 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encamp Compass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event where we cover commission activities and anything that may be of interest to Nebraska librarians. We have NLC staff at your presentations and guest speakers as we have today. We have a mixture. We do sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. It's free and lasts for about an hour or however long it takes. We do a mixture of all sorts of kinds of sessions, presentations, interviews, book reviews, whatever we come up with. This morning, we have a group here together that you see their names listed on the screen here. They're going to talk about legal self-help options for librarians and how they can help their patrons. We have Beth Goble here from the Library Commission. Hello. Julie Bino from Lincoln City Libraries. Good morning. Laura Johnson, also from the Library Commission. Hi. And Mary Jo Ryan. Hello. Hello, everyone. So, this is our group for today and I will hand over control to Beth. You should be able to actually turn the mouse this time. Nope. All right. Cool. Okay, hi. This is Beth Goble talking and I'll be talking for a little while and then be sharing it over to Julie. We'll just be going back and forth about who's going to talk to you about different things. So, here's in a nutshell what we're planning to cover today. First, we'll talk a little bit about issues that all librarians face and some do's and don'ts about what you can and cannot do in terms of giving legal assistance or legal advice to people. And then we're going to talk about some legal Nebraska specific legal referral resources. So, we hope that you folks who are joining us from other states will get something of value from this, perhaps some ideas for things you might want to do in your own states. We're going to talk about some Nebraska legal web resources and that will be a tour of a few websites. If we have time, we'll talk about some legal questions that you might get. We asked some Nebraska librarians what type of questions they're getting and we hope to be able to show you some places where you can find answers to some of the most commonly asked questions. And we'll follow up with Mary Jo talking about something called the BTOP grant. And I'm not going to say any more about that. You'll just need to listen to her tell, explain what that acronym BTOP is all about. It's some exciting news about a big grant that we've, statewide grant we've received that will help libraries help their patrons with e-government resources. And finally, just like to mention that the link you see on this slide is actually to a great handout that Laura has prepared for us, which has, as Christa said, don't worry about trying to furiously write down URLs and notes. This has the essential links and notes from our presentation today and you could even bring this up in a separate browser if you wish and kind of follow along as we go through some of these resources. Okay. This question may, we may not even need to ask this question. Why are we doing this session? I would expect that most of you, we've got a couple of people from courts, I believe, joining us today. Also people from state libraries in other states and libraries in other states. I think we're all very aware of the huge number of e-government services that are available now. You can pay your taxes in Nebraska at least. You can title your car, pay your car registration fees online. You can pay traffic tickets online. You can license your pet in the city of Lincoln online. Yeah, me too. There are just an enormous number of resources available and they're great for convenience and they save both you and the government money. And the other issue that you're probably all aware of too is with the situation with the economy now and even before that I think people can't afford to hire lawyers. And I believe Julie's got a couple of statistics for you later on about the number of people that are trying to represent themselves in court. And that's where I said you may or may not be familiar with that term pro se. I actually did a little Google to get a definition for this and pro se means for himself or on one's own behalf. So what we're talking about today is how to help people who are actually trying to do their own court work or legal stuff themselves along without the health of a lawyer. Now that may or may not always work and that's part of our dilemma is people are coming into libraries now not only looking for their resources but really looking for somebody to help them do something. So that's where we're going to get into the do's and don'ts. Okay and this has an impact on libraries already. Some of you public library folks joining us today may be familiar with ALAs survey that they do on public library funding and technology access. And the latest survey I provided a link to you for you here. Don't worry about trying to click on it now. I'm not sure if I can click on it. The URL will be there for you later if you want to go in and take a look. But what this survey does is provide a lot of info. Where's my scroll bar in the left? It gets hit in the nose right? Yeah, you got it. All right. Okay. Yeah. I have some statistics on the slide that I'll jump back to in a minute. And I just wanted to show you where I got those from. In this report there are state summaries. And this is a PDF file. When you bring it up you actually just can scroll through. Take summaries. Okay. Anyway, that gives you an idea of where I got these statistics. I looked up the Nebraska report and what I found is that 83% of Nebraska public libraries are providing assistance in accessing e-government. Now, I believe our data services coordinator, John Fettlen, tells me that this is a sample survey. Not every single public library completes this survey. It's a sampling every year. And this is what the Nebraska survey revealed. It's not a big surprise to me with the work I do here. 68.8% provide access to jobs database. And that's probably a number we'd like to see go up, actually. 78% report that they offer the only free access to computers and internet in their communities. And Mary Jo could probably speak to this too and why we asked for that big grant that she'll be talking about later. I think that's a relatively high number in terms of other states. 