 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host and presenter today of Encompass Live 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 it is recorded every week. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show and it is posted later for you to watch at your convenience. And while we're here, I'll show you on our, this is our Encompass Live website here. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think may be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. Our archive shows, our upcoming shows are here on our website so you can see the ones coming up for the next couple of months. Our archive, a link to our archives is right here at the bottom. It's most recent ones first. Today's recording will be at the top there. Should be up by the end of the day tomorrow. I'll email everyone who attended today's show and registered for today's show to let you know when it's available. We'll also push it out to our Twitter and Facebook page that we have for Encompass Live. You can search our show archives. You want to see if we've done what we've done. If you didn't show us on other topics, anything you might be interested in. I'm not going to scroll all the way down here, but just be aware, our show archives, these go back all the way to an Encompass Live first premiered, which was in January 2009. So we are 15 years in. Wow. And we have all of our recordings here up on our YouTube channel. So just pay attention if you watch an archive show to the original broadcast date. Some of the shows, it's all listed here, it always tells you when it was first broadcast. Some of the shows may stand the test of time, still be good, useful information. Some things may be old, outdated, information has changed, links might not work anymore, resources and services may be totally different. People might not work at the same library they worked at when they presented to us with us 10, 15 years ago. So just be aware of that if you're watching any of our archives. So with the Library Commission, we provide services to all types of libraries in the state. So we do have shows on Encompass Live that would be for any type of library public academic K12 colleges, universities, historical societies really are only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries, something cool that libraries are doing something we think they could be doing. We bring guest speakers on sometimes to talk about things they're doing in their library to share their experiences. We also have the Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations for us about things we're doing here through the Library Commission. And that's what we're doing today. Today, as I mentioned earlier, I am your presenter, just me today. And we are this morning going to be talking about the public library accreditation process public library accreditation that libraries in Nebraska can apply for. Here at the Nebraska Library Commission at the Library Commission, I am the library development director, that is my official title and part of library development is doing accreditation for libraries. So this is a program that I run and keep track of so I'd be the person who'd be in contact with about anything related to accreditation. We're going to talk to today we're going to do just a short one hour. And for basic information about the accreditation process. We do have other trainings coming up as well I'm going to go over here to our library commission website. So you can see if you go to our calendar up here at the top of our website goes to our training and events calendar it's also been emailed out to people. And if you search here for accreditation 2023. Search, you will see all the workshops we have coming up when we're on doing today, which is about accreditation which is this one hour session, but I do have coming up our full in depth workshops next week and the week after. These are three our workshops as you can see here for different days. It is not a for a workshop session. Each workshop is going to be the same thing done every day. So you do not have to attend all four you just pick whichever one is best for you. I scheduled multiple ones, multiple dates and times, hopefully that people can find one time that is convenient for them. There will be recorded session of the three hour one as well after all the live sessions have been done to, if none of these dates and times works for you. So today we're doing an overview and intro to the process, and we'll get if you want to learn a lot more and get more in depth. I recommend you also register for one of the three hour workshops coming up. So, I have links here in the event page to our accreditation website and our community's response plan website there's the two main things that accreditation is all about. So I'm going to start just going right to the Nebraska public library accreditation web page here. So as you can see here, the process starts July 1 of each year. So we are today and this month doing training ahead of time so you can get yourself prepared and ready and know what you might need. When the process officially officially opens up on July 1. So you get a head start on everything. So this website has everything you need to know about accreditation and we're going to go through as I said, some of the things here. I looked up who all is registered for today's show. And I'm just double checking. Yeah. And almost everybody is due for a re accreditation this year. And I know some of you who are watching are unaccredited that's great we'd love to have more libraries become accredited. So we'd love to have you. And I know we've got some people that are looking for into the future they're going to be up for re accreditation at their library in a few in a few years. But this will be good information for everybody. So the first thing I'm sure you may ask or wonder is, why should I become accredited why should my library become accredited. I've talked to libraries about this a lot when we I get this question often. But I have added that what I always talk to libraries about onto the webpage so that you know you can refer to this. If you are wondering why am I doing this when we're going through all this work. If you need to talk to any local stakeholders people on your library board, people in your community, your city council members wondering why you spending all this time. And this is all the reasons here. Excuse me, and you can refer them to this or you can just borrow this wording and send it out in emails to people. Excuse me. So, I'll also clarify something too. I should say first, this is not a national program dictated to us by any other organization it does not come from LA, the American Library Association, or from IMLS Institute of Museum and Library Services at the federal level. Those are both you know organizations that do have things for libraries. Public library accreditation is something done just locally here in Nebraska. So, excuse me, I am we are in charge right here we run the program we created it for our libraries. If there are some other states that also have accreditation in their libraries for their libraries and some that do not. So if you possibly worked in another state you might not have never heard you may have never heard of this because it didn't exist, or you are on other states programs