain or anything on our library's name or anything like that. So we know that if you want to use that sort of movie franchise kind of thing, we know that every epic failure or every blockbuster chain has one failure. So we look at our textbook pilot as kind of the Incredible Hulk. It sounded great in the meetings. It had all the right components, but it just didn't click with our audience. So from here, our questions were really, how do we frame it? How do we move forward? How do we find a solution to the problem? So we wanted to continue focusing on the fact that our students were spending their money that they should be spending on food or on rent on textbooks. So this is a clearly defined problem and it's clearly not going away. And the answer is most definitely not to quit and never try something like this again. We wanted to keep on moving forward and make sure that we solve or help solve this problem because that's what we're about here at UNO libraries. So because students weren't coming to us and it was clear that they were not coming to us, we have to go to them. And the Office of Digital Learning came to us with the idea of open educational resources with the opportunity for a large NU system grant. And with this, we found ways to reach the faculty money, really bottom line money. And so the open educational resources, this really changed the conversation. And we were, we are able to give faculty grants for them. And then that becomes real money savings to our students without any sort of inconvenience to their students. So right now what we're doing is giving out $2,500 grants to faculty who rework their courses as a fully open educational resource course. And that has broad kind of broad meaning to it. It can be items that we already have in our collection. It can be a series of journal articles. It can be content that is created online and shared as open educational resources. It is so many different things. So faculty are going to have more content or more control over their content using OER. And we have the ability to then market this program directly to faculty and mostly at department meetings. So that is that one-on-one relationship that we get to rely on and build upon. And so we're generating interest through both our department meetings and then at our learning communities at the student level as well. So it's been very, very successful. And people are very interested even though we really haven't even started this grant program yet. It's starting in the next semester in the spring. So really what you have to do or what we do here at UNO Libraries is we build a culture that is very, very comfortable with adjustment, with failure, with adjusting, with reworking something and moving forward. So we make decisions based on what's best for our students, not based on our egos or our personal agendas. And that is extremely important. We work as a team and we move forward to make sure that our students get what they need. So sometimes those two things like our personal agendas and what the students need is, you know, sometimes they align, but sometimes they don't. We always go with what's best for our students. So we lean towards innovation. And while we always do our due diligence and we take stock of cautionary tales, we're always aware of our specific unique community at UNO and the talent that we have here at the Libraries. We always begin with why not rather than we can't. And that is so very, very important. We always think, well, we could do this. Why not? And that starting from a very positive angle is so, so very important. It just starts everything off on a very good foot. We also have a leadership that is 100% behind assessment. We call it a relentless assessment, at least I do. We track most of what we do in order to make things better. And that's just a simple expectation here. We track everything that we do and how people respond to it, how many people, etc., etc. So there's always a way to assess whatever it is we're doing. The important thing is that this assessment is in the service of learning and succeeding in our drive to provide this good service to our students and good materials for our students, not in the service of judgment or blame. So we are not assessing the person that is doing the program. We are assessing the program. We are really, really curious about what works and what doesn't. And if something doesn't work, why it didn't work? So I have plenty of programs in plenty. I have a few programs in outreach that haven't worked or don't work. And we are very curious, why didn't that work and what can we do to change that? So if something works, we keep it. If something doesn't, then we adjust it and decide if it's worth it to roll out a new program or not. So we're very quick in kind of moving to a different scope. So like I was saying earlier, some people really don't like the word failure, but it really just means lack of success. It doesn't mean you'll always lack success. It just means this time maybe it didn't work so well. Trying once and failing and never doing it again is really not tenable for if we want to be the best for our students. So we really do have to continue to push forward even if we have a few setbacks. Part of failure is this idea of resilience and creativity. Resilience means that you keep on trying, but not necessarily the same thing every time. We don't want to just sort of beat our heads against the ball. We want to try something new. We want to be creative. We want to find new things to do related to an idea that you think is fundamentally worthwhile. So for us, it was we're not going to continue to just kind of push more books onto the shelf at our service desk for textbooks. What we're going to do is shift the idea onto the open educational resources. And we really do think that this is going to be a fabulous opportunity for students and faculty. You really have to be able to able and willing to learn from your mistakes to tweak your outcomes. And I mean, this is the whole idea of moving those goal posts, right? And just keep on pushing them back or adjusting them slightly so you can still make the goal. So