 Hello and welcome to Encompass Live this week. I am Christa Burns your host. This is Nebraska Library Commissions Weekly online event. Encompass Live we cover all sorts of NLC activities and library topics presented by NLC staff and some guest speakers we've been bringing in. These one-hour sessions are free and they were done every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. They are recorded so you can listen to them and watch them after the fact you can attend a live session. We do a mixture of things, presentations, interviews, book reviews, web tours, Q&A sessions, anything we can think of that might be of interest to the Nebraska Library community. And this morning we are going to do a session on accreditation and certification. Richard Miller and Laura Johnson will be going through that today. So I will go ahead and pass over on to them. I'm not sure who started. I'll start. Okay. I'll start. I'm going to begin. This is Richard Miller. Glad to see or hear you this morning. And I did want to give you a clue first of all about sometimes people confuse accreditation with certification. One of the ways that I've learned to remember that is that accreditation has to do with institutions or libraries and certification has to do with people. It's tipping. So we're going to talk about library accreditation, but then we're also going to talk about librarian certification and library board certification. So it's people for certification. It's institutions for accreditation. You can flip over a couple of slides. This is a slide that Laura found of a non-library library, but it certainly looks like a library and you can flip to the next one as well. So why do we have public library accreditation in our state? Well, you can see there and I'm not going to read the slide to you that it is meant to improve services. It started some time ago and it does give libraries to set up guidelines from which to do things. I'm going to read from the introduction to the guidelines for public library accreditation. Just several of the sentences there. It says in those guidelines in the introduction, Nebraskans deserve and expect high quality service from the public libraries. The purpose of statewide guidelines is to establish a consistent level of basic library and information service that can be expected to be available in every public library across the state. And later it says the topics addressed in our accreditation process include governance, service, and resources of public libraries. The anticipated outcome is that Nebraska citizens will have access to accurate, high quality library and information services from public libraries that meet statewide guidelines. And then a bit later in the guidelines under the purpose statement, there are a couple more sentences I'd like to read to you. It says the guidelines for accreditation should serve as a tool for measuring and encouraging growth and development of library and information services offered in Nebraska public libraries. The outcome should be the availability of those services for Nebraska citizens served by accredited libraries in the next slide. So why should libraries be accredited? Well, you can see there that there are a number of reasons for it. I'm going to start with the second one. You are eligible. Your library becomes eligible for state aid to public libraries. You're eligible to apply for three different grant programs that we have here at the commission, youth grants for excellence, continuing education grants and library improvement grants, which in the past were called LSTA grants. And you are eligible to apply for other federal grants, such as the community development block grants or the USDA grants and loans. Those last two that I mentioned here, a number of public libraries have received for their public library building programs. And quite honestly, a better reason probably for your library to be accredited is to demonstrate to local officials and to your customers that you have met a certain level of excellence in your community. Go to the next slide. In fact, go two slides. Now to be accredited, each year around mid-July, we send letters out to all unaccredited public libraries and to about a third of accredited public libraries that are up for reaccreditation. And the reason we do that is so that we don't have everybody coming up the same third year. We kind of split those up a bit. Accreditation itself runs a three-year period that goes October 1st through September 30th for that three-year period. I do have to warn you, however, that if during a three-year period, the commission learns of a situation of some substantial change in the library's situation that affects one or more of the guidelines or the level of accreditation, the commission can review and revoke or revise a library's accreditation standing or place a library on probation. It's accreditation on probation until that deficiency is rectified. Basically, what we're saying is that if you have a situation that changes significantly within that three-year period, the expectation is that you will maintain that level of accreditation, that phase of accreditation throughout those three years. If you can't do that, you should really let us know because we need to look at that in the next slide. Here's a slide of what the guidelines look like on the first page and Laura has put on these slides, the link, and Kristen has put these links in our delicious account at the commission so you can find them for this presentation after this presentation. You don't need to try to scribble those down at this point in the next slide. There are three different levels or phases of accreditation, depending on whom you speak to. There's an essential level, an enhanced level, and an excellent level. The essential level is the beginning level. We used to, under the old guidelines, had kind of a beginning and advanced. We had two levels, but now we have three levels. I think it provides for more opportunities for libraries. Under the essential level, there are 26 guidelines listed. In order to be accredited at the essential level, the public library has to meet all 26 of those guidelines. If the library wants to be at the enhanced level, it has to be all of the essential guidelines, those 26 plus 18 of the 22 guidelines listed under the enhanced level. And if the library wants to be at the excellent level, it has to meet all 26 on the essential level, all 22 of the enhanced level and 14 of the 16 at the at the excellent level in order to be accredited. State aid is awarded at higher levels