may be completely different from what we have here in Nebraska. So, I just want to clarify this is just coming straight here from the Library Commission, there is nowhere else that is that we have to follow any other standards from anywhere else we have created the standards for this program here in Nebraska, specifically for our Nebraska libraries. So, these standards that I mentioned these are things that that's one of the big thing one of one of the big things about becoming accredited. The standards that were created and came up with by other library professionals. This program is actually before my time, I've been here at the Library Commission for over 20 years, and we've been doing accreditation long before I was came here. But it is library, other library professionals came up with what would be the criteria you need to meet to become accredited. So, it's something at your community that you are reaching for these certain goals that there are certain standards that here at the Library Commission and with we worked with other library that said library directors and library staff across the state to determine what would be like the minimum criteria for a library to become accredited and then what could be a little upper level criteria to be a little higher accredited. So, these are guidelines that were developed, and they have changed over the years. So we do try and keep up with changes in technology and services and whatnot so they are not still the same criteria that we started with. So it's something as I have here to be proud of and to celebrate saying that we did these things and other professionals, our colleagues have said this is what makes a great library and we are doing these things. So there are some minimum standards you have to meet. You have to keep up these standards, so you don't just do this once and then you're done you have to maintain what you're doing at your library. As I mentioned there's some re accreditation. And it, you know, I said you can show to your community show to your library board to your mayor your city administrator. Here's what we have done and we have reached these these goals and met these guidelines and we got this. You get a certificate, yes to be in the mail. So that shows this library accreditation is valid for five years. So every five years you do have to renew. It was three years, we did make a change it last year there were some changes made to the program last year so if you've done accreditation previously you may have heard about a three year process. It's now valid for five years. We had heard from many libraries and we agreed that three years would not a long enough time for things have changed in your community for you to just, you know, to do the to come up with new goals and and see what was changed and if you're meeting these guidelines. So, we expanded it to five years. This also came out of the COVID-19 pandemic. We actually put a pause on accreditation for two years where libraries did not have to renew. There's plenty of things going on in the first two years of the pandemic that we did not need, I did not need libraries to be worrying about this as well. So we actually gave, we did one year extensions to everyone's accreditation expiration dates so everyone then was like four years and then we did a second year of that. In fact, last year for the first time after since the pandemic has started to pick it up again so everyone ended up with five years because of us giving everyone two year extensions. So we just made that official. So now you only have to do re accreditation every five years. Other benefits here. Making proud, you know, bragging rights. Look what we did we met these criteria these guidelines, but also money money's important. And there are certain things that you can only apply for certain grants and money that you can receive only, you can only receive it if your library is accredited. State aid to public libraries. This is something that we offer through here we get funding from the state legislature that is specifically to give out to libraries. In order to receive state aid, you have to be accredited. And then if you are accredited at a higher level, we have bronze, silver and gold levels. You get a slightly more state aid just for having reached that level and actually $200 silver and extra 400 for gold. In order to apply for our grants here that we offer through the library commission, you have to be accredited. This is our continuing education and CE grants, CE and training grants. Excuse me internship grants, library improvement grants and youth grants for excellence. Now I will mention that in the last couple of years. Last year we did have special grants from through the American Rescue Plan Act also, you know, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rules for those grants we could did not have the requirement you had to be accredited. So if you did receive grants last year, those ARPA grants that we gave out, you will notice if you look through that information about it from last year's grants that accreditation was not a requirement. But that was only when we had that special funding through those special funding from the federal government. We don't have that anymore. They have not done a new one. So now we're back to our regular rules where you do need to be accredited to apply for our library commission grants. In addition to that, the USDA, Nebraska USDA, and then a Department of Economic Development have decided for their particular grants that they do want you to be a accredited library as well. So there are community development block grants and USDA grants and loans. Both of these are for construction facilities, your buildings, libraries are eligible to apply for them. So if you're doing any sort of thinking of doing any sort of building a new library, renovating expansions, any sort of construction type thing, these are some grants that you could apply for from here in Nebraska. But you do need to be an accredited public library in order to apply for them. So why become accredited, breaking rates and money. I guess that would be the two big things. Now, as I mentioned, anybody have any questions about any of that type into your questions section of your go to webinar interface. All right. So as I mentioned, the process starts each July. We actually started training ahead of that, of course, as we are doing now with this workshop, this encompass live and then our becoming workshops, but officially on July 1, I send an email out to all libraries who are up for her due for re accreditation, and any of that have not been accredited before, but have submitted the public library survey. So that is really your first goal criteria that you have to meet. Before even thinking about accreditation if you've never done it before is to make sure you do that public library survey. This is something that if you attended trainings or received emails from Sam Shaw, he's in charge of the public library survey that we do. And you must submit that. And we have a supplemental survey to that here in Nebraska, where we ask a few more questions. So if you have submitted that, then you'll get an email from me inviting you to apply for accreditation for the first time. The survey is wrapped up in February. So for this upcoming year, that's all done. You can't