 Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns, your host at the University Library Commission. Encompass Live is our weekly online event that we've been doing here since the beginning of 2009. We cover all of the NLC activities and library topics. We've had presenters from the Library Commission and from outside. Commends we do have guest presenters coming in on any kind of topic that may be of interest to libraries and librarians in the state. We do this live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. And this session is recorded, so if you're not able to attend during our live sessions, you can watch recording at your leisure later. This morning we have Sally Snyder with us from the Nebraska Library Commission. I was going to be talking about one book for Nebraska Q's and one book for Nebraska Team's program that the Commission said. So take it away, Sally. Okay, thank you. I'm going to scoot around a little bit and I'm right between the windows and the background there. Let me know if my voice is loud enough. I was really pleased to be asked to do this session. I think Krista got it up and I thought, well, that's a good idea. And I'm glad that a few people have signed up to be here today and I hope other people will watch it after it's loaded onto our system. And we'll just talk now about one book for Nebraska Q's and one book for Nebraska Team's. So we know that the statewide reading program for adults began, I believe, in 2005 with my Antonia by Willa Cather. And that was successful. People were excited about it. Libraries had programs and so that program has continued each year with a new book and a new focus. And I can't remember exactly when it was, but Sharon O'Feng is the administrator of the Meridian Library System. She came out not long after I became the new children's and young adult services coordinator. I went to meet with Sharon and we had a discussion about a number of things and one of them she was keen on was we need to have a program like the adult one, but for children and teens. And I said, ooh, that sounds like a good idea. So we talked about ways to get started. She and I met a couple of times and talked via the internet about some things. And so then in 2007, the first year for one book for Nebraska kids and I'm the one who named it. A lot of people call it one book, one Nebraska, four kids. That's OK. I just, one book for a Nebraska kids closed nicely until I called it that. I wasn't really thinking about being more consistent with the one book, one Nebraska. So it was just slightly different, but that's OK. So we started, the first year was 2007 and we used the book Rescue Josh McGuire by Ben Michelson. And mostly we chose that book because Sharon O'Feng recommended it. And she was the one who really kind of got me started on this. And I thought, I didn't have a better suggestion. I had some ideas, but I thought, why not use this book? And it was successful. I think we had a lot of kids across Nebraska reading and discussing that book. And I was really pleased. And then we were fortunate enough to be able to bring Ben Michelson to the state in 2008, which was also very successful. Don't expect that every year. But it was a wonderful opportunity for a lot of communities and kids and adults. Then I decided, again, just me naked of my own mind, that it was a lot of work to have one book for Nebraska kids. And there's just a timeframe where I'm pretty busy with it. And then the rest of the year kind of closed by itself. But I thought having one book for Nebraska kids, two in the same year, was just double that work. And so I thought, well, let's just alternate. Sounded really good to me. And I don't know how all of you feel about it, but that's what I decided. So in 2008, one book for Nebraska teens was the feature book. And it was The Book Feast by Martha Susack. And again, that book was very successful. We did have quite a discussion. And then you'll find out who I mean by we when I talk about how the books are decided now. Because Sharon does not get them every year. I don't think she wants that responsibility, although she was happy to choose the first book. But we did have a discussion about whether the book should be for middle school age or for high school age. Because initially, when I was deciding on this program, I thought the teens would be more middle school age. Well, I had several people talk to me about that and say, you know, the Golden Sower Young Adult book is geared towards middle school, which is fine. But there isn't anything that's geared for high school. And it would be really nice if your one book for Nebraska teens was geared for high school age. So my youth advisory board and I talked about it and we decided that would be the direction we'd go for 2008. And the book thief was selected as the book. And you know, when I first looked at the book thief, I thought, my goodness, it's so long. Thieves are going to want to read it. Well, I guess I was wrong. And at first it wasn't a paperback, but then it came out of paperback and so we were good. And it's been very popular and also there are a number of adult book groups that have been using the book thief for their book discussion. Book as well, which is just great. And so when I thought about one book for Nebraska kids and one book for Nebraska teens, another thing I