for the enhanced level and for the excellent level of accreditation. So that's another good reason to work toward a more advanced accreditation. Each of the phases of levels of accreditation have the following groupings of guidelines. There's governance, funding and administration, services and facilities, personnel, collection, technology and public relations. There are some things that are required by the accreditation guidelines no matter what level library is and I'll just mention a few of them. It must have a certified library board and we'll be talking about certified library boards later in this presentation. It must have a mission statement. It must annually submit its statistics via this bibliostat collect or whatever other tool we happen to be using. It has to have a library telephone. It has to have paid library staff. It must have a certified director and it must offer free internet for its pay phones. Let's flip that over. Now, once the library is accredited or re-accredited, it does receive a certificate like the one you see here and that certificate is signed by a commission director Rod Wagner and you'll notice near the bottom of that certificate it indicates which level of accreditation the library has attained. That is good for three years and I don't think there's anything more to say about that but you can keep that up there. Before I finish, I want to stress the importance of as many libraries as possible submitting their annual statistics. We have public libraries that are unaccredited but which send in their statistics to us annually and do receive a $250 amount of money under dollars for data and that helps us with getting a more accurate picture of public libraries in our state and where they are statistically speaking. So I would like to encourage you to do that just to give you some idea and we're not going into detail on these accreditation guidelines but just to give you some idea about it in terms of the amount of local support either the total amount or the per capita support if the library is accredited at the essential level it has to meet a 65 percent of the average of other libraries within its size group in order to be accredited at the essential level and that shouldn't be difficult to do because really you're at the D level of your income so if a library says that it's difficult for them to meet that you can tell your local funding officials that you're at only 65 percent of the average level of other libraries within your size range. If the library wants to be at the enhanced level that library has to meet at least 85 percent of the average income of other public libraries within its size group and if the library wants to be at the excellent level that's when you're really exceeding other libraries because you have to be at 105 percent of other libraries within your size group in terms of local income or per capita income. And the last slide. We put these mug shots in here because we weren't sure if we'd be live. I assure you I don't always look so grim I sometimes smile um and uh that is the end unless you folks have questions about library accreditation before we move on to public library certification. Nobody has any questions I guess we'll move it off. All right. Nothing else? Yes please. We'll move it down there. Oh, down here. Yeah, yeah, down because of the feet. Now we'll talk about um librarian certification. Uh this is Christina. I'm standing on a big big book. So this was a good uh this this was a good uh picture for librarians I thought. Um goddesses as they are. Yes as we all know we are goddesses. Um librarian really helps us to assure good service to library users and that's the big thing. Um it gives librarians the opportunity to keep up and to learn. Um certification is not really a matter of earning the credential it's a matter of gaining the learning. Um it's meant to the program is meant to help you get the time to carve out the time to tell someone else yes I need to have this time to um go out and learn and um network with other people. So we really mean for it to be a help to you. Um it is a requirement for accreditation that you are certified. Um and at the various levels um you'll need more of your staff certified at the essential level you'll need your director certified but um as you go enhanced and excellent you need more people in your on your staff sort of right. Um um librarianship is really a learning profession we don't never stop learning um so many new things come along um we've just done the 23 things and I think everybody was so thrilled but there there were 23 things in six weeks that we all learned that were new so um we do have to keep up. Um the big deal with this program it is voluntary um and all you have to do is sign up it doesn't cost anything. Um the application form uh simply asks for your email address your mailing address and your level of education because there are levels of certification um what will happen is we'll send you a certificate we'll enter you into our database and we'll keep track of your um of the CE um credits that you've earned and we'll give you a password so you can check your record online anytime you want to. Um this is the uh application again and I suggest really that you go to the um front page of the Nebraska Library Commission's website and just search on library and certification application. When I did that this morning it came up the second thing in the list so you shouldn't have any trouble finding it. Um this is the certificate suitable for framing. They're good for three years and uh we love to we love to send them to people so um so how does all this really work? Well you go um you participate in activities and if an activity is sponsored by the Nebraska Library Commission or by a regional library system they will let us know who will attend it. They'll send us basically a copy of the signing sheet but if you um attend other workshops or you go to one of the web junction webinars or you um recordings of this I mean there's just lots of ways to earn credits um you need to let us know you've done it we have no way of knowing unless you let us know so we have put a um a form on the web again and if you go and search on CE activity report that should come up um and we just want to know um who you are what you attended when it was because we like to we like to enter things in the database an event we enter one time and then we enter all the people who attended that event so we need to know when the event was so that we get the event um but we need to know the particulars of it um