submit one now and then get into the process so hopefully you already did that. If you haven't looked next year, when they open up they usually open up the public library survey usually opens up in November, I believe. And when, and I'll go to scroll down here at the bottom because we're talking about libraries who are currently up for re accreditation and libraries who are not. On some of our page here we do have a link to the Nebraska public library accreditation status. This is a list of all public libraries in Nebraska, all libraries that we know of, and whether they are accredited at what level and when they expire so if you're not sure when your libraries do go here and look it up. So you can see here we have right here at the top, Albion is do is at silver level second level and they're due this year. We also list what library system you are part of where you are geographically in the state. Any libraries the blanks that means they are not accredited yet. But as I said, we'd any library who has who submits that public library survey will be officially invited to apply. So this is not something that you can just go out and do the form and say I want to be accredited, you have to wait for me to send you the email that says you have been invited because you've met our basic criteria of submitting that public library survey. I invite you in July first get that email. And then there are two things you need to submit to me that I'm going to get to a little more detail about in a few minutes here. There is an online accreditation application form. And there is a community needs response plan, which is a document that you write up an email to me, and I'll get into more detail about that kind of like a strategic plan a guide for your library. Those two items are due by October 1 of the of this year. And then I will as soon as I receive both of those, I will start evaluating them. I love them both together. There are things in your application that refer back to the community's response plan. So they do work together. So I will once I have both of those I start evaluating them and then I will, as soon as I have my do that I don't wait till October 1. So if you send both of them in like July 2. If you're right on top of things, I will immediately then start working on looking at your documents. And by the end of the year at the very latest December 31, I will have gotten back to you about whatever. If you are renewed or if you are newly accredited. So accreditation runs for the full year. So libraries who are due for accreditation in 2023, you are accredited through December 31 2023. So you're working on getting your new accreditation that will start in 2024 for the next five year period. So there are some basic requirements before you can be invited to apply. As I mentioned already there is the public library survey and the our own supplemental survey you have to submit both of those. Sam Shaw figures out if you've done that and then he sends me the list so I know who can be invited this year. And if you are currently accredited, you do still have to keep submitting the survey every year. If you don't, you can lose your accreditation you it can be if you do not keep up with submitting that survey. Now, we do not do these things just you know, in stone hard line where they didn't submit it cut them off. It is you didn't submit it I will reach out to you and find out why Sam reach out to you and try and help you get these credits submitted especially if you are currently accredited we don't want you to lose that accreditation and lose any of these benefits of being accredited. So we will work with you on that as best as we can. If you have certain issues happening in your library. Disasters just your your new library director just started like in July, I would not make you, you know, force you to go through accreditation. Yeah, we give extensions. As I said we give extensions for the coven 19 pandemic in 29 we gave lots of extensions between 19 if you if everyone remembers when we had the flooding in Nebraska. You know, many libraries are like I got so much on my plate, no problem, we can bump you for another year. We do as I said there is no, you know, national organization national group, telling us where to do this. This is all us. So here at the library commissions we will work with you if there are any extenuating circumstances that for some reason why you couldn't get your survey in, or why you're just not able to get your re accreditation done this year and just do some of the things going on. So just keep in touch, let me know. But the basics are submit that survey and the supplemental survey. And then there are 12 minimum qualifications before you can even start the accreditation application form. As you can see here, that's nice. Right now the application form is not even available. It's not doesn't go live until July 1. So we're just looking at a static page here, showing what are the basic criteria. So you must meet these 12 minimum qualifications first. There is also you'll notice here and whenever you are in the actual application form itself the online form there you will see in some places this little yellow question mark. Yellow circle the question mark in it. If you click on that that opens up a new page that has help guides. It has interest for some of the questions on the application form not everyone of them, and it will give you links to things in so you can have some more information if you're wondering well what does that mean what does legally established mean. Well, it means you, you've met the criteria and these specific statutes. There are certain statutes in Nebraska. Nebraska state laws that govern how libraries are legally established. And you can find them here. You can find the help there for all of these different things so first you have to legally established, the established means you had there was some sort at some point in time in the past. There was a resolution and ordinance something was, you know, officially done by your municipality, whether it's the city township county village whatever, stating we are creating a public library. And then the second thing is you have to have a library board that has a minimum of five members. That's the two things that you're legally established. You have to be in compliance with any other Nebraska library laws, or any other local or federal laws that affect libraries. As I mentioned there are specific library laws. And you'll find the links in that help there. You have to have a library board and follow the Open Meetings Law, Open Meetings Act rules. We actually did an end cup as live about the Open Meetings Act last year. So I recommend go take a look at that and see to learn more about that. Your board needs to be certified and your director needs to be certified and these are two things I'll get into a little closer. And this is meeting certain criteria here at the commission and doing continuing education work, keeping up with professional development. You have to receive local funding from whoever is your local funder city village township counties some somewhere. Any or or all of those, depending on your situation. As I mentioned you got to do that public library survey in the supplemental survey. You need library staff, you cannot be a volunteer run library to be accredited