thought I was, because I'm going to alternate years, each book will be the featured book for two years. So one book for Nebraska kids began in 2007. It was still the one book for Nebraska kids for 2008. Although I don't call it that up there because we didn't get another one until 2009. And that kind of helps people, if you think of it that way, because initially when the book is announced and people are organizing their book group, they get on the list and we have quite a few people with this year's book again, which I'm so pleased about. But also, there's a fact that you don't have to talk about it in 2008 or 2009 because you'll have another year to get it might be more available for you to use in another year. So I thought, well, that's helpful too. So the book for this year, 2009, as you may or may not know, is again, this year, it's one book for Nebraska kids. And it's the Green Glass Seed by Ellen Clodges. And that was a book that I had not read until it was recommended. And my youth advisory board, which I'll again, I'll talk about in a little bit, read a number of books. They're so good to take the time. And usually it's in the summer when I'm asking them to do this. Really a busy time for them. And here I am saying, please read 12 books or however many there are. But they're very good about doing that and helping make the decision as to what book will be chosen. So again, the Green Glass Seed will be the one book for Nebraska to kids for this year and next year, because next year 2010 will be choosing our second one book for Nebraska teens. And I don't know if we're going to continue with the theme of it being a high school book or not. Again, that's something that the youth advisory board and I will talk about. Maybe we'll use this system to do that. I hope I don't scare people too much with it. Okay, so how are the books selected now after the first year? And I've been talking about the youth advisory board. They're an advisory board to me, to the commission. And it's about 20 children and teen librarians that are somewhere in Nebraska. They're across the state, which is great. And they're the ones that make this program work. Because as I said, they read the books. They suggest books. Other people can suggest books. And we put them on our list. I'll show you my list about the criteria in a moment or the guidelines. Not only do they do that, but they also provide the information and puzzles and other items that you'll find on our web page. And I'll also show you in a little bit. So they really helped choose a book that will see a good discussion book, pull together different information that libraries and schools can use to discuss the book. And it really helped to have different people doing this. Because if I did it all, it's all from my point of view. And basically I did a lot of this stuff for Rescue Josh McGuire, which is okay. But it's a lot more fun to have other people helping because they all have different information and different places that they go to find ideas. And I don't know all of them. So it's great to have more help. So here are our few guidelines that we've come up with as a group. We decided that we did not want our book to be a golden sewer nominee. Not that those are bad books. We think those are all pretty terrific. But because already kids are aware of them. Kids are reading them. And we wanted to have something else that kids might find a good read and also a good discussion book. So we thought, well, let's not choose a golden sewer nominee. The next one is that we really want the book to fit the suggested age group. And we both, we all know that that's kind of a tricky call because an age group is, their abilities and interests are wide ranging. But we wanted to be more in tune with what things that that age group might like. And also we want to be sure that the book has some good discussion points. I think many of us have been in a book discussion group where we've read something that everybody really liked. And nobody had much of anything to say about it. We all really liked this book. Had a good time reading it. And now we're done discussing. Well, that's not a success. Well, it's not the success that we want. We do want the book to have some things that kids can talk about and ask questions about. Why do you think this character did this? Or why was there an issue with that? And there can be different viewpoints. And as we all know, all viewpoints are accepted. It's not that it's right or wrong. It's just something to get a feel for how many different viewpoints there might be about an action that happens in the book. So we want there to be some possibilities for that. Now I mentioned the webpage. We do have a one book for Nebraska kids slash teens webpage and this is its URL. You can also search for it on our homepage just by going to our main homepage and clicking the search button at the top on the left and typing in one book for Nebraska kids. And it comes up as like the fourth choice. I don't know why, but I love to wear one. Fourth is pretty good, it's findable. And if you click there, this is what you'll see. It looks kind of like this. At the top of the page, this wouldn't be great if kids all over Nebraska were talking about books. That's been my opening line for all of them because I think that's great. And this top paragraph will have a