 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event where we cover various commission activities and anything that might be of interest to Nebraska librarians. We have guest speakers sometimes, and we have commission staff at the presentations as we have today. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. They're free last about an hour or whatever it takes, and they are all recorded. We now have over 80, I just counted yesterday, over 80 archive recordings that you can listen to. We started doing this January 2009 was the first one. Can you believe we have more than 80 things we want to talk about? And the list is growing. And I don't think we've had any real repeats of topics either, so it's been great. So this morning we have, as I said, commission staff here. My name's on the last slide. Mary Jo Ryan, who is our communications person here at the library. Who's going to talk to us, sorry, about Big Read book discussions at your library. So I'm going to turn it over to Mary so you can go for it. Thank you, Christa. Good morning, everyone. Today we are talking about the National Big Read Program. We're actually going to talk more about how you, right now, can use this Big Read program in your libraries if you'd like to. The National Program, and let's just go on to the next slide. Would you like to give it a click? Spacebar? There you go. All right. The National Endowment for the Arts has created a program, and it started, I believe, in about 2004, to provide funding to libraries to do book discussions. And this program has been going on. It's been going great guns ever since. Let me go to the website, actually. And it created an opportunity for libraries and other organizations that wanted to write grants and do special book discussions on special books and special topics. But it also now has created an opportunity for all of you, because we have materials from these programs that you can use in your own library whatever way you want. I'm thinking I should be able to move that now, yeah. There we go. Okay, so here we are at the National Endowment for the Arts, the Big Read website. Is that coming through okay, or do I need to make it bigger? Probably fine. We seem to be frozen up in our... Our camera. Our frozen. Can you see us, everybody? Can you let us know? Can you still hear us? Hello? If you can still hear us, let us know by typing in the chat box or raising your hand, which is an icon you can click on. Of course, if you can't still hear us, you won't hear me saying this. We're having a little technical difficulties today. Well, it looks like it from my end. And does it look like it's frozen at what? Like it never went to this website? Yeah, and our camera is frozen. But nobody's saying anything either. Hello? Can anybody hear us out there? See if they could hear us. They would have said so, because that's what I asked them to do. Yes, they can see and hear us. Okay. You can see and hear us. Okay. All right. So you can actually see this website and you can hear me talking. Okay. Great. What I want to do is tell you a little bit about this program. They called it Creating a Nation of Readers. And it's to inspire people across the country to pick up a good book, listen to radio programs, watch video profiles, and read some brief essays about classic authors. That was their goal. And the way they decided to do it, this was based upon some research that they had commissioned, which, dear, that's not very good. Okay. Which was called Reading at Risk, a survey of literary reading in America. Oh, look, then I covered me up. Didn't I? Neither. Okay. This was in 2004. It was by the National Endowment for the Arts. And they found that not only is literary reading in America declining, but in fact, it's declining rapidly among all groups. But in fact, it is really declining in an accelerated rate among the young. So that brought them to the point of thinking that if we brought together a coalition of groups such as, this is the partnership. Oops, it's not there. Okay. The partnership is the Nebraska or the National Endowment for the Arts. It also included, oh, I think I have to go back to the homepage to show you. And this is a pretty slow move back, isn't it? It also included the IMLS, Arts Midwest, some other groups that have the same commitment to reading and encouraging reading. And we'll go back to this. And what they decided was what they needed to do was to restore reading to the center of American culture. And they thought by doing this that they could make grants to libraries and other organizations to do these month-long book discussions. And the book discussions would include a kickoff event. And it would also include a variety of other activities, author readings, panel discussions, book discussions, events using the book. As a point of departure, for example, film screenings. Some of these books have been made into films. And so these film screenings are a good way to promote the reading of these books. At any rate, they made over 800 grants in the last three or four years since they've been doing this project. And I believe that grant program is now closed. There are no longer making grants. But that doesn't really matter to us because we are the beneficiaries of a lot of materials to help support this project. They created these