you have to have staff that receive a salary. You can have volunteers work at the library that's okay. We know we have many libraries have volunteers, sometimes library board members help out and they don't get compensated. That's okay. As I said on a temporary basis for certain hours that's fine as you see it says you're doing all scheduled hours, but of course there will be situations where you can't be there so volunteers running the library for the morning, or you go to a conference, or what workshop for a day and a volunteer helps out that one day that's okay. It's just on a regular basis as far as your regular schedule is there's always someone who is paid who works the library. If you have an email address that is used and checked regularly that is how we communicate with you. That may seem like a strange thing for some people that of course I have an email. That's how we do things. Well, for some places it is. It's not. And it had been difficult over the years sometimes to get in touch with library directors, and we do not have the ability here to call everyone on the phone. We have almost 300 public libraries in the state and that's just not something that's going to happen, or to mail things out to all of them. So we do communicate via email, you need to check your email and you need to be responding when we reach out to you for things. You don't have to provide your basic services at no charge. This is one of the Nebraska state statutes actually states this that public libraries must not charge residents for basic circulation of materials. Using new providing reference services to them new resources, and number 11 here access the internet no charge you cannot charge people to use your internet service it has to be free. So these are just the things that have to be free other things yes you can pay for you can charge of course you can do, you know, late fees charging for workshops, sometimes for materials and things for registering that's okay. These are just the things you cannot charge for per state statute. And you have to do an annual report to whoever is your governing body, your local government. That's also a state statute is supposed to be done by February of each year. So at some point you have to do before February of a new year. So sometime in January or February, just submit a report to whoever is in charge of your library city village township county whoever. I did not require you to send me that report you just check this box and say yes I am doing it. That's a minimum criteria just to even get into the accreditation application form that you have to check off. Any questions about that about the qualifications. I'm not going to get much into the public library survey. Sam handles that. If you have any questions about that submitting the survey questions on the survey, or the supplemental survey. You can reach out to Sam Shaw about those with any questions you have for those. Any questions about the qualifications for those 12 minimum for becoming accredited. The question you can go ahead and type into the question section of your go to webinar interface. There's questions or chat whichever one works for you. Or if you have a microphone of your own on your computer that you know works. Let me know and I can unmute you and you can ask your question that way. I don't know if they're hand raised but let me know if you'd like to unmute or just you're going to type in a question. I can't see if you're all typing it doesn't show me that I have to wait until the whole message comes up so um since we're talking about the qualifications here I am going to go into certification that was mentioned there. Oh, there's a question. Okay, good question. Yes, someone is that Denise has a question. What about charging for cards for non city residents is that okay. Yes, that is okay that you have a lot many libraries do do that that is perfectly fine. You're just charging them to access, you know to be able to use your library because they are not. And actually, that's not a problem because as you can see here the wording here says basic services to residents that supply tax support. So you would be having anyone who is in your tax area please please money, you know to your tax district, you would not be giving charging them, giving them, making them get a non resident card because they are resident. Non residents, that's okay so that is this is only you have to just make sure that it's free to your own residents. Yeah. It's just perfect thank you yes, it was perfectly fine to charge non city residents because it specifically states that your own residents, you have to make sure that it's free for. Alright, so, um, director and board being certified I'm going to talk a little bit about that. Let's see you get back to there. So back to our library commission homepage if you look here you'll notice there is a menu item on our menu on our website here for accreditation and certification. And if you look there you'll see that we have board certification library certification and library accreditation all grouped together. That is because board certification and library certification feed into library accreditation. As you can see what I just showed you it is required for your board to be certified and your library director to be certified. Some people get confused about this. About certification and accreditation the wording of it and my predecessor Richard Miller said people can would explain it this way. People are certifiable, but buildings are not. So only people can be certified, and your library building is accredited. That's the way you can possibly remember it. But if you reach out to me about my librarian accreditation I will clarify what you're talking about about you as a person or your library as a building. So we do have information here about your board and your library and certification, because they are required for your library to be accredited board certification. So what we do have where you can look up your library board status. So just like we were looking at the accreditation status you can check and see what is the current stand standing. If your board is certified and when they are due for recertification and or whether it has expired and you can see some are expired recently some while ago. And some libraries who just have never gone through the process this is all voluntary process certification for boards certification for librarians and accreditation is all voluntary. So you will see some boards that just happened to have gone through the process of doing it. You can check and see what your board situation is there. On your library's name, you will see where they are currently what items have been submitted to us for content education that the board members have attended, how many hours they have and how many are needed, and when they are due for recertification so you can see here Ainsworth, and this all comes from information that you provide to us. They're halfway there. They've done 10 hours and they need 10 library boards need our board certification and librarian certification renew on a three year cycle. And library boards have to do 20 hours of continuing education credit in that three years. This is 20 hours as a group, not 20 hours per person. So you have five members of your board. Each of them has to do like four