brief description of what the current book is about and then some information about how you can get book sets and other ideas, how I really have planned this so that it's in alternate years. And then down here you'll see the one book for Nebraska kids, The Green Glass Sea. So I'm gonna go to my next slide that I put up there so you can see this a little better. This is where you'll find the different items that my Youth Advisory Board has put together for this book. There's a list of activities that you might be interested in. There's offer information. I know you can all read this yourself. There's some different puzzles. There's also a new puzzle up that I had already equipped this when I put this in my presentation today. But Julie, your puzzle is up there now. Thank you very much. Julie Austin. Oh, she has a microphone too, yeah. She's one of the Youth Advisory Board members and she very kindly put together a crossword puzzle for this book. And so that when you go to the page, you'll see there's another item listed there. But one of the reasons I also wanted to show you this was because you can see that the previous year's books are listed. The items that were put together for those books are still there. So if you've already done The Green Glass Sea and you want to go back and do Rescue Josh McGuire or something else, it's up there. And you can still use it. I also wanted to mention, I forgot earlier, that you can borrow a set of books from the library commission or from any of the systems. Each system office has a set of each year's books too. So they still have Rescue Josh, as far as I know, they still have Rescue Josh McGuire. I'm sure eventually they're going to have this, they're going to run out of room and they're going to be asking me, now I'm interested in that or something. But so if one place has set a book, it's booked out for several months and you want to try somewhere else, you can do that. You can try your system office and then you can try the library commission. And I have to say that what happens with the bookseek was I bought 14 books plus one book on CD for each of the systems and for the commission. I think we got 10 for the commission. And it was less than a month later, I was buying 15 more books for each of the systems and the commission because they were just getting booked like crazy. So if things are being booked out too much, then we need them to say, man, I tried to get that book and they told me I couldn't have until October. What's with that? And if I had any money in my little, my little meter fund at all, I will try to buy some more books for whoever needs them. Because I talked with Rod about this and I think this is really an important philosophical point. Rod and I discussed buying more for some, Martha Sue's book. And he said, well, really, this is a program worth promoting. We want people to be doing this. We don't want to say, well, no, you can do it for three months or five months. That kind of negates the whole idea. So that's why we try to have enough books for people to, I know you may have, you're still gonna have to wait a while depending on when you want them and when other people want them. But we do try to have enough books so people can borrow it to their book groups and have a good discussion. Oh, here's a sample. This is actually a clueless crossword puzzle, which I just learned to do. So I happen to put this one together. This is a sample of some of the puzzles for life that you might find on the page. Whenever I get a chance to do a puzzle, I do a clueless crossword puzzle. If you don't like those, well, you can volunteer to do a puzzle and then I won't be doing them. So are there questions about anything I've said so far? And maybe Julie wants to chime in and anything from her perspective at being on the Youth Advisory Board? Let's see. From the being on the board, it was really fun to read all the books and get an opinion out there for other people to bounce ideas off of each other. That was, I think, the best experience of it. I don't think I actually wanted originally the book that we picked, but then once I heard other people's opinions of it, I really liked it and thought it would really have good discussion quality. So I think that the parameters that we're using are really good for choosing those. And I just like to mention that we do a lot of our discussion via email. We have an email group and I get suggested books. So I'll send out a list. Here's five books that have been recommended. Please start reading now and I'll send more as I hear from people and then I'll send out more lists and people will start emailing back and saying, wow, I like this one so far, but now there's these five other books I'm going to read. You can see what we end up with and there'll be some discussion about the pros and cons of particular titles or also people will point out to me things that maybe I hadn't noticed, like something with a Newberry winner or a Newberry Honor book, which I hope I'm paying attention to, but sometimes gets past me. And then we'll say, well, Newberry's pretty noticeable. Maybe we should look more at some of these other books that are also good discussion books that haven't been as well advertised or whatever it is we want. I really like that you're picking books that haven't already been promoted in other areas, you