materials. And so now we can use them in any way we see fit. And they are free of charge to Nebraska libraries and schools. So why don't we go to look at what some of those materials are like. I'm going to hold them up, but I don't think you can see them very well. Maybe I'll pop up a little closer to the camera. Well, we have a kid. And the kids have a teacher's guide, which I will tell you a little bit in a minute or two. But these teacher's guides are very useful. And they don't need to be used by teachers. They can be used by librarians, who's hosting a book discussion group, or even just a citizen, a community person who's hosting a book discussion. So this is a resource for your book groups as well as other things. Oh, this is a resource for your book groups as well as other things. In addition, they have these readers guides, which are smaller versions of these guides, and they've got a lot of good information in them for the readers as they're reading the book. And the other really sweet thing about this packet is you can't see this, but it's a CD, and the CD has radio programs on it. And the radio programs can be used with your local radio station to promote the work that you're doing or at the book discussions. Or you can just give them to people to check out and listen to because I guarantee you if they listen to these radio programs, they will really, really want to do a book discussion and read the books. That's the whole point of it, and radio works great that way. For those of us that have done radio programming on books, we know that it gets people to read those books, doesn't it? I'm telling you. So let's go to one of these books that we have. It's My Antenna by Willa Cather. We don't actually have the books, but we do have the materials to help people talk about the books. And their website here begins by sharing some information about Willa Cather. And our people in Nebraska know a lot about Willa Cather because she was from Nebraska. But you can see that this is interesting information for people who don't know much and also who haven't seen photographs of her or illustrations. Willa Cather commissioned these illustrations from a Bohemian artist for the first edition of My Antenna. So this is the kind of thing I had never seen these illustrations because I'd always seen the pictures that are in the more recent books. And this is 11-year-old Willa Cather. And a lot of people have a lot of interest in Willa Cather and in My Antenna for a lot of reasons. But maybe there are people in your community that don't have that interest. And that's where things like the Reader's Guide and the Teacher's Guide come in. Just to give you a quick idea of what's in the Reader's Guide, there's a short introduction. It's that little notebook I showed you. It's got some information on historical context. It's got information about the author, which is very interesting for people, I think, and other works by the author. Always good because it's the first one. A book is made with one's own flesh and blood of years. It is cremated youth. It is all yours, no one gave it to you. That's a quote by Willa Cather. It also has to sky questions. And I really love this. Now, I have a book group that we don't often retreat to these discussion questions, but I always like it when they're there because sometimes we're having a discussion and it seems like in our book group everybody has just said the same thing. The book has had the same effect on all these people around the room and they're saying the same thing in a variety of different ways. And that's fine, but it is good then to be able to go to a discussion question and ask something that maybe they hadn't thought of. Why does Jim title his manuscript My Antonia? What does he mean when he states it's through myself that I knew and felt her? So that kind of thing can be very useful in a group discussion even though you might have good discussion going anyway to insert a question that's different from what everybody's talking about. Everybody's agreeing it's nice to toss in something that they haven't agreed on or haven't thought about. Exactly. I think the best discussions are when people don't necessarily agree. Sometimes it's not that much fun, but it's very interesting. These are additional resources. Works by Willa Cather. Here's a PBS video. Here's a website at the Cather Foundation. Another one at UNL for the Electronic Archives. I'm not going to go to all these because it's taking kind of a long time to go from one website to another for some reason. But I do think it's interesting to see that it's got all these web resources too. So that is the Reader's Guide. Now, if we went to the Teacher's Guide, there's even more information. And again, even though you might not use this in a formal educational setting, you might not need a schedule and lesson plans and all this kind of stuff, but there might be and probably would be something in here that would be interesting even in a very informal setting. So it's worthwhile having it. Let's see. So essay topics and essay topics are very much like what I was talking about before. A question you can ask a group that will get them off the topic of what they're talking about that everybody's agreeing on. For example, this is a good one. As an adult, Jim tells Antonia, I