78% is a pretty high number to say that the library is the only place you can go to get free internet access in your town. So, of course, that leads to the expectation that libraries will have access to these resources and that we're able to help people use those resources. So now I'm going to turn this over to Julie and she's going to talk to you a little bit about what she's learned. It was pretty interesting how this all got started. Mary Jo Ryan and I got invited to attend a summit on Nebraska public and law library resources for prosaic litigants. And they defined prosaic, it's along the same lines as what we found on Google, but they call it as self-represented. So people that are going to represent themselves in court. This summit was sponsored by Judge Richard Severs, who's the chair of the Nebraska Court of Appeals. In his committee invited court employees, librarians, and others such as representatives from organizations that provide free legal help or reduced rate legal help. The whole purpose was to get us all together so that we could learn from each other, learn what everybody's offering, and see if there's ways we could improve what we're offering to our customers in the state of Nebraska. Judge Severs started this back in 1999 when he first implemented a committee on prosaic litigation. So far what they've done is developed a manual for court staff, and that's going to talk about that later. Set up self-help centers and provided volunteer lawyers to provide advice. Judge Severs invited us because he believes that all Nebraskans should have access to the system and that the legal system should be accessible to everybody. And we're so happy that he thought of librarians because we've got the perfect venue to be able to provide this information. What a novel idea, a collaboration, or a partnering with court employees and librarians. It's such a great idea and we're just really glad Mary Jo and I are both glad that he invited us to this. Now the surprising statistic is what he reported is that 55% of the county court cases are prosaic and 45% of the district court cases. So that is a huge amount of people that are representing themselves in court. That's surprising. I had no idea that it was going to be online. I was pretty shocked when I saw that number too. It's just another reason for us to become as best informed as we can. And I know librarians that at least I've been always kind of a little bit afraid of legal questions. And what we found is that there really is a lot that we can talk about. What Beth and I hope to accomplish is to talk about the legal resources available so that we can help these people. And that we also hope that people in the different cities in Nebraska are able to actively partner with the court employees in their cities. They really recommended that we get to know the court employees. So what we're going to talk about is that we cannot give legal advice, but we want everybody to go forward with the attitude of let's do see what we can offer you when we talk to the customers. And I think there's an awful lot that we can do. So the first thing that I'm going to talk about are the do's and don'ts because they're pretty important. And the other thing to remember is that law librarians are bound by these same guidelines as public librarians or state librarians or special and institutional librarians. Everybody's kind of bound by these guidelines. Okay, so I'm going to talk about what we can do first. We can focus on what librarians can do to help people walking through the door and what resources are available. And what that involves is that we've got to do a little work and a little educating of us and all of our staff. We can explain and answer questions about how the court works. And Beth's going to show a website later about that. We can also provide glossaries of legal terms. We can provide the West Law Dictionary. There's a lot of things that we can do just to understand the terminology. We can provide the access to legal forms and let the customers select their own forms. This is exactly like what we do with tax forms when it's tax season. We have the list of what we can offer. The customer tells us what we want and we print it out. We can provide telephone numbers for lawyer referral service, for legal aid programs, and other services where you can get legal information. Now, these are the things that we cannot do. And I'm sorry, but the list is just a little bit longer. We cannot select the legal forms for the customers. They can tell us which ones they want. We cannot fill in the forms for a person, even somebody with legal or limited English. They have to do it themselves. We cannot explain or interpret the law or how the law would apply in the person's case. We can't recommend specific attorneys or law firms. We can't give legal advice. That's just a given and we're not going to anyway. I used to be a medical librarian and it's the same thing with medical information. You can take somebody over to the shelf and say, here's a reference book on colon cancer. You can't say, well, based on the symptoms you've described to me, here's what I think might be wrong with you. You can't give them any kind of advice. Well, we used to always tell them to give them several different sources and say, read these, take them to your doctor and discuss them. This is the very same thing. Read these things, talk to your lawyer. We can't tell a customer whether or the litigant whether they should bring their case to court. We just can't do any of that. Now, in the summit, they also gave a few more gongs and these were really kind of based towards court employees because the court employees get a lot of these same questions that we do, which was a surprise to me. I didn't realize that court employees were getting all these questions too. So they can't tell the person what words to use in the court papers. They can't tell them what to say in court. They can't give them an opinion because I think they've been asked a lot, should I take this case to court? Can't go there. And they can't let them talk to a judge outside the court. So a lot of don'ts, but there is a lot that we can do. So the goal of this Encompass Live is to help librarians identify the best sources of legal assistance based on the issue. And this does include that it could be referral to another agency. That's something that we can certainly do and there's a lot of them in Nebraska. This is Beth talking. I'm just going to jump in for a minute. We mentioned that you don't have to write down all of the URLs and information. I'm just going to quickly link over to the handout that we prepared for this. And if you really want to, I guess you could probably cut and paste this into a separate browser now if you're doing this from your desktop and kind of follow along from here. But I just want you to get a look at our handout so that the things that Julie is