hours and you'll have more than enough in a whole three year period so it doesn't take too much. You just have to keep up with things. Back to the main page here. There we go. This is our manual very useful for library boards just to keep up with how to be a library board, but main page for library board certification I'm not going to go into a huge detail on this and just going to show you briefly. How you can become certified as I showed mentioned before you'll see some boards don't have anything that you have to submit CE activity activity for your board, and then we know that you are trying to be be certified and we start tracking it. We have, you can check your surface intact certifications test which is showing you. We have a link here a specific CE reporting form for library boards. So you can put down one activity and list multiple people you don't have to do one at a time for each person so if like all five board members sat through one workshop, like this work, the training we're doing here, you just list all their names. And to apply for certification, you do have to just submit this so that we know that you are trying to you have to submit this certification application first, just let us know that you are actually working towards that so that when we do receive CE forms. We know why we know that it's not just, you know, mistake or something but that you are wanting to become certified. So that's one of the things you can do to earn certification as a board. Generally speaking, it just needs to be something that has to do with being a board member of running, doing your job as a library board member. If you have any questions about what does qualify what doesn't Holly Duggan who's our CE coordinator continue education coordinator she is the person to talk to and ask, does this qualify does this not and she will let you know yes or no. So just specific things that you can do trustee Academy courses short takes for crush for trustees that we pay for to have for libraries to have access to through United for libraries website. This is the organization for friends and foundations and board members. So we pay state of Nebraska pays for all library staff and board members have access to all these trainings so we have lots of things out there available for you. So if you're familiar with what the different topics are. There are some other videos here that are through other states that you can watch theirs to earn CE credits and compass live sessions that have been held that are related that are trustee and board which is board related. You can watch any of these. They have not, they have those trustee training specific things but they also various monthly webinar series, monthly work things that they do other events conferences, you can see here's a huge list of things that your board members can attend. And it's not just online you can do things in person to. So, you know, attending in person workshops that are about library board you know if there's something is done at the Nebraska library Association conference or through some. Regional library system or something. You can attend those as well. So your board needs to be certified 20 hours every three years. Also your library director has to be certified. It's very similar situation. But you have to do more. So your library director, first to decide what level you need to be certified at is based on your education. If you've attended any sort of library school, or if you just have a high school if you have a high school diploma GD, anyone is eligible for certification. It just depends on if you have attended something that is library related education wise, you do not have to work to our extra basic skills courses. We've already done some sort of education that is library science related. If you haven't, which is the case in many, many of our libraries, we know that's why we have our basic skills courses. So as you can see here. You have your high school diploma, but you have not done any higher education you do basic skills courses. You've done some sort of higher education work, gone to college or university of any sort, but it's not library science degree that you have, you have to do our basic skills courses. Basic skills classes are offered throughout the year. There is a schedule of them they happen regularly. There's most of them are two week courses summer month. They're online, and you have three years to if you do need to do the basic skills classes you have three years to do all of the required courses. And so you don't have to do everything a whole one year and do them all that one year you they'll, they'll come up every year. In addition to if you didn't if you have a library degree, you just have to do continuing education hours 45 hours of CE hours in your three years. So anything related to your job attending workshops. Going to conferences presenting at conferences and presenting workshops you can earn CE credits for presenting you earn double for that actually. So if you presented at the Nebraska Library Association conference, or if you presented an encompass live for me, you can, you will receive CE credit for that. So if you have a library science degree of any sort, you just have to do this 45 CE hours every year. If you don't have a library science degree the first year you becomes you apply for certification you have to do your basic skills classes, and do the 45 hours. After that you just have to do 45 hours every year to keep your every three years to keep your certification up to date. You also have to apply to the program just like with the board, you have to submit an application, telling us that you are actually the reason you are doing this work and attending these workshops is because you are trying to keep either get earn or renew keep up your librarian certification. So you guys submit this application first and as soon as we have this then we know anytime you submit something to us, or you attend something, we will add it to your record. So attending this workshop here today actually I take the list of everyone who attended this and I pass it on to Holly and Mary Bible who's our assistant admin assistant in our department, and they automatically add your CE. So if you attended something here at the library commission you don't have to submit and tell us we know, and we do it for you, pretend something, attend something else somewhere, anything else that we haven't done, then you do have to submit a form. There is a link here about how to earn CE for librarians there's lots more information here because you have more hours you need to do. You can take courses webinars workshops things in person online. Like I said teaching all sorts of things, and there is a report form to submit for anything that is not attended from the library commission where we already know that you did it. So you would use that form to submit these CE hours. If you're not sure what counts contact Holly and ask, and she will work with you on that. You can also look up and check your record. This is not something I can show this is personal to you as you. So I'm not going to look at this like we looked at the board one. But, so you can look up in here, your name and password that there is a look up for your password if you don't remember and didn't know what that was. And then you can see