you have to think, discuss and decide what success is going to look like at every sort of turn. So you really have to be willing to communicate with all of your partners again and with your colleagues here and have that be in a supportive environment that is so important. So these are some questions to ask. These are the questions that tend to come from me because I'm so excited about new and fun ideas, especially in outreach or in programs like this textbook program. I see something that works maybe for other libraries and I say, hey, can we do that here? And through the three years that I've been here and been partnering in RIS, my director, these are questions that come up a lot. And actually, these are questions that we often go through one by one. And it's kind of a checklist now in our mind. So there's about nine of them. And sometimes you answer all of them. Sometimes you don't, but it's definitely something to use as a way to touch base. It is really important to take the time to reflect on your process, on your event, on your program or your project, your intended and your actual outcome. I wanted this to happen, but this happened instead. And so, and then work with the people around you, including your supervisors and the people affected by this program to get the answers to these questions. So the first one, I'm just going to go through them really quickly or maybe not so quickly. So did I define a clear problem? Why did I do what I did? I've found so far that sometimes those ideas that sound really great or really cool don't often work well. If we haven't thought about how it will work specifically for our students. So then do I know what others have tried in this situation? So ask your networks to a literature review. Do your due diligence. We definitely knew that about our textbook pilots. We knew what other people did. And in solving this problem, what might success look like? What do you want to happen? For instance, in this particular project, I want students to pay less for their course materials. That's it. I want them to pay less for their course materials. So the first thing we tried was a textbook pilot program. So then is there more than one path to that success? And for us, clearly there is. You know, you have to be creative. You have to ask lots of people. You have to ask the community who cares most about it. You know, for options. So whereas the bookstore might say, yes, here are books. Students may or may not care that they have a book in front of them. And we found out that that's really the case. Really bottom line, they want to pay less for materials. Have I communicated well with all our stakeholders? Communicating many, many channels. And we found that that is, that's kind of our biggest thing, I think. If you talk to somebody in person, follow that up with an email. OER in particular is gaining traction for us, I think. Especially in my areas, because I know what motivates each potential partner. And I'm able to speak directly to that. Some people, yeah, it's money. Other people, it is better creative control over the materials in their classroom. And, you know, other people, it is serving the students. Well, we're all concerned with serving the students to our best possible, you know, to the best possible way. So then do we have enough champions to make it work? Champions are really key. We identify our champions a lot around here for all different kinds of, for all different kinds of projects. And, you know, it's not just sort of identify, oh, yeah, this department would like this or, oh, yeah, this group of students would like this. You need to specifically name people, list them, write them down, know what motivates them. Don't assume anything. Don't assume that students will automatically like this or don't assume that you'll get buy-in from a particular community. You have to go and you have to ask them. And then, you know, keep track of what it is you talked about. Keep track of the best way to communicate with them. Will more money, people or time help? The answer doesn't always have to be yes, but often it is. So, you know, not necessarily about our textbook program, but about other programs that I particularly have done. Some of the more expensive programs have been some of the least successful. So don't assume that money, people or time are going to help. Sometimes students just want to sit down and, you know, have some crayons and a coloring sheet and that's all, right? They don't want this big thing for outreach. So, what does my assessment data say about the problem and my first solution? Don't be afraid to take a very careful look at the data and then close the loop and do something with the results. The students for us here with our program, the students were coming to us so clearly we needed to go to them in some fashion. And we need to go big with it. So, once we do this OER, we need to continue to roll that out and to tell students this is what's happening. So, they tell their professors that that's what they want and it gains traction and steam from there. And then the last question there is, should I try again? Again, this answer could be no, even though I've been saying, you know, don't just put it on the shelf and never try again. But really if you look at the assessment data, if you look at your champions, if you look at your communication and your problem, sometimes the answer is, you know what, we tried that and it really is not the problem that we thought it was. Really it's something that we don't need to worry about and we don't need to put more staff time into. So, sometimes it is, no, we're going to pull back on that and wait until we see a clear problem and we can define what success looks like for this problem. It could be not right now. So, like I was saying, just wait, just hold on to that idea. And in that case, it would be really interesting to, if you say not right now, then you start to sit there and say, I'm going to put this in the back of my mind and I'm going to notice. I'm really going to watch what my students are doing and what they're asking for. And when we have to say, no, we don't have that. No, we don't offer that. Then we know that the time is right for really action for this problem that we know exists or we think exists. So, we could say yes in a different way or we could say yes in two semesters or three semesters. We'll try it again. So, it's very important to kind of look at that timeline and always be open to these possibilities. So this, I mean, I think this is a fairly popular gift as well. This is really the epitome of failure, breathing success for us. So this is the whole idea of persevering, rethinking, reimagining. This is not lowering expectations. This is changing the game. So that's really how we think about things at UNO Libraries and how we kind of reworked this program to make sure that it was a success. All right, so we want to leave plenty of time. If anyone wanted to ask questions, we will be truthful about our failure and where we are at now. So we will turn it over to you guys. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you very much. If anyone does have any questions, go ahead and type them into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface. I'm monitoring that here on my other screen. All right. So thank you, Heidi and Tammy, that was great. You can put your slides up still if you want to or have the Libraries website or anything you want up there to, in case people want to ask questions, you might need to refer back to something at some point. So you said with the open, there we go, yeah, the OER that you're doing. That is still in its pilot phase right now? Where are you, you said that you're still getting started with that? Yes. So the OER, we hired a coordinator based on a two-year grant that was awarded to us. The new coordinator, Toni Farrell, she's there on the website. She is starting the grants. She's been on for a semester to see what our needs are and how she can help our team and then our grants for the OER program actually start this spring. So we've been, again, spending time thinking about the problem that we have. We know it's getting students affordable content. And so like Tammy said, we took a minute to step back and watch this semester to find champions who we think could help with our OER, who are viable candidates for this grant. And we've been talking with them. And so, again, we closed the loop on our assessment, but we have changed the direction of where we're going with this. And so those grants will open up in the spring for faculty. And then these are actually things for next summer and next fall even so that we could give plenty of time for faculty to be mindful about how they could change this curriculum. Right. And that's going to be a lot that they have to adjust to potentially what they're doing actually with the students and in the classrooms. And yeah. Yeah, some of them, to be quite honest, already have basically an entire class that is open educational resources in this broad way of thinking about it. But others will have to rework their curriculum. So and I have some faculty that and some art and art history faculty that they can't find what they need in a traditional textbook. And so they either have to practically write their own textbook or bring things together. So, so we're, we're, it's kind of this triangulated kind of thing where the faculty member with their subject librarian and with Tanya, the OER specialist for this. And so we come together to find the best possible materials for their classes. Cool. So the, the textbooks then so you did the pilot of trying to have the textbooks available. So at the moment then that's where everyone is the students are back to just having to get those textbooks I guess in this kind of in between. Right. So we didn't pull the textbooks off the shelf. They're still available for students to come use the faculty know that they can send students who might need it. So what we saw in the statistics was that students were using them heavily for about those three to four weeks of class. And then at that time the checkout dropped off and we think that a couple of those reasons might be that financial aid comes through. And so they're able to buy a textbook at that point. The VA benefits, military benefits, GI Bill are notorious about taking a while to come through a lot of military students. And then also students are finding out whether they want to even stay in that class. So add drops happen if they found someone to share with. They took their own textbook back. There was a lot of reasons. So that need is still definitely there. And that's where OER also comes in because OER is available day one. Right. So day one students have those materials and they're going to be more successful because they have access at the start of the class so they don't fall behind. So this might actually end up probably being a little of both in the end. I mean, still having those textbooks there to start with and then or this to start with. And then, you know, using both in conjunction with each other just because of what's available. The content that's available in them and when they're each available. This open OER right off the bat. You gotta don't worry about financial aid of any sort. And maybe some of this, it'd be great if some of the, even if they are getting the financial aid, that's still ridiculous. The amount of these texts, that's a whole nother problem. What is anybody thinking? Yeah. And I think that students, students are very, very aware of the cost and the, you know, and they really are. That's, that's I think a big part of it is that they just simply don't think that that's fair to charge for dollars for a physics textbook. And so when we talk to students, I talked to students in two classes and other general education classes. And, and they're very, very aware of how much it costs and how much they're going to get back after the end of the semester. So, so they are really, really looking forward to the idea of having very specific course material that is chosen specifically for them by experts in the field and by their professor. And that it's free. Yes. And available all the time, anywhere they are. I mean that great because this is all online