going to be talking about now are all on the handout. And further down, you'll see some of them actually include hot links that you'll be able to go to. If you can print this handout off later from our website or do whatever you wish with it. And when we go on tour, the links for the tour will be there as well. It might be a little resource. When the recording is done, this link will be there as well so all of you will be sent the direct URL to this page as well for that. And we want to thank Laura for combining it. We provided her a lot of links and she put them all together. She worked with several iterations of our outline for today and produced this terrific handout for us. But it's got wonderful information. The first thing I want to talk about that there are self-help centers. There's self-help centers in Lincoln, Omaha, and the Grand Island area. And these are operated by volunteer lawyers which may be able to assist the litigants. Now, it's important to know that the centers do not offer assistance with criminal cases and questions are not taken over the phone. The people have to go to the centers. And what they will provide is legal information, assistance with forms, and they will guide the litigants through the process. And they will also give some brief legal advice. So there's one in Lancaster County, Omaha, and the Tri-City Center, Hastings, Grand Island, Carney. The hours are all listed on your handout so I'm not going to go through them. But it's important to look at that because they're not open 8 to 5, they're not open normal hours. Now, there are some other places you can go if the litigant cannot afford the lawyer. There is legal aid of Nebraska and they have a self-help center in Douglas County where low-income people can access legal resources including computers, forms, self-help clinics, et cetera. Now, they also have offices in Lincoln, Fankroth, Norfolk, Grand Island, North Platte, and Scotts Bluff. So this is a wonderful resource all through Nebraska. And again in the handout, we included the phone numbers. Sure, why don't you go back to the handout for just a minute just to show you. I'm not going to bore everybody by reading all this, so I don't have it memorized. The other thing that is offered, the Nebraska State Bar Association has a volunteer lawyer project and they work with private attorneys to place civil cases for free or low-cost to low-income individuals. And again, this they can't assist with criminal cases or misdemeanors or traffic violations. And they always get a lot more requests for help than they're able to provide. So again, you ought to contact them as far ahead as you can and tell the customers that when they come in. Lincoln Area Agency on Aging will also give referral for Lancaster County residents 60 years and older and we've included the phone number. And there's also Nebraska Appleseed Center for the Law. And they work with the legal aid of Nebraska and the State Bar Association Volunteer Lawyers Project. Just another place to refer people to. So there's lots of places to refer to. I know that we are really good at referring people to the Law Library College at UNL. But this opens the door to a lot more places where we can refer people. Now, there are also law school legal clinics. The University of Nebraska College of Law has one. Creighton University School of Law has a clinic. The Creighton ones for Douglas County residents. And the UNL one does accept a few cases through their civil clinical law program. And the clients are represented by students at UNL but they're under the supervision of the College of Law faculty. So in both instances, I think rather than just giving a patron, for example, these websites, these are here for you to learn more about them. But those phone numbers that you see there are the ones that you would want to give a patron. If they wanted to see about getting an appointment at one of these clinics. Again, remember, these people are all overworked, a lot of people applying. But there's still good resources to send. And just FYI, the Creighton Moscow Clinic is Douglas County only. Okay, there's also Nebraska Supreme Court has a lot of self-help forms on the web. Beth's going to talk about those. The State Library has a wonderful library. And they've got access to legal resources. And they've got the internet there and they can do some legal research. And it's located in the State Capital Building. Public libraries have a lot of information. There's a website for all the public libraries in Nebraska. And I do want to plug our Lincoln City Libraries website. The website address is on there. Can you go there? Sure. Okay, which one? Both? Yeah, you can start there. Well, maybe you should go to the other one, actually. I guess we don't. In sake of time, I guess, you go to research tools then on the left. And then go to research resources databases. And on there we have the Gale Database of Nebraska Legal Forms. We've got the No Low Self-Help Center and the West Legal Dictionary. And these do require that you do have a valid Lincoln City Library card. We do under website resources. I'm going to be including or adding all of these different links that we've talked about. They're not there yet, but we are going to include them sometime soon. So this is your public library. The University of Nebraska College of Law Library at Schmidt Law Library also is an excellent library. And we refer a lot of our, the customers there. When I talked to them at the law library, they said to kind of tell the customers that this isn't a quick process. They're not going to run over, print off a tax form really quickly and be done. It could take a couple hours. And then to also tell them that their law librarians are only there during the day 8 to 5. So please check the hours before you send people there. It's kind of the same thing with the Creighton University Law School Library. They've got public access computers. They've got reference librarians there to help. And they have some restricted hours too. So again, it's important to be aware of those. I'm just going to jump in real quick here, Julie, and say the Library Commission also has an Ask a Librarian service. And part of our mission here is actually to provide government information. It's actually part of our statutory mandate and something that you can use yourself as a librarian if you need help asking us how to help someone else. Or you can also give your patrons this web, Ask a Librarian. We actually have two Ask a Librarians, one that looks like this and another one that's linked off the state of Nebraska's official homepage. And that's