have liked to have you for a sweetheart or a wife or my mother or my sister. Anything that a woman can be to a man. And he tells her sons, I was very much in love with your mother once. Do you believe him? Why does Jim never try to marry her? Now that might not be something that would come up in the conversation, but it would be a good question to get people talking about something different. Again, another resource we have for all of these books is the Radio Show. And the Radio Show, as I said, can be used in the context of a real radio station. Obviously these are short. They're designed to be played as a show on the radio. But you don't need to use them that way necessarily. If you have a radio show where you go on and talk about books, you could just use this part of this. And I'll show you how. Just a second. Here we go. Hopefully you'll be able to hear this. If you can't hear this, because sometimes we have trouble with this. If for some reason you can't hear this, please just raise your hand or tap in the chat box. Type in the chat box. Tap on the typing keys in the chat box. Okay, here we go. Obviously you could cut the music out if you didn't want that. The material out of which countries you're made. No, there's nothing but land. Slightly undulating, I know, because often our wheels ground against the break as we went down into a hollow and worked stuff again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it and were outside man's jurisdiction. But I jumped it on carrying me. I knew not wither. I didn't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky, I felt erased, blotted out. I did not sing my prayers that night. Here I felt what would be, would be. That was Garrison Keeler, reading from Willa Carter's novel, My Antenna. My Antenna was and is one of the greatest works that's ever flowed out of the fingers of any American writer. Because when you read that, you really understand what it meant to find the Indian American. And more than that, I mean, it's a boy meets girl story. It's the kind of story that we all wish we could agree. It's a story about beginnings, beginnings of a country, beginnings of two people's lives. So we'll read again and again because it tells us how we can lead our lives with courage. It is about class differences. It's about memories of childhood. It's about immigrants and the Great Plains and hard work. Canada is the giant out here. All the rest of us writers are in the shadow. That book is kind of like a mouthbrush for my face. Some of the writing is the ceiling against which all great writing will have a bump. Welcome to The Big League, a program created by the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The largest reading program in American history, The Big League is designed to unite communities through great literature. Here's your host, poet, and former chair of the NEA, Dana Joya. Willa Cather's My Entitya is set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, a period in which pioneers were arriving in great numbers to settle and cultivate the land. When Cather moved from Virginia to Nebraska as a young girl, the wide expanses of the Great Plains had a profound effect on her. In My Entitya, the land itself becomes an undeniable presence. Writer and radio host, Kurt Anderson, is a native Nebraska. There is something about the landscape of the plains that is unlike any other I've ever been in. The sky is huge and there are these fields of corn or wheat or whatever they are, and there's something splendid about her description of that. Former U.S. poet laureate, Ted Couser. Well, I've lived in Nebraska for over 40 years now. She's right on with the description of the prairie grasses and the colors, and I wouldn't know where I was from reading it. There were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. I used to love to drift along the pale yellow corn fields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smart weed soon turned a rich copper color, and the narrow brown leaves hunk-curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Trees were so rare in that country and they had to make such a hard fight to grow. They used to feel anxious about them and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that twanee landscape that made detail so precious. Author and jazz musician James McBride. Well, I'm just going to cut this off there because I just wanted to give you a little taste of what the Myantonia radio program is like. And I think that all of you that have worked with discussion groups can see how playing this CD would get people started. And also it's kind of cool that it's got people on it from Nebraska. I mean, it's got Kurt Anderson, Betty Court, who used to be the head of the Cather Foundation, Ted Couser, of course. I mean, I just think that this could be a wonderful resource for all of you who want to do book discussions. And Myantonia being one of the books that people often want to talk about in Nebraska. It was the One Book One Nebraska a few years ago. It was. Yeah, we had a lot of use of our books, our book club kits. And we do here at the Library Commission have some Myantonia book club kits. And that brings me to something I want to really stress when we're talking about the Big Read. I have to stress it more than once. The Big Read materials