as well. It's the whole idea of it as well. You don't have to get a hold of an actual physical book or something or the right one. It's all going to be there and kept up to date immediately. I mean, you know, we think about this from all sides. And I do, I do sort of hear from some students who say, but I like physical books. I like the actual textbook. Yeah, but yeah, yeah. So there is a there's a small number of students and, and I don't know how small it is to be frank, but, but they do enjoy actual physical books. So, having the combination is probably going to be a good thing. We'll probably find a happy new year. Yeah, everyone has different learning styles and the different way that's best for them to absorb the information. Yeah. Now, one of the things you mentioned to if anyone has any questions I saw some other people that come in if you have any questions type them into your questions section will grab them and ask. Heidi and Tammy what you're what you want to know more about you mentioned that region at the very beginning that you think you maybe had trouble with the promotion of the textbook program. Did you. How did you actually promote and how did you think of new ways you're going to do that or are you kind of working that into how this is now going to be promoted. How's that all, because I know getting the word out about anything that we do is the, I think one of the most difficult things. Yeah, you have that problem here at the state level to the library mission so. Yes, so, so we for the textbook program, we really it's it's two different ways of communicating and communicating to two different communities basically right so. With the textbook program we needed. First of all the students to know that it was there and the students it's the onus is on the students to actually come to the library so they needed to know. First of all that existed and that it where it was and how it worked and so we were trying to communicate directly to students and. To a certain extent through their professors as well so we had to get that very large message through professors to students or to students directly if the professors weren't putting it in their syllabus or. Announcing in a class which they we found out that many of them were not doing that so what we did is that we we did email professors. And some of them we had some that were definitely champions and definitely they announced it during class and those were highest checked out books we put. We put notices in email we put notices on on bulletin boards we gave copies of flyers to learning communities here on campus and those learning communities are. Basically identified students who are perhaps having problems with with budget you know with with money or something like that so some of our lower income students and so we. We were telling folks and using different communication channels but I think that the the message was. There was it was so multifaceted that I think that that was a big that was a part of the issue as well. Now with OER it's a much more simple message I think and it also were not we don't have to tell the students about it the students don't have to do anything to to to use OER. Materials it's all about going directly to the faculty members and so what we're doing as as librarians is using our connections with faculty members. We know the people who use our online who use canvas a lot and so we we hear about that and that's when we can jump in and say you know we have a great opportunity for you. Almost all of us all the librarians are invited to the beginning of semester meetings with the faculty and so once a semester we're able to go in and we're able to say not only do we have this really great program coming up. Where you can be in charge of your materials but we'll give you money for doing that and that is approximately the same price is actually teaching a class if you're an adjunct so. So they understand that they get that and you're interested in that so it's I think that it'll be more successful the communication plan this time because it's not so complex. I mean I don't know if I answered your question but. Oh yeah definitely I because I know as I said you when you mentioned promotion it kind of you know. Self and oh yes that's so difficult and I wanted to know more. Yeah. The other problem is that we still haven't kind of unlocked the key to getting directly to students. That is the biggest problem because students we know for a fact that students aren't reading out that newsletter that comes out here at UNL. There's a weekly newsletter that all students get they don't open it. If we send direct emails that they typically don't read their email. So it's a it's a difficult thing. I think that the best way to get to our students now is paper flyers to be quite honest they see paper is more than anything. So for anybody who's out there who's wondering how to get to students. That's what I found. They'll pick up the piece of paper see that somewhere. Yeah. They'll see that and even if you have if you have electronic signs or anything like that digital signs they will they don't see that it's just more sort of. Yeah it's just more noise that they block out so paper signs. They're yeah they they work yeah. And I think this is I do like that. I think it's going to I agree with you it's going to make a difference that coming from the faculty which they're definitely listening to them because that's how they're going to get their education and get their grades and and and graduate and everything. That hopefully that that should definitely make a huge difference in this now. So this isn't going to is going to be ready you said for this spring or no you're starting the grants in the spring and then it'll be after that yeah okay. There are some chances that will we are ready for some of but I think that for the most part it's going to be. So we'll definitely have to have you guys come back again after this has happened for a while and then the year or so and see where's where's where you're at with it yeah. Sure absolutely yeah. So it just might have anybody else has any other questions type them