where we get most of our government information questions. So that's just what it looks like. You can phone us. You can chat with us. And there's Beth, a picture of Beth providing service. Well, that's a few years back. Anyway, I'm hoping to get a new picture pretty soon. But anyway, that's another resource that people certainly in Nebraska can use. They can Ask a Librarian over here. And I bet a lot of public libraries do. We have instant messaging at Lincoln City Libraries. And we have text messaging too. So there's all sorts of ways to ask questions. Now, thank you for bearing with us. There's a lot of information. There's a lot of places people can go for referrals. Now, the other places that they can go is the Nebraska State Bar Association has a lawyer referral service as does Omaha has a lawyer referral service. The Nebraska State Bar Association also has a lot of pamphlets. And what's nice about those is that they're English and Spanish. And I think Beth, you're going to talk about those maybe a little bit later. If not, go to the website when you look to see what pamphlets are there. Now, the other thing that they talked about at the Proce Summit was that there are mediation centers available too. So if people don't know whether they need to take it to court and they want to just try to see if they can resolve the problem on their own, there are mediation centers that we've provided a link. And finally, we would like to encourage librarians to call their local court clerks and get to know them. We have provided a link to the district court clerks and the clerk magistrates. So you can look on those and find out who the people are in your area that you can get to know. And the people at the summit really recommended this. It's like, let's make this an active partnership between the courts and the librarians. Now I'm going to turn it back over to Beth. I'm just going to jump back to the slideshow here and go forward a couple slides. And as you can see, when it gets to the tour part, I was just suggesting telling you that I'm going to be working off the handout. And we'll jump to a few links from there. So I'll just get started there. Okay, web resources for self-help. Julie mentioned a wonderful little handbook, manual, that actually the Nebraska court system has prepared for their own employees. I think they, from what I have heard, there was a lot of frustration out there, both on the part of the public coming into courthouses and asking for help. And the staff, the court employees, were really uncertain what they could and could not do to help people. So this manual was created and they do keep it updated. And I'll just show you a PDF version of it. They've given it to us so that librarians can use it. We can post it on the internet. So the library commission has posted it on our website. Then you have the link to that. I know that page looks a little dark. Now Beth, this is not necessarily for our customer, the litigants. It's just to give us some more information. And this is something that it is written for court employees. However, there's a lot of great information here that I think a library could use. Let me just take you on through a few of the pages here. This one, for example, those dos and don'ts that you just heard from Julie. A lot of it is right here. In fact, I understand the courts have this set up as a poster that's actually posted in courthouses in Nebraska now. And I think that a library can easily customize something like this. If you really are in a situation where you're getting a lot of people coming in, asking for legal help, maybe you just want to have something like this out there where they can see to help their frustration at what you can't do for them perhaps and also remind them that there's some things we can do. So I thought that was a great page to have. I don't want to spend too much time in here, but a lot of the resources that Julie talked about that are on the handout, this is another place where this is all set out for the court employees to know how to revert people, some general guidelines. And I thought this was great because they've actually included some sample questions, the kind of things that they get all the time. As Julie said, she was surprised at how much traffic they get in the courts. People coming in asking, I don't know if you can see it on your screen, but there are some questions that people come in really. Yeah, what attorney should I use for my case and so on and so forth? Thank you for doing your own legal work. Yeah, so this booklet is provided for the court employees so they know what to say when somebody comes in and says, I want to talk with the judge. They've got suggested language and I think some of this could be adapted for libraries, so I think this would be a pretty good resource. Long things again on what constitutes getting legal advice, which is one of the don'ts. There's more pages in there if you want to read up more on that. They have some subject-related sections in this booklet, what to say to people that are dealing with criminal and traffic cases, there's a lot of stuff in here about child custody questions about what to say to people coming in with custody questions. So it's worth a look if you would like to spend a little more time going through that booklet. Okay, now I'm going to show you an actual website, which I'd be interested in hearing from some people from other states if there are parallel sites, similar sites to this available to them for the court systems in their states. This is a self-help, but I think largely as a result of the pros and cons that Julie was saying that Judge Cedars had pulled together to help people who really need some help. So I'm sorry, I keep doing that. While we're here, I want to show you one thing that I have found really helpful. I'm not a lawyer and I'm not even from Nebraska originally, so we do get those chat questions and emails and people may start off with, okay, where do I pay my child support? And you're like, well, I don't even know what level of court to refer them to for that. If I just try to find them a phone number of somebody they can call, they have put up something that used to be a pamphlet called the Citizen's Guide to Nebraska Courts here on this self-help center. And I go to this a lot and I've suggested this to other library folk that you can, yeah, I have got an issue with trying to do this. Okay, when you're in here, you get an overview of the court system first and probably we can not worry too much about the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court, but when you get down to this information