how many hours you've submitted that we know of and how many hours you have left so you can always double check your own record here to see where you're at and how to make sure we've received something that you submitted or to see how many more hours you need. If you submit that CE form activity form. That is something manually that Mary does so do give her some time it's not an automatic thing where automatically it's actually record to just take her about a week or so to get that any see we say I love at least 10 days for something to show up in your record from when you actually submitted it or from when you attended something. Any questions about board or librarian certification. As I said, they both feed into your accreditation they are required. They're one of the 12 minimum qualifications that your board is certified and your library director is certified additional staff can also have me certified and you can earn a few more points towards your degree as much as they are, but your director is required to be. Now, as we are getting ready to start up this year's accreditation process for any libraries that are up for renewal, or who have submitted the public library survey, I will be double checking to see if your director is certified and if your board is. If not, we will have to have a discussion about what we need to do to get you on track for that. We can talk about we will talk about why you're misdoing your hours, what we need how much time we could give you set will set up a plan for you to maintain or re earn your certification either for your board or for you as a library director, so that we can also continue on with your accreditation. So we'll be checking into that. The last thing you need to do is submit a community needs response plan. This is a big thing and it is one thing that sometimes does takes a lot of work for libraries to put together sometime if you have a previous one it's great you can just take that one and modify it. But if you've never done one before you will have to do one from scratch. I'm just going to briefly look at this here. As I said, we do have the three hour workshops coming up where I'll get dig much more deeper into this and into the accreditation application form with all the questions on there. This is just a little overview today, but you have to put together a document where you meet have these seven elements in it. It's basically it used to be called a strategic plan, but that was too broad a term and it kind of confused a lot of libraries. So we changed and called it a community needs response plan a plan for how are you are going to respond to the needs of your community from the library. So looking out into your community seeing what's going on and seeing if there's something you can do to help. So kind of a guide for you. We have lots of resources on here about what you need in a plan. Examples of other libraries plans. So these are great to look at and duplicate if you want to, you know, model them as a template. We have, as I said we changed, we did make some changes to communities response plans also in 2022. We last year we had a, we brought together a review team to review and do a self evaluation of accreditation. And the community needs response planning, because it had not been evaluated since 2013 in the current incarnation of it. So we made some changes last year to hopefully make things easier and on libraries so there are some changes to the sections, some of the sections and some of the information you need to include in your community needs response plan. But these previous ones have good resources. These two new ones here are some examples of libraries who submitted them last year that are good. So I highly recommend taking a look at those if you're looking to either update your current plan or write one for scratch. We have help guides about all the different sections here and like I said we'll get more detail into detail with all of this in the longer workshops. So you can look at this if you want to ahead of time and see what you would need to do, and look at some other libraries examples of plants. But this is a document, as it says here that does need to be also submitted to me so there's two things you'll submit to me, the community's response plan, which would be Word document PDF however you want it that you email or mail to me, and then the accreditation application form which is submitted online. So those two things I take together and look them over and see if we get re accredited or earn your accreditation from the first time. There are three levels of accreditation that I've already been mentioning bronze, silver and gold. Yes, when this was first when we first did this new version of accreditation it was the Olympics were happening I've heard the story, and it was actually jokingly said, how are we going to what are we going to call our new levels we have this new way of doing it and so let's do bronze silver and gold like the metals. And they said, oh actually that's a good idea. So it is. You earn points for each guideline that you meet on your accreditation application, depending on how many you earn you either bronze, silver or gold minimum is 175 points. Previous versions of accreditation hat were much more stringent where you had to meet all the criteria in this long list to become bronze. And then now there's an extra criteria to the also have to meet to become silver and even more to reach gold. So it was the same for every library. So, in 2013 accreditation was revamped to do this point system, where you can earn points for what you're good at at your library, each community is going to be different what your community needs, what you're doing for your community what you do in your library as programming and things. And we wanted you to basically be, you know, what's what's going great in this community is going to be totally different than what's in this other community and you both should earn points and be able to earn accreditation based on what you're doing that fits your community. So this way of tracking it seems to work much better. There are the accreditation application has five different general categories of governance and planning resources services cooperation and collaboration and communications. And we're going to look at a preview application of this just to show you briefly what it looks like. The information that you submit into your public side library survey which I said is required to even become accredited. Some of that information is automatically fed into your accreditation application form. And the things that use that you report to us are used to decide if you can earn points for them. So rather than having you reenter all this information they already submitted to us in the survey, we automatically dump it into your application. So some peer comparisons that are done using that public library survey information. These nine guidelines here you're actually compared to libraries who are similar in size of your community. 