are discussion materials. They are not books. So when you want to do a discussion with this, you can get the discussion materials from us for free. You can keep the discussion materials. You can give the reader's guide to the readers. You can keep the CD, I'm sorry, and a radio program. But in order to get the books, you're still going to have to use Interlibrary Loan, or Interlibrary Loan, our book club kits, or something like that. So you'll still have to find resources to get the books, but we do have the resources to help you do the discussion and the activities and the library promotion and that kind of thing of the program. So moving on. I want you to see that there are lots of books. And how hard is it for me to get to my PowerPoint? Oh, there it is right there. We have, there we go. We have an order form which will put up. It can be put up along with our recording of this program. Yes, yeah, we'll put the PDF of this up along with the recording when this goes up. Great. And so then you can just print this out and you can just order what you need by sending this, e-mailing it, or faxing it, or sending it to me at the library commission. And you can tell me how many of each thing you want. Like say for example you decide you're going to do something with the adventures of Tom Sawyer. You could get one of the audio guides. You could get one of the teacher's guides or you could get more of course of the teacher's guides, more of the audio guides. But you can actually get even more of the reader's guides because if you notice we have 50 audio guides, we have 150 teacher's guides, we have 500 reader's guides. So we're anticipating that when you order this you'll probably order extra of the reader's guides. So that's the one that actually gets given to each person who's in the group. Exactly. That's the way that works is the reader's guides go out to your customers and they may not come back. Probably won't. Which is fine, that's a point. That's good, yeah. Another thing people have been ordering just a complete kit. And I've had some people send me an order form with apps, they want one of everything. So they're going to end up with complete kits for all of these books. And these we have in stock, we have them right here at the library commission and we can make up these kits for you. That might be a good idea. I think for someone who's not sure what these look like inside and want to see what am I talking about for each of these and get one of each thing, test it out and then decide which one they want to get more of later to actually review the group. Exactly, that's what I think people are doing. They're looking at all of it and then they're deciding which ones are going to go with first and then they'll put in another order. Now let me tell you the easiest way to do this, if you can do this this week, you're in right now and I'll bring your orders, if you're coming to Grand Island, to the NLA NEMA convention, I'll bring your orders to you in a package and you can pick them up at our booth at the NLA NEMA convention in Grand Island next week. If that works for you, it works for us. If that doesn't work and we get your orders after we get back from NLA NEMA, we'll have to work out a way to get them to you because we don't have the funding for postage to mail them, but we do go back and forth across the state a lot to make sure you get them. There's commission staff traveling to various places that we just toss things up. I'm here, take this, take this on. And they're very nice and willing to oblige. Thank goodness. So that works out pretty well for us. In addition, there's a lot of people coming into Lincoln in November for the BTOP, the library broadband grant kickoff. So we'll be able to give stuff to people then too if you want to get your order in before then. Or if you're just coming to Lincoln for some reason of your own, I'm going to be in town because I'm coming to do whatever and pop by and pick it up. Make up a kit for me. I'll be in town. Yeah, we'll do it. So that's just to give you an idea of the best way to order the materials. Let me go back here and show you. I want to make sure we get to a couple more books so that you can see. I think that this is so useful. Let me see if I can find some. Oh, I know what I was going to look for. Here's one. The Wizard of Earthsea. Now again, this is a book that appeals to and did you hear Chris, she just moaned in happiness over the Wizard of Earthsea. I love those books. Oh God, Ursula again. The thing I love about this book is it can appeal to a wide range of readers. You could have an adult group very much interested in this and then it was originally published as a young adult book so you know you're going to be able to engage young adults. It is, but I've been reading them like as an adult and it's okay. It's about kids who start out as young adults. The characters are, but they grow up too. They grow up. So it's not just a kid's book, or even a young adult. I got to tell you, I think this is a book that's got a tremendous amount of potential for being part of a book group, reading group and I just don't know that it's being read very much anymore and I'm sad to say that. This is probably helping. Maybe I don't know when they choose the books to be on here, but they did have the TV movie of