know, there's lots of good books out there. Not all the ones that won the awards and the honors. So try and read those too. There are good books just as well. And I think the Green Glass C is a good example of that because Julia said she wasn't all that keen on it at first and I had not heard of it till someone recommended it for us to read for our one book for Nebraska kids. And somehow I missed that. And here's a book that we really think is pretty terrific. And now a lot of other people go about it too. So that is fun. If you do have questions, you can use the text chat, if you don't have a microphone to type them in there. We do have that open here. So if you have any questions about the program or any of the books or anything, feel free to go take in something in there and ask. Another thing you might type in there or use your microphone is if you have right now have any suggestions or recommendations for books we could look at. I said 2010 will be one book for Nebraska teens. So we're looking at maybe high school, maybe a little bit younger, I don't know yet, but you can make suggestions. And also 2011 will be one book for Nebraska kids again. So if you know, I didn't define these, did I? I did say high school and maybe middle school. When I'm saying one book for Nebraska kids, I'm thinking of like upper elementary, beginning middle school, so maybe fourth, fifth, sixth grade, you know, right in that range. I don't think that one's Twilight. I don't think that one's Twilight. I don't think I've already read that one. Well, I haven't. That just won the Young Adult Golden Sower Award. So since it was the winner, maybe we won't have it for our one book for Nebraska teens. I know, now you're gonna recommend New Moon, aren't you? And I think Wayne, that book has been read through the entire city of Wayne, so. I believe it. I think you can have a book discussion group and just pull a bunch of kids teams together and say, okay, all of you who have read Twilight, let's discuss and they'd be ready to go. Oh yeah. You don't have to tell me right now about what it would give you this chance to recommend something. Also, you can recommend other titles or more titles just by emailing your calling on the phone. Any suggestions you have for books that we might wanna consider for one book for Nebraska teens or for kids. And also if you have other questions after you've signed off today or if you're doing this as a recorded session, you can certainly call or email me and ask me questions about whatever's on your mind. I'll try to help. Are some of the books you guys may have discussed like classics as well, not just like recently published titles but like something that might be older to that maybe some of their teens are out and kids might not know about because it is old and hasn't come out new so they don't even think about it. That's a good question, man. Actually, Rescue Josh McGuire came out, oh, he's even more than 10, but it didn't in the 90s or something. But really, no, we haven't thought about classics. They haven't really been on our list, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't see some figures out. A lot of them have probably like your criteria to have more awards, I'm sure, because they're classics. I should have another one, too, there's nothing to have in it. Or maybe that, you know. Well, one favorite example is the Charlotte's Web. I think it was a Newberry Honor book, the year, and the book of one, nobody remembers. I have read that. Yeah. I can't think of a name of it. It says, yeah, Wengalord and being popular to the general public, that's a few different things. It's not easy to say, only. But yes, these are considered older books that we think will have keen appeal. And there are various reasons that books are still to kids. I forgot, too, another thing that we consider when we're talking about books is we know that a number of books are in the school, and so I'm not saying that every book that we consider has to be pure, so to speak, but when we're talking about books for teens, we do have to take into account that schools have a different parameter than public libraries, and so we want to have a choice that everybody can use. So we do want it to have good discussion points, but we want it to be something that school and public libraries, both think we're getting that return somehow. They might do that. Some schools have like a lunchtime book discussion group or an after-school book discussion group, and sometimes there's an English teacher that wants to use this. So it all depends. But we do want to keep that into consideration. I forgot to put this on my list of guidelines. Something else I want to mention so you can still interrupt and ask questions, but I was prompted to mention this by Lisa, which is on May 20th, not just two weeks from today, Lisa Kelly, who's at the Library Commission, and Vicki Wood from Lincoln City Libraries will do an end-compass session about how to lead a book group for adults or kids, and they'll tell you how to organize and run a book group, and I know they're going to have good suggestions and good thoughts for you. So if you've never run a book group or have done it, but it hasn't been a while or just want some pointers, I'd recommend tuning in. Now, Alana is asking that... Because it has to be an award-winner and she needs