about the district courts and so on, if you notice they do tell you a little bit about what types of cases they handle. And same thing with the county court. So I have used this so when somebody says, you know, if I make my alimony payments or something, I know if I'm familiarized myself with this, I would know enough to come back to the person and say, okay, that's probably going to be a district court issue. What county do you live in? And then there is a place where I can look up the phone number or find the website for that particular court. And then if I'm chatting, I can give them the URL for that. So I just find this a really useful place to familiarize yourself with and then further down, if you go down far enough, to even have a little table of types of cases. What is the difference between a civil case and a criminal case? And generally speaking, again, somebody who is a more legal professional than I might want to jump in here, these civil cases are probably going to, a lot of that may be handled at the county level. And a criminal is probably going to be at the district court level. Anyway, that's a... I did have a comment. Kim Harp is a librarian at the State Library of Kansas. Kansas has its own self-help site as well on thekscourts.org. So Kansas has one as well. So it may be the same thing in all different states. Kim, do you get a lot of questions at the Kansas State Library from the public asking about legal issues? Yes, many. And she had that URL really quick, the copy and paste in there. Oh, okay. Well, then someday we may invite you to come do this same session to tell us about how you do things in Kansas. Okay, and I'll go a little quicker here. There's a definition of legal terms in here. I won't go in there, but it's just what certain words mean. Then they have a down here. This is kind of a topical thing, how to find help with certain things. From what I saw from the questions that Nebraska Librarians sent to us, there's always a lot of stuff to do with child support and child custody. So this is kind of a subject approach to resources that you can find on this court website. I think one of our highest most asked is the fence dispute. Yeah. Where can you put that fence? Oh, yeah. We've got new neighbors next to us, and they put the fence so far in a lot line that it's not even an issue, but it could be. And you see, again, some of the same things that Julie's already talked about, there's several places you can get this information about where these self-help centers are. And of course, the usual disclaimer about you're really on your own here. We cannot do everything for you. Even the court system is not going to do that. But we're thrilled with this site. Excellent site. Yeah, and this is a specific part of that same court website about legal forms. And I don't know what happens in Kansas, but what we've heard from Nebraska librarians is forms, forms, forms, forms all the time is kind of like spam, spam, spam, spam. You know, it's all about forms. And this particular website, which you'll see from the handout, is where you can find specific forms, and they're related to different levels of the court. So you can use this to kind of see what kind of topics are handled by what level of court too. Okay, now this is something also on the court website that we haven't even touched on today much, except that you can do a lot of stuff online now. And this is a place, and I bet they have the same thing in Kansas, where you can go in and pay traffic tickets, and this is statewide. It's not just if you got a ticket in Lincoln. And other things that you can do, you can pay, you can make a payment in a juvenile court, you can make payment on garnishment. So this is a place where you can actually pay some of your stuff online. So that's something that I know the court folks are interested in having people know that they can use this internet payment system. They don't actually have to show up in court to do some of this. It makes things easier for both the person who needs to pay it and the court system themselves. They don't have to deal with the person actually walking in. Now, trying to get information about a specific court case is a little bit more problematic. In Nebraska, we have something called the justice system, and this is not free. There's a $15 fee for it, but if you have names of litigants, if you have a court case number, you can use this system to do a one-time search to check on perhaps the status of your own case or somebody else's case. So that is called the justice system, and we provided you a link to that. Okay, how are we doing for time here? About 25 minutes, still. Okay. Okay. Again, just going off the handout, I just wanted to let you know about a few of Nebraska Access pages, and I'll just start with this first one. Nebraska Access, for those of you that aren't Nebraskans and aren't familiar with this, this is what I would call the For the Public website that the Library Commission offers. There's information here I'm not going to go into. We do, I know many other states do this. We purchase access to some databases that are available to any Nebraska to use. This is the jumping off point where they can log in and do that. It also includes a lot of websites that primarily our reference desk is offering access to, and a lot of them are government-related, just because as I mentioned that Ask a Librarian Service, we have a little rule of thumb that if we get asked something about three times, we create a little page in Nebraska Access on it, an FAQ type page. So one of them is Legal Aid Services in Nebraska. So that's what I'm showing you now. And I know you're hearing, you've heard this about four times now. This is another place you could go. We've actually got some text information in here about some of those things that Julie covered. This is enough. I can't guarantee that every single link is on here, but there are some things there. There's also a little bit here from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Those are some common questions. Yeah. How do I read them? That would just be one more place, I guess, that you could give people this URL if they're looking for where to get legal aid services in Nebraska. I think, Beth, what we're trying to show is that there's lots of places that you can get this information on the web. Okay. And now I'm just going to use our search just to show you that once you're here, you could just do a search on it. Legal forms. If you do a search in Nebraska Access, this will bring up, and this was an FAQ that we created kind of out of desperation because we kept getting