into the question section I'll grab them and share them. Let's see what did I have here. So the textbook program that's going to actually continue no matter what it's just not going to be your main thing so because I never myself noticing if you're going to think about going back to it but you said that's just going to be in addition you're still going to have that same. The textbook one going right never going to go away or you think it serves a purpose enough that it'll stick around. Yeah, it actually did work. So we have a traditional reserves collection like academic library where a faculty can put the textbook on reserve they just give us a desk copy or exam copy or whatever and that will never go away because we'll always have students who need to read for classes. We're not actively collecting textbooks for that collection. It's only if the professors at you know proactively say you're doing this out there. Faculty has come forward and said I'd like to be a candidate please buy my book I have three students who can't buy it. And I'll say something like well did you know that your bioinformatics textbook cost $285 plus a workbook plus a scientific calculator plus graph paper plus all these things. And they'll be like, wow, like they haven't looked at the price of the textbook for their class in five years, 10 years. So that's a good thing for us to have a conversation with them, and we certainly won't get rid of the textbooks that we've invested in. I have engineering faculty who will come in and check out a copy from 1998 that they have to have something for class and we have a copy someone donated, and they just try to make it through the semester. I mean students are willing to try to try to make it work. So those will eventually will probably go up to our circulating collection and if they go out for the semester and one student uses it. My personal philosophy is that it's no different than when I buy a $250 conference proceeding for a faculty member and it goes out and sits in their office for several years. It's one person using it. If one person is using that textbook and that helped that student succeed, I don't think we should keep the textbooks walk away and we certainly invested a lot of money in them. So it's not like we would, you know, get rid of them or anything like that. So it's ongoing but it now looks more considered a general collection item and we actually have got a lot of interesting things on our that were additions to our textbook pilot from the biology, kinesiology and anatomy and physiology departments. They said, Oh, well, you have the biology one book on reserve, which is about 450 students enrolled each semester for that class. So we had two copies and they said, we'd like to send over a brain diagram. Students are coming to the library to study for the test. Can we send over a plastic 3D model of the brain? It goes with the book. If you want to provide a brain model, we'll put that in reserve and then an eye model showed up and then a heart model showed up, shoulder joints showed up. And so again, it was thinking about that problem of how can students have access? How can they be successful? They don't want to pay for these materials. So it opened conversations with my departments about the students needing access to things to be successful. So we took it one step forward from the textbook to be successful is they needed access to this model, which was only available during office hours to four in a closed off building. But they needed to study and they were coming to the library to study and they were coming to the library to get the book. Could they also have access to the models that went with the books to prepare for the test so that they could name all the parts of the eye? And so again, we found those champions who saw a need on their end if we were able to partner with them. So now we have all sorts of fun anatomy and physiology models that sit right next to the textbook. So when the students come in for the model, they can see that we have textbooks available too. So that was an unintended perk of having the textbooks up there. I think too that it's notable that these models are checked out more than the textbooks ever are or were. So yeah, yeah, so it's just having that flexibility to understand that we're going to do again, whatever's best for our students and sometimes making, you know, making room for those students. I'm feeling the figuring finding out what the need was and this way kind of just a accidental, but whatever works. Yeah. And this is something that a lot of libraries are doing in public libraries are checking out all sorts of things, not just the books and the videos and the whatever, but you know, the cake pans and toys and tools. I mean, whatever is needed and having the hours like you're mentioning the libraries, academic and public are open a lot longer hours in those evenings and weekends that a lot of these businesses or offices are not. And that's when the people need what they need. Yeah. Well, the important thing again to go back to kind of the framework and the culture and the mindset, the important part is to say, why not? Instead of just looking at something like that and saying, well, that's not a book or a journal or something like that. So we can't. The very important thing is why not? Let's try it. You never know until you try if someone will check it out or someone will use it or not. And if they don't, it's okay. Try something else. It's all right. Exactly. We're not we're not going out and looking for problems. We're looking for some. No, no. All right. So it doesn't look like anybody typed in any other questions. You did mention that some other libraries have done that textbook thing and it has been has it been more successful at other places? I mean, you said you'd seen it air or. If anybody looks up the Acero conference proceedings from 2017, there were probably half a dozen presentations and posters from libraries that were at community college level libraries that were at the four year institution level. There was just a ton of different people who had taken a lot of different approaches. And