15% above my above or below your legal service population so we look for the size of your community, then libraries the same size, and then we do a comparison. If you either meet or the average of those libraries, or the median of those libraries and you can see down here that's a math thing value line at the midpoint when the statistics are all ranged in size order to me either one of those you earn the points. It seems to be more more fair to compare you to other libraries were similar size to you rather than anything else. There have been some libraries and who went to this this version of it there and some libraries have said, I don't really work for us though our library even though we're similar in size there's all these other things going on. We have looked at it and we did some evaluation last year and changing and adding any other criteria like amount, you know, budget or other things. Didn't really change who you are compared to. We turns out to digging into other, other, other data, this 15% still ended up with the same library as you're being compared to. So we're gonna stick with that. If you do have any issues with who you are being compared to you can always reach out to us and we can work with you on that too. For some libraries, there are not communities of the same size in Nebraska. And if we, if we come up with not enough libraries to have something, you know, meaningful, we do reach out and look, bring in statistics from libraries in potentially Iowa or Kansas nearby to us, in parts of states similar sizes. The public library survey is a national survey. So also all libraries across the country you're doing it so we can find the data from other states in help to bring you gather some good peer comparisons. All right, so we're going to look at the preview application now just briefly so you can see what it's like. So, actually, the first thing you do when you go into the application is you're going to get those 12 criteria, and you've got to check all of them on the live form once it goes live. And once you've checked them all off, then it will let you apply the forms that turned on yet right at the moment so we can't that won't work. But once you check all of them, then you can go into the application, which is, at the preview one, which is just a static form. So you can see the kind of questions that will be asked when you do yours, yours will be personal to you. You will log into this using the same login username and password that you use to submit your public library survey that bibliostat password. You want it after a member whole another password. So, the same password use for that you'll use for this, and then it will know what you're like who let which library you are and will pull in your public library survey data into your accreditation application form. But for today we're just looking at the preview application. So you can just see what is going to be in there. You'll see there are the help things. The question mark that I talked about is here you'll see it within the application for some of these if you click on that it pops up with a new window and brings you right to that section of the help. So anything that has a question mark you can click on and you'll get more information about and help guide. So anything that has, as you can see here a green check or red X was based was automatically pre filled for you from your public library survey, you can't change any of those. So if it has a green check market, says you meet that qualification if it has a red X you don't. Of course this first one here, you meet the 12 minimum qualifications because you checked them off on that first screen. The last that does not have a green check is something that you can check off yourself. This isn't a live form. So you're not going to happen but as you check these off, you will earn points it shows you how many points each item is worth. There will be a box that will pop up and tell you here's how many points you are at and it will do a running total of them showing you throughout the form as you're checking things off checking and unchecking things, how your points total is going. There will be requirements and planning resources, you can see all the ones that relate to come in from your survey certification level your library director here's one that you have to meet. As I mentioned, there's a technology section and questions about your collection at your library. Lots of things here compared to other library so all these ones and green checks, you'll be compared to other. You'll be compared to your comparisons to other libraries similar in size to yours. Services that you offer and anything ways that you collaborate with other organizations, and then how you communicate and share the resources. You'll see here at the bottom there is a point total right here by default it's just 96 points because all of the public library survey ones are checked off. And then you would start checking boxes and those points will go up as you for any of these things that you do. And you'll be able to see how where you end up in your points total and what level of accreditation you end up at. When you are also in your live form here in this yellow box will be a new button but a button we don't see it here because we don't have a specific library we're looking at of course, but there will be a boxer that says pure libraries and you can see when you perform who are your pure libraries. So you can just find out all these the ones that compared to sure that makes sense. If you question that you're like, I don't think these are right. Contact Sam and he can work with you on who your peer libraries are we do know you know this is by default he just does it based on the legal service area, but then we do actually look at the libraries to and we do sometimes tweak and pull out some because we know it's not coming up with a really good comparison. So there is some, you know, human interaction done with that it's not just all automated for that comparison, but a few questions about it. You can ask you can also give you the answers, the public, the actual, these other libraries answers to their questions on the public library survey that's all public information. If you want to get together some data on you if you want to see well what did the other libraries answer I mean this is saying I did or didn't, you know, meet their, my peer group for this. Well I want to know what they are doing and he can get you that data. Any questions about the application form as I said during our longer workshops, I do go into much more detail about some of these questions of more explanation and information about it today we're just talking about in general. I think that you'll need to submit that you can now you can take a look at this now and just see the kind of questions you may need to ask. Okay, sorry. I just got a notice from someone that quit not a question but says, sorry, have to pop out. I understand we did just hit 11 o'clock and that's okay. We have goats at story hour. Do we get extra points for that. I'm assuming you collaborated with someone to bring those goats in the library just doesn't own goats. So that could be something you could, if there's someone you worked with to do that kind of programming or if it's something under your outreach programs. Was it targeting a certain audience there's ways you can work that in there and get some points yes definitely explain about your goats and you're in your plan I'd love to hear more about that. Alright, anybody have any other questions about the application form. Go ahead and type in your question section as I said we did just