an actual exam. That's right, actually it is the opposite. Because award-winners get a lot of notice already, we wanted to gear our program to something that really hasn't had as much notice. It could have gotten a start review in a journal or it could have been on some of these best books of the year list. But if it's an award-winner, or either the Newberry or the Golden Sower list, we really wanted to steer away from that because kids are already reading those or having those available to them. And we wanted to find something else that was good, but not... The underdog books. The underdog books. Excellent, there you go, yeah. That's it, the underdog books. Julie, do you have any other comments? I'd like to know about other people's publicity that they use, because I did a lot of publicity, but the best publicity I had was one teenager reading the book and then telling all of his friends to read the book, and then they all came in to read the book. This is the best publicity for teens. A middle school and high school probably hurts the younger kids too. If you have someone who loved the book and is talking about it, and their friends are gonna come and find it too. Peer pressure is the best publicity. So does anyone else have publicity ideas? I'm thinking that was something also that you could ask Lisa and Vicki about leading a book group. I'm wondering if they're going to talk anything about getting the book group organized in the first place. Well, gee, I will join right up and do that one. And do that one. Good, one thing I know that people do when they haven't had a book group before and they're working with teens, either middle school or high school, is to often start with, if they have a teen advisory board, they'll start with them. If you don't, then you start with some kids that you know come in the library and read some things. And you just say, you know, tomorrow afternoon, we're gonna, some of us are gonna meet, we're gonna have some cookies or popcorn and coke. And we're just gonna talk about what we've been reading and what we've lost. And then they're not all reading the same book. Everybody comes, whoever can come, comes in to talk about the books that they read recently that they like. And that can get things going. Then the kids who are there, and there might only be three, they all share their ideas and pretty soon they're gonna pick up each other's books and then they're gonna talk to their friends and say, hey, you know, we kinda had a good time at the library and there might be five people next time. Or there might still be three. But you may end up starting pretty small. But that's when we know when we're working with teens, small is okay and small is a success. Because teens, to get teens in the library can sometimes be tricky. So see, Alana has a suggestion for you. See, Alana suggested that there's been publicity using a re-poster with one of your youth and the latest book. Alana, you can actually get the software to download and make your own re-posters, like what they put out with famous people and celebrities and have your own people. We actually have it here. It's a mission that's available. So yeah, get one of those teens who came and said, hey, we're gonna make you our poster child for this year's book and put them in a re-poster and put that up around the library, around the channel. And then we have a team of your community promoting the book. That goes a long way. Like we said, word of mouth and the focus is a good idea too. Anybody else have any ideas of things to help promote it? Don't forget, you can use the text chat, the bell and text chat button on the top of your interesting thing to pop open the window for you. We have an RIE down there. Or if there are other questions, not that we're going to ignore Julie, but this may be a long-term answer, Julie, since this today. Okay, well, again, if you have questions, just, I'm gonna pop this up in a minute. Just email me or give me a call and ask or if you have some more ideas for Julie, I know it takes me a little while to think of answers sometimes. So if something comes to you this afternoon, let me know or email Julie and I heard no. And we'll all share whatever we can think of to help promote one book for Nebraska kids and one book for Nebraska teens and other book groups. And thank you very much for tuning in today. You're welcome, have a great day. Oh, Alan suggested, Twitter, I am about the book, whatever your teens use to communicate. If they are on Twitter, then you can get on there and you can get on there. Good, yeah. Thanks for being on the spot. Okay, some applause, great. Yeah, that was a great question, Bernice. If it wasn't my idea, I read about it and I said, this is really cool. We should tell some more people about it because everybody knows about one book on Nebraska, but I've never heard about the teen or teen one, so this is great. Thank you very much, Allie. That was great. Next week, we'll be joining us our topic for Encompass5 will be government information for you and your customers, that's global from here at the Library of Information we'll be presenting that. And as Allie said, the week after that, on the 20th, it will be the How to Lead a Book Group for adults or kids. So that's our next two upcoming Encompass5 sessions. Thank you very much for attending. Bye-bye, bye-bye.