this. So that's probably in the last year. Yeah. They did an Earthsea mini series or movie type thing and I think that brought some more attention to it because that was one of the ones they picked it and it was very well done too. And that's another thing, I'm glad you mentioned that because that's another thing that they can use. Right, Krista, they can use those TV movies, that kind of thing as part of your library programming because it's your license that we have purchased to assure that you're within your copyright, correct copyright. Yeah, so find out if there is a corresponding movie about one of these books. Yeah, and that's another way to do programming. But you'll see here, you can also print out the map of Earthsea. It's just very cool. It's really cool. Now let me just go here and just quickly show you the Reader's Guide again. All the same resources. Historical content about the author, other works, discussion questions, additional resources. It's just really cool. Let's see what they say about additional resources. They might actually say these are her other books and her website. They don't actually have the movie up there. And then at the Teacher's Guide let's see if that's gotten more. Here's the Teacher's Guide and again very useful for discussion leaders. You don't have to use it in a formal educational setting. See if the additional resources are the same. They are the same, it looks like. Books about her. Yep. I bet you there would be something about it possibly on her website. I would think. There would be a link to find it. Okay, let's check in with this radio show. You'll have to crank up the speakers again so they can hear it. Let's try it. The Big Read. Watch the air between my hands. You turn away from others and spit still. In a great, smooth gesture you stretch out his arms. A gesture of welcome that opens an occasion began to speak. That's King Otter Rogers reading from Ursula K. Le Guin's novel A Wizard of Earthsea. Welcome to The Big Read. A program created by the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The largest reading program in American history, The Big Read is designed to unite communities through great literature. Here's your host, poet and former chair of the NEA Dana Joyer. A Wizard of Earthsea is the first book in a series of celebrated fantasy novels by Ursula K. Le Guin. This first novel describes the childhood teenage years of a young wizard Ged as he grows up in a remote mountain village and begins to discover and master his powers. One remarkable thing about A Wizard of Earthsea is that it offers readers the excitement of a fantasy adventure along with the psychological depth of a realist novel and the ethical and ecological awareness of a philosophical text. Le Guin invents a rich and complex maritime world in which she sets the story. A place called Earthsea novelist Michael Shabon. Earthsea is a world of islands scattered in an archipelago across the surface of an enormous ocean. Author R.L. Stein. Each island has its own personality and each island has its own geography and its own mythology and its own history. That strange communal isolation strongly characterizes the people of the world of Earthsea. The book has for me the silver light of the Pacific Northwest where we lived and I feel that I'm almost looking out on the sharp and steamy maritime skies that you see in places like Portland and Seattle but the fabric of it is very eastern and in that sense very ancient. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin. As I recall one of the first things I did was draw the map which is the map of Earthsea that's in the book now. I just named the islands. That was fun. I just irresponsibly gave all the islands names. I didn't know what happened on them or who lived on them or anything at that point but there they were. There was my world to play with. The Island of Gunt. A single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-wrapped northeast sea is a land famous for wizards. From the towns and its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays, many agudishmen have gone forth to serve the lords in the archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage or looking for adventure to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea. Of these some say the greatest and surely the greatest voyager was the man called Sparrowhawk who in his day became both dragon lord and arch mage. His life is told of in the deed of Ged and in many songs but this is a tale of the time before his fame. Before the songs were made Kelly Lake. Ged is a goat hurt from a small island. He seems to have some kind of power that very few people in his village have. He's a kid but he has these remarkable powers suddenly and he has to learn how to use them. Using the small magics that he's learned and the deep power that's inside itself he saves his village from the invaders. Here is this army this vast army coming to this poor restless village. He does this fog spell and brings this incredible mist that confuses the invading army and they're totally lost. He wins it's his first major victory. In saving his village from the invaders Ged uses so much of his strength and power that he falls into a frightening trance in which he cannot eat, sleep or speak Kelly Lake. After again he's sort of used