hit 11 o'clock that's 1102 by my clock here. We did start a few minutes after 10am that's okay, but we'll go as long as it takes for any questions you all have and anything else I still need to wrap up talking about today we won't get cut off. We'll leave as this person does that's okay. As you know we're recording the whole show you can always watch the rest of it later at your convenience. Alright, so that's the application form. As I said, once you are invited to apply when you receive that email from me on July 1. You would go into the live accreditation application form. You will log in and see, yeah. When this goes live when you get to here before you get to here you will have to type in your username and password. Like I said, as I said that bibliostat username and password and then it will let you get in the form, and then it knows which library you are. There will also be a link right in the email saying click here to go and do your application form. Alright, does anybody have any questions. Let me just check and see. Then I make sure I've got everything. Alright, so as I said, on July 1 is when you get invited to apply. And that is when the application form will go live. However, your community needs response plan you can start working on that and that at any time that you may want to need to do focus groups talk to people in your community get some information that will, you know, feed into that. You're going to have to wait to do that you can be working on that now. If you have a draft version of that or just some ideas you can reach out to me and I can evaluate that ahead of time, even before the July 1 that's okay. So you can start working on that right now. If you want to you don't want to be you know rushing through that. For anyone who is interested in the history of the program home waiting to see if anybody has any questions we do have a link down here about our accreditation program. It started back in 1986, where we first started talking about guidelines for library excellence and think the guidelines have been revised updated throughout the years. 2013 was the last big change when we went from the kind of hard line levels to the point system that we have now. So just last year we did do a self self evaluation of the program, trying to we hadn't looked at it yet to him just to seeing since 2013, how it's gone. We brought together a group of library directors, and our regional library system directors to discuss what changes can be made and we did make some updates, clarifications and questions have been tweets to make them easier. And he's responsible and a few changes to make it easier and making it that five year period too. Alright, so that is pretty much everything the basics of accreditation. Why you want to be accredited the benefits you can receive from it when things are going to happen look for an email from me July 1 if you are being re accredited, or this year, or if you've submitted this public library survey and are wanting. I invite you to become accredited. Look at your accreditation applications start working at a community's response plan right now, if you want to. There's a lot of data in there, and sign up for our workshops that we have coming up. Next week and to the week after that those are my more in depth where we'll get into how to write a community's response plan all the different parts get into a lot more about that. And we will go much deeper into the accreditation application form and going through all of the different questions that are in there to give you more detail about that. Alright, does anybody have any questions before we wrap things up for today. Let's get into your questions section if you have a microphone I can mute you I just want to make sure anyone has anything you want to ask right now I don't want to cut you off while you're still thinking about it want to be able to answer you today. If you're thinking of anything right now. All right, I don't see any desperate questions coming in right now that's okay. Oh, of course something comes up pops up as soon as I say that I knew it. Question is if you have multiple outreach projects do you earn points for each one. No, let's go into the preview application here you can see under the outreach section. It just has. No, you don't learn the extra for each one know you're in six points if you have any sort of outreach that you're doing here. If you have certain programs and things that you're doing that are based that were mentioned your community's response plan and to touch certain target audiences you list them all here. We don't earn for each outreach that you have just the fact you are doing outreach at all. And if you're collaborating with anyone. Same thing here you collaborate with local entities you can earn 10 points and it doesn't matter if you have one or 20 different entities. So, more of a general thing are you doing it at all. And then in some cases you may explain more about that in your community's response plan, possibly. Alright, I think I will wrap things up for today. You all know where to reach me though. Email crystal dot Porter at Nebraska. Gov. If you do have any questions about it look at the community's response planning info. Look at the preview application form to familiarize yourself with any of the questions that are going to be on there when it goes live. If you are looking for workshops, if you are want to learn, like I said more in depth about planning the community's response plan and the application form. And look for that email from me on July 1 if you are due for re accreditation or if you are submitted your survey and you may be credited for the first time. We're always getting new lot more libraries added. So every year voice at a few and want to keep going with that. I am going to go back to my encompassed live website here. All right, as I said that will wrap it up for today's show thank you everybody for being here today. It will be posted to our archives section here as I mentioned, by the end of the day tomorrow as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me. I also put a link to it on the accreditation website as well, since it is related to accreditation so you'll be able to find it through there as well for today's recording. And then after all four of those longer workshops are done a recording that will be available on all of those web pages as well. So that's it for today. Thank you for joining us next week, when we are going to read the rainbow serving the LGBTQ plus community in your library. Lang Gibson is at our Lincoln City libraries here in Nebraska, and they're going to talk to us about what you can do to build a more inclusive and welcoming library. This is a workshop we had scheduled a couple months ago, but due to illness had to be rescheduled so if you were looking at this is thought you saw this before you did. And we'll do it, and Elaine's finally coming back to do this with us next week. So I definitely sign up for that one and any of our other workshops we have coming up that may and June getting filled in. Keep an eye on the schedule for any other as I add more dates, more topics in. And hopefully we'll see some of you getting renewed for your accreditation or becoming a live accredited library for the first time we love that. All right, thanks a lot. Bye bye everyone.