asked, and it covers a lot of... So there's a link to those court forms that I just showed you. There's also links to some other things that are not off the court site. Living Will information from the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. I believe there's actually, they have posted some sample. Yes, forms. So people say, you know, I just want a form for how to do a living will. We provide a link to that. We get asked this one a lot by employers. You know, this is the Employment Eligibility Form for new hires. This is a commercial site. We try not... And some of these are going to... They may provide you the bare bones of a form. Oops, did link. I'll have to fix that later. Okay. You know, and again, I'm not going to go into a whole lot of these, but we have linked to some commercial sites that may provide some basic free legal forms, and then if people want to pay more money for a package, they can do that too. So anybody got any questions about this? Power of Attorney is one that I've been asked for more than once. And this is a... If you have a question, you can type it into the chat box to the right of your screen, or you can click on the hand, raise your hand if you have a microphone, and we'll unmute you and you can talk right through the microphone. So far? Okay. Good. I'll interrupt you so I can see something. This is kind of a wacky one. I didn't quite know what else to do, but I was asked one day about a power of attorney form, and I didn't find it on the court website, and I just... I finally actually... And tell me if I've gone too far here. This is a great example of have I gone too far by doing this. I've actually provided a direct link to a section of our Nebraska statutes because right in the statute of all things, they put a little form that somebody can use. Isn't that interesting? And I think it's fine because that's what the customer is asking for. And of course if you're familiar with working in the statutes, there's the history of the laws that were passed that have resulted in this section of the statute. So we all have different levels of comfort of how much we want to do. I'm relatively comfortable with referring someone to the statutes and maybe even saying, well, you know, I tried a couple different search terms and I got some hints, but you see what you can find. Other people don't feel comfortable even doing that. They would prefer to just refer people to the statutes and say, here you go, it's searchable by keywords. So any thoughts on that from people listening? Okay. I do think it's important to explain to people that the statutes are not the only laws that you have to consider. Statutes are legislation and they're important laws, but case law, things that have been decided by the courts of appeals and the Supreme Court also affect how laws, so people cannot read the statutes and realize and think that that's the only word. How those laws are applied is in case law. And that's very good, Maura. That's a good where we're going to refer people to a lawyer. Yes, absolutely. And we've got the sites where to refer. Right. You see, I blinked over to the sample divorce forms in the judicial branch because that is one that we just get over and over and over again and you probably do too. We do have a comment from another librarian from the State Library of Kansas, Cindy Rup. She refers people to the index and sometimes gives them the statute numbers as listed in the index and tells them these are coming from the index itself. That's a good suggestion. Very good. Yeah, thanks, Cindy. Tax forms, we all get asked for tax forms. And I heard on TV yesterday that the IRS is no longer going to mail tax forms to anybody. I saw that, yeah. So I guess you either go to the library, but the libraries will be given supplies as usual. But not the Nebraska State forms. Those are not going to be printed. Okay, well, there you go. We're going to need to know how to show folks how to get those online. There's a link. That's one of our little FAQs, where if enough people ask you the same question, it makes your life easier to just say, you know, we've got a website on that. Here you go. Okay. Again, I'm going to use the search rather than go back to the handout. But statutes, you know, what is the law on? Lots and lots. Did I spell statutes right? Yeah. So we've got a whole page related. It is fairly Nebraska-specific that links to both statutes and regulations. Because people, they want to know what the law is. They don't necessarily know enough to ask you whether it's a law, an actual statute or a regulation. So we've got a little set here, and we've even got a link to municipal codes in here for local things. So for Nebraska, this would be a little one-stop shop of where to find things like that. Statutes and laws. And then, you know, your level of comfort of how far you want to take somebody in from there is up to you. But if you're not familiar with this, you can actually search for regulations by keyword now from what we call in Nebraska the Nebraska Administrative Code. And this is maintained by the Secretary of State. It's a little clunky, but you can actually browse by agency. You can also do a keyword search. So I've used this. Somebody was really interested in some Game and Parks rigs on whether you could use nettle detectors in state parks. And I was all over this trying to find out that. And that was before I made the phone call to the person at Game and Parks who actually had the answer. But just this things you can use are referred to other people, for other people to use. And speaking of municipal codes, I think we actually, again, just by popular demand, we've made a little page just on municipal codes. This is the problem with not being able to see what you're doing. If it shows up with a little bit of shading at the top, it's because we're forcing that particular page to the top because we think that's what people really are looking for. This is obviously a work in progress and hopefully we're not missing too many, but these are Nebraska communities that have posted their own municipal code online. And boy, there's a lot more than we thought. And there may be some others that we haven't found out yet, but we also get back to the, you know, my neighbor's got the barking dog. You know, can somebody really park a car in their front lawn? That sort of thing. You're probably going to find out in a local municipal code, probably in a state law or a federal law. And depending on Nebraska librarians out there, you know that your municipal code is online and we don't have it up here, please email Beth and send her the link and