up saving the village. A mage comes, a man named Gogan who restores Ged who gives him his true name. The world is Well I just wanted to cut that off because I didn't want to spend too much of our time listening to these radio programs but I think they're fascinating. I really think I could sit and listen to the whole thing. I was noticing on the page that it's actually released every two weeks it's a podcast. It's a regular podcast so if you've got people who are into listening to podcasts about reading or about books or literature this would be a great one to suggest to those people and every two weeks they'll get a new program. They can subscribe, you can subscribe to it on iTunes and everything just like any other podcast that people listen to. I would think that if you could just put that up on your website a link to the podcast and if you could say our book discussion today is Fahrenheit 451. Let me go to this and just see how easy it would be right there. See there it is. You can just put that right up on your website and you can have a link to it and people could start listening to them as a podcast and I think personally just having listened to these I think they're really going to get people interested in reading these books. I personally think it's a great way to get people because they tell some of the story but it does make you want to read them. I also like the authors of the books if they're alive are participating in these talks so it's not just other people talking about them you can hear from the actual author which makes a huge difference to reading and getting involved in a story. It's so cool. The authors themselves explain what they did with drawing the map first and now I've got to figure out what the heck all these islands are. It is so cool. I know you'd have never known that reading the book and it makes it different. It is so cool because you hear these things about what it's like to be a writer and to think these things up and to come up with these fantasy worlds like that and it's pretty cool. It's the same way when we have had the actually living writer for One Book One Nebraska we've had them go around and do programs in libraries that are really valuable I think. People really enjoy it. I know I took a group of older people to a author presentation and they may not have really loved the book but they loved the author presentation so that part of it was really memorable for them. They really enjoyed meeting the author hearing the author talk about how the book came to be and that's just like we just said in these podcasts there is some of that in there reading from the book. I guess I want to go back if I can. Back to the big read order form to remind you that we don't have every book on the website. We just have the ones that are listed here. Those were the ones that they had extra and could make available to libraries state libraries but let me tell you what some of them are. Like I said there's the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and it goes all the way from the Adventures of Tom Sawyer down to the Wizard of Earthsea but there's some other ones you might be interested in to Kill a Mockingbird. Again lots of interest around that because it's Harper Lee's, I don't know was it the 50th anniversary of that book coming out and so there's been lots of interest about that. Their eyes are watching God, classic, absolutely classic never heard of a book discussion group who didn't have something to say about that. The shawl, that's not one I know but it looks really interesting. You guys are all going to email me and say, I can't believe you don't know this shawl but that'll be one for me to read. I've got one in here I need to read. The Maltese Falcon, another perfect discussion book because but everyone knows the movie. Exactly the movie is an icon of American culture and so you can play the movie, you can talk about it in connection with the movie in comparison to the movie so it's a great one. A Lesson Before Dying that I hear is very popular with book groups The Joy Luck Club, one of my all-time favorite books. Love it also great awesome movie Housekeeping, okay there's a book that most people are not familiar with and I am here to tell you it is one of my top 10 favorite books. It is just awesome and there's a great movie out with Christine Lottie that is just fabulous so again being able to read the book and watch the movie and talk about the differences between the two and I'm just reading out some of these. This is not the whole list obviously but Greats of Wrath again a very popular movie The Great Gatsby another very very popular book, great to talk about. Bless me Ultima if you're not familiar with that book it's definitely one to get familiar with so I'm just wanting you to take a look at the books in this order form take a look at the website and let me know if you'd like to have any of these kits for discussion and I think if there's any questions now would be a good time to ask them Go ahead and pick me You can either type right in the chat box if you'd like to there's a chat box at the corner of your screen or if you have a microphone hooked up you can just raise your hand click on that raised hand and we'll unmute your microphone so you can talk to us we'd love it. I don't see anything coming up