so I went to one and I was like, wow, this is amazing. And then I suddenly changed my whole schedule to look at all of them. So they're definitely out there. But that's the Acero 2017 conference proceedings are kind of just a nice literature review. A lot of them doing it then. Yeah. And that's I think a good thing to see that a lot of those were doing it that not everything works for every library. I mean, just because some other place has done this great thing. It's not always going to be for you. You might have to try it and tweak it to make it work for you or you may have to totally just throw it on. You know, flip it on its head and say, nope, we're going in a totally different direction. Yeah. And I look at our place. You know, NCSU does does this as well. They do a lot of things that we want to do a hope to do. But NCSU does it big. They went big. They have textbooks for every class. And they just have a big hall full of textbooks that their students can check out. So we don't have the money to do that. Or the space or the space or things like that. Yeah. It wouldn't work for us, you know. All right. Well, does anybody have any last minute desperate questions you want to ask? This is your chance to get anything. Any other questions in? I will be wrapping up in just a few minutes here. Thank you so much, Tammy and Heidi. This is great. And I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what happens with OER. I know that's a big thing. I've been seeing lots of other places doing in them. I wanted to keep an eye on what you guys are doing for that. And have you back on and with. On your honor. Yeah, I saw her on the page. And we do have a link. We do have a link to this page on our session page for the show. So if you want to keep an eye on or see what's being what's already there on their OER page, you'll be able to link right to that off of our information when the archive is up. All right. So thank you very much. I think we will wrap it up for today's show. Thank you. This is great. We will definitely have you guys all on again when we see how these things have gone in a year, year and a half, however long it takes. Awesome. All right. So I am going to pull back presenter control to my screen here now. So I can show you. Here is where I was showing you this year. There we go. Yeah. This is the session page for today's show. And you can see every link to the Chris library and to the current OER initiative that they are starting up. So definitely take a look at that when the archive is ready. As I said, the show has been recorded and it will be posted. I'm going to get it processed through YouTube and everything should be up sometime later this afternoon. It would be my goal. Let's see here. Heidi and Tammy, if you wanted to, we can also include your PowerPoint presentation and whichever way you like. If you want to email it to me or if you have somewhere that you post things online. We can send the team from our digital. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. I'll link right to that. There are slides available as well. And if we go back to our Encompass Live website here, if you are looking for our page, just Google Encompass Live. We are the only thing out there called that so far. Awesome. So you'll find our main page. We have our upcoming shows here. But right beneath that, you can see there's the archived Encompass Live sessions. Most recent ones are at the top of the list. And it goes all the way back to the beginning. So today's show will be up here. As I said, probably by the end of the day today. I'll have a link to the archive. It will be our YouTube channel and a link to the slides. And while I'm here, I want to show you this is our archives. We do have all of our shows archived here going back to the beginning of the show, which was January 2009. So about 10 years worth of recordings and PowerPoint presentations and handouts and whatnot. So we do have a search feature here now so you can search it to find something specific topic or person or anything you want to look up. You can search everything going all the way back or just the most recent 12 months if you want something more current. So do keep that in mind when you are looking at our archives. We're just going to scroll down here. Everything does have a date. So pay attention to what the date is on something that you're watching. It may have taken place so long ago that the service or product doesn't exist anymore or some links may be broken or the information may be outdated. But we are librarians. We archive things. That's what we do. And this is all here for historical purposes. So just pay attention to what date is something when you are watching the shows. So that will be for the recording. Hope you'll join us for next week's show which is Talking Books and Duplication on Demand. Scott Schultz is the director of our Talking Book and Braille service here at the library commission will be with us next Wednesday the day after Christmas. And there's some new things coming Talking Book and Braille. Digital duplication on demand going all digital for things for the visually impaired. So if you're interested in that definitely take a look at that show sign up for that. Any of our upcoming shows we got coming up in 2019. You can see we started filling in the schedule there. So please do sign up for any of those. Also Encompass Live is on Facebook. You can see I've got some links here. We have a Facebook page here. You can give us a like over there if you do use Facebook. We post reminders about when things are coming up. Here's a reminder to log into today's show. Announcements about upcoming shows are on here. When a recording is available. So if you do like to use Facebook you can use that like us over there. Also we do post to our Twitter account. So if you do follow our hashtag of Encompass Live. You can see when I'm posting things out on Twitter. All right. Other than that that wraps up for today's show. Thank you very much Heidi and Tammy for being with us. Thank you everyone for joining us today. And hopefully we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye bye. Bye.