she'll put it up. There you go. I would love that. And all of our emails are going to be on the final slide for you to see how to get in touch with all of us here today. Okay, now I'm going to, if I can get way back to our handout. There's one final thing I wanted to mention here, I think. Oh, no, I guess I don't. Okay, any questions at this point? At this point, I thought I was, if not, I was just going to show you kind of where to find the answer to a few of the questions that we've had or that other people have sent us. I think you were going to start with the questions, some of them that we legally could not answer. Yeah, and I need to find our slide presentation again. I should close this out and I'll go back to it. All right, okay. I'm going to need to jump ahead. We get so many things going on here on this, where are they going? And there's so much information. Okay, yeah. I'd like some comments from somebody listening today. I'll give you a second to read through these a minute or two and tell me what would you do with questions like this. We got all of this from one library that said they have people coming in asking questions like this frequently. We're really glad they think about asking us these at the library. So look these over, think it over, and if some of you would like to let us know, how would you handle? Yeah, I think there's a big but that goes with my statement. But we cannot do this. A lot of family law, it looks like a lot of questions about family law. Think back on what Julie said to you about the do's and don'ts. I think that these are excellent examples of what we cannot do. Yeah, what I saw with this one, and this came to us all as a group from one library, is these seem to be questions that would require you to give an opinion. Tell them what to do. What do I need to do to get custody of my kids? What are my visitation rights? If this was me and I got questions like this where they really are telling you their personal story and they want you to tell them what to do about it, this is where I would start looking at some of those legal referral sites. You may want to speak with somebody in legal aid, and you could even have a handout, just as the court people have, of where to refer people in your own community on certain topics, or you could simply have a handout of here are the legal aid resources available in my community, and it might feel like a cop out to you, but we do have to be cautious about actually telling people what to do. Can a police officer legally do X when he's arrested? That's interpreting the law. You could go back and look at that little manual that I mentioned. They've got some lengthy stuff in there as to what constitutes giving legal advice, and what you don't want to do. Sorry to be so negative. I think it's being a cop out by not doing it, but I think that goes along with a lot of being a librarian is not answering the question for them, but telling them where they can get the answer because for lots of things, not just legal or medical, but all sorts of things, we can help them figure out what they can do in all questions they might ask us. This is just another one. You know what? I'm not a lawyer, and I think once you say that, they should realize, oh, you know what? You're right. You're not. But I can tell you where the people are that can give you the advice for this, who are the experts. We can get you to the experts. And that's completely acceptable and a perfect way of being a librarian. And that's the point we want to make with this presentation. There are things that we can do. Yes. And I think that there's a long history in librarianship providing information for all. We've been doing this for many, many years and we've had a lot of different content areas. This particular content area has got some pretty rigid boundary lines. But we haven't had any problem figuring out how to do that over the years, and I think we'll figure this one out, too. We're good. Okay. Looking at the clock, I'm wondering if I should give Mary Jo an opportunity to talk to us about the BTOP. You can come back to this if time permits. These are just some questions that were sent to us by Nebraska Librarians. Also questions that I've encountered here and what I've done here if we went over to the handout again. This could be their take-home quiz, Beth. Yeah. Or you tell us how you did. Well, we provided some of the answers. Yeah, we provided... Well, not the answer exactly, but places that you might be able to use to have answered. What we would do for the customer. So here, back to the handout. Resources for some specific subjects. A lot of these, you'll notice, are Nebraska Access pages. Some of them are not. We're looking back at the Supreme Court here. Small claims. We haven't brought that up yet. I could tour you through these real quick or just let you explore on your own. You can see if it's purple, I've already showed you the municipal codes one. The Supreme Court forms on divorce and name changes. Small claims, that's actually another little section of the Supreme Court site, the court site, specifically on what the Small Claims Court does. Including instructions on how to file a case in Small Claims Court. And I'll get a lot of that is done per se. Not with the help of a lawyer because there's not a lot of money involved. I've already talked about the living bills. Oh, the Bar Association pamphlets. Julie did mention I was going to bring that up. This is the State Bar Association's website. And we like it because they're in Spanish. Yes. And those pamphlets if you get down here on the screen, you see there's an excellent topical ones. And I emailed somebody the one on just setting up a simple will recently and they were just thrilled. But yes, Spanish as well. And I love that these are not things that you necessarily think of in terms of a court case, such as living trust, such as contracts and credit. These are all kinds of legal things that may never involve quote-unquote going to court. But they are legal issues. Exactly. Exactly. And it's something we can provide. And Landlord Tenant, we get stuff, you know, the guy hasn't sprayed for roaches in three years when we're done. We can't tell them what to do, but we can't say, well, you know, the Bar Association has a great pamphlet that talks about Landlord Tenant Law in Nebraska. And there you are. You can give somebody this URL and they can, it's a little five-page pamphlet that would help people kind of figure out what are my rights as a Landlord or a Tenant. So I think I'm just going to stop here. Is there a comment about anything at the moment from anybody