immediately. That's an answer to all the questions Well if you do have questions you all know where to find Mary Jo and if you would like me to bring these out to the conference next week just be sure and send me your order form right away Yep, nothing coming in from the audience Anything else? No? Okay Thank you so much everybody That is very cool, very interesting stuff definitely We're very lucky to have these resources that we can give. Yeah and I'm sure a lot of people will have any idea that they even exist or that we have them so hopefully this will help get the word out and get more moves going We're going to wrap it up for today. I'm going to pop over here and um Do you need the keyboard? Yeah, I'm trying to figure out if it's really good Is it still for? No I didn't play that one, good Just sitting here Normally what I do at the end of here is invite you to come and join us next week However next week we will be taking a week off from Encompass Live because as Mary Jo was mentioning it will be an LA NEMA conference Go to LA NEMA Go to LA NEMA conference This is in Grand Island Registration, early registration is closed but there is onsite registration available so you can still go, it's not a problem For the conference there is a few events there that the commission is involved in a lot of things Some of us are speaking We'll hope there's also pre-conferences on Wednesday A couple of different pre-conferences One of the ones that we're running is library camp in Nebraska This will be the third one, our on conference Yes, you can show up, since it's free there's no cost for the library camp so there's nothing that you have to pay ahead of time or even pay if you just show up on the day We've got plenty of room in it still so feel free to show up on Wednesday morning 9am to join us for that on Wednesday if you want to not a problem, we'll just take your name down there Is it the kind of thing if you can't get in at 9 o'clock can you come in in the afternoon only or something? Because the morning is mainly what we're going to do for the day, choosing the topics whatever It's a breakout session throughout the whole day that you can just jump into and we'll have everything planned out There's a break for lunch in the middle of it If you're on your way going to Grand Island but you don't get there until later in the day find us Riverside? Riverside I think and find our room and you can just jump in and see what the topics are but it goes to 4 o'clock so you've got all afternoon to jump in and just join the discussion It's all open discussion, there's no presentations or nothing like that, just come in and share what you have to think about or say about whatever we come up with in the morning There is a website for it If you do go to the NLA NEMA conference website there is a link to the blog for the Wiki blog most blog actual reason this year for an library camp and you can see what the topics may be you can sign up there to participate in it just off of that since the registration on the NLA NEMA page is closed you can sign up there and suggest topics that you might want right on there on the website that's what we want people to do but even if you haven't suggested topics you don't have to but we're just saying there's also sessions that will be participating, lots of us are speaking and I'm not going to mention all of them Thursday night library commission along with itar is hosting the open gaming night so hopefully come to that that will be at the holiday no, at Riverside starting right after the banquet ends, eight or so, whenever that's done until whenever we're done and it will be a mixture of the video games usually that we have, rock band, that kind of stuff a couple of weeks set up with various games, but board games and card games are bringing along anything we have that we want to share anything you might want to share games share with your colleagues, bring along and teach people how to play games and just hang out and have a nice fun evening of it and we'll just stay there as long as we need to for the night related to that, our session right after NLA is about gaming Susan Franklin from Perkins College Perkins Library will be talking about how they've been doing a regular series of gaming nights for the students and then we have our tech talk with Michael Sowers where he will be at Internet Librarian a conference in Monterey, California and he will be live from Internet Librarian which means it will be 8 a.m. for him and whoever he manages to round out his guests out there so we hope you'll show up for that and I think that's that's not all we know about October that's the end of October more things coming in November and December of course we do thank you the materials are a wonderful resource for our library from Constance Danzer from Springfield Memorial Library oh fabulous Constance let us know how many what you need to look at it or something so if there is nothing else we're good to go thank you all very much come sign up for upcoming sessions and contact Mary Joe for more information about the degree to order your stuff and come visit us at the booth at NLA Grand Island we're going to be there no matter what come to the booth and talk us about anything thank you very much and we will see you in two weeks thank you bye everybody