in the audience? Just a reminder, if you have a microphone you can raise your hand and talk. Yeah. If you're feeling brave. It's not scary. Or we can turn it over to Mary Jo. Yes, go ahead. Okay. I just want to talk for a moment or two about a wonderful, exciting new project that we are embarking upon here at the Library Commission. For the last year we've been working on a proposal that we wrote to the federal government to fund a pretty widespread project. The name of our project is Library Broadband Builds Nebraska Communities. And basically this is a grant we wrote for what is known as Economic Recovery Funds or NTIA, that's the federal agency. At any rate we wrote a grant, we received it, we're absolutely thrilled. And the grant is actually $2.4 million in federal funds to be matched by $1. $2.5 million in matching funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The total budget is $3.6 million over a three year period and we have some exciting ideas about what we want to do with these funds. We are going to set up 147 public computing centers in Nebraska libraries. And these public computing centers will be state of the art. They'll have high speed access for the most part. They will have computers that the public can use. They'll have printers and scanners and projectors for training and educational setting. It's just going to be a wonderful resource across the state for people who are looking for all kinds of information. But we know as we wrote our project we knew a lot of the information they'd be looking for would be e-government information. So we looked for partners to help us provide programming and training in these computing centers over the next three years. And one of the partners that we found is actually going to do a terrific job for us. This is the Nebraska Court Administrator's Office. And they are going to be very instrumental in helping us to do the best job we possibly can across the state, providing those resources that we've been talking about to the customers in all the communities. They are going to do training for librarians and court personnel in all 93 counties over the next three years. And they're going to help us work together with the court personnel in our communities to serve our customers that we've been talking about, these people we've been talking about today. I don't know any detail at this point. We are just now talking about what are the needs for training. The information that Beth and Julie and Laura gathered this last couple of weeks where librarians sent to them some ideas of the kinds of questions they have will be very helpful to the court administrator staff as they plan the training and to us as we try to help them. And again we are looking at a three year process of hitting all 93 counties in Nebraska. So that's pretty exciting to us. And I guess if you have any questions about the grant please do type them in or else put your hand up and speak into your microphone. But I just wanted to sort of wrap up what I had to say with something that I think helps us bring us back to why we're doing this. That was the question that Beth asked at the very beginning of this session was why are we doing this. And I want to come back to that with a testimonial that we received and it was not to our librarians, it was to a librarian here in Nebraska though who had helped someone and I just want to read this to just help us remind ourselves what we're here for. I wish to express my gratitude for sending me this information. After reviewing it I feel that I have properly submitted the proper paperwork for my appeal to the district court. I definitely wish I had contacted you sooner since some information I searched and searched for at the time is contained within the 37 pages of the document you provided me and would have made my research so much less stressful since I am a prosaic claimant petitioner. Once again thank you very very much for the information. So again, there are so many of our former, of our current and former customers who are out there and who are singing the praises of the librarians and help them get to where they are and to resolve issues like this. So I just wanted to make sure we all keep that in mind for the tough days when you get the tough questions. Which we all get. Yes. Oh and what I was going to do, I'm sorry I didn't point out that for the future over the next three years, when this training happens you'll see this thing, tools for participants, training will be listed here on this website so that's why I wanted to bring the website up. So you'd know that all those kinds of training events will be listed. There'll be a link to them and we'll be able to track what's going on in terms of training and programs across the state. Thanks Marjor. Thank you. You guys want to wrap up? Okay. I guess our wrap up is to thank you all for bearing with us and our technical difficulties and so on and so forth and thanks, I have a deep thank you to everybody here. We all participated in this and I'm always so grateful for Krista. He probably doesn't get a lot of credit for handling those things that I'm too terrified to even think about dealing with. Here's our contact information e-nails if you want to follow up with questions for any of us. Thank you. Is mine on the next page? Oh, yes. Sorry. I thought they were going to forget me. I was trying to be stingy about how many slides I have. I don't need to make slides for all of the library people. I can just do two slides for all four of us. I just want to say thank you to everybody for tuning in. Anybody have any final questions or comments you want to? You can type them into your question section or raise your hand we can unmute you. Doesn't look like there's anything urgent. You have the contact information for everybody who is here today so if you do feel this happens a lot, I'm sure I do it all the time and you're like, I don't know if you have any questions and as soon as we end you're like, oh wait, I knew something I wanted to ask. Contact them, you've got their e-mails and phone numbers. We'll also be sending this information to the PowerPoint presentation along with the recording out to all of you when it is processed later this afternoon so you'll have all that information as well. Thank you very much for attending today and we hope you'll join us next week when Mary-Jo will be back to talk about the big read at your library sessions. The information we have available for librarians or Nebraska librarians to use for that event. So, thank you very much and we will see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye everyone. Goodbye.