we just need to know what the program was about how does it relate to your job um we're pretty broad minded about what relates to librarianship because it's a pretty broad field um I always tell people that your violin lessons and your tai chi won't count um but really um if you need to learn to use Excel spreadsheet because you use those in your job well then that that's a continuing education for you if you need um and I would think almost everyone would need um CPR that counts because we would really like you to save lives if you can so um and if you have a question about whether an activity would count it can be a call and I'll um we can go over the guidelines and see if we think it would um be suitable for um uh a CE activity um we need to know what time the what time the activity started and what time it ended because that's kind of how the number of um points that's determined and we need to let us know within 90 days uh we do find people who sometimes let it go and then they don't remember exactly when it was or who the speaker was or something and so it's just really better if you let us know right away so we're gonna ask that you do this within 90 days in fact we're gonna insist that you do it within 90 days um then you also you can check your record anytime online um you will have a password and you just go to the CE record review again something you can search on the nlc homepage and it will come up you just enter your name your password and you will see um what's on your record um passwords are combinations of letters numbers and symbols and they're case sensitive in other words they're awful to read over the telephone so if you uh have trouble with your password there is a password look up on this um and if you want us to help you with your password we'd be happy to but send us a little email um because we want to email it back to you so you can just cut and paste it into the box rather than having to read it aloud um we do keep your record confidential you of course are free to share it with anyone um and we recognize that your library your library board the people that run your library certainly have a vested interest in your continuing education your professional development but um this is your professional development so we won't share it with people um so how does all this really work exactly well you need to fulfill the basic skills requirements first when you first sign up um to be in the certification program you'll get what is essentially a um certificate for three years and during that first three year period you'll need unless you have already completed formal education in library science you will need to fulfill the basic skills requirements we do offer the basic skills classes which would fulfill those requirements but you can do it by taking courses at the community college or other college courses and then you need to participate in library related continuing education activities so that at the end of the three year period you have earned 45 continuing education credits that does seem like a lot until you think oh well that was three years that was only 15 a year and if I went to a couple of clip meetings and the summer reading program workshop that's it I've I've earned the cd credits so some people find that they have to be um very selective in what they attend because there are so many things out there to attend um then you need to unless the activity was sponsored by the Nebraska Library Commission or a regional system you need to report your attendance within 90 days um anytime you look at your record is there's something that you don't understand or if there's a problem with your attendance of something let us know just give me a call or give you know send me an email and let me know there's a problem if um at the end of the three year period or you you know that your renewal is coming up and you haven't earned your 45 key um credits well things happen sometimes and I appreciate that and if you need an extension because you broke your leg or you had to plan your daughter's wedding or you're taking your mother-in-law to chemotherapy you understand that um and we can give you a little bit more time on the other hand we will be quite as understanding if you didn't do it just because you didn't do it um but we would like to encourage you to keep up and to kind of pace yourself so that you don't have a lot of credits to earn at the end of a period um if however there's a problem let me know we'll work it out we'll figure out something so that you can earn the credit she needs and get your certification renewed renewal is automatic at the end of a three-year period uh if you have the 45 state e-credits we'll send you a new certificate and you're good for another three years um at the end of three years when you've gotten a new certificate we sort of set the clock back to zero and you have to earn 45 more credits in the next three-year period as well there are no fees there's never any charge for any of this um we talked a little about the basic skills requirements I just want to go through them really fast we need training in four areas really which is public service directly helping the public collection development which of course is helping the public but in a kind of an indirect way as you purchase materials for your library organization of materials which is uh how to catalog and make your materials accessible to the public again really public service but in an indirect way and public library administration which is all those things that you have to do um reporting your statistics and probably scraping the chewing gum off the sidewalk and a whole lot of things as well but those are the basic skills requirements and we do teach classes but there are other ways but you can get those useful skills requirements as well and that's it in a nutshell um if you do have questions please let us know um we're happy to talk with you about it and um we hope we'll see you at the workshops thanks a lot. Thank you. Anybody have any questions right now for Laura? How will we plan any time to ask other questions to do? Now in keeping with the gods and goddesses Laura put together a typical looking library board in Nebraska here just for your information I think actually these are greek gods and goddesses but I guess that's what boards have to aspire to anyway probably or these are all gods these aren't goddesses I don't see any goddesses on there I guess they're all gods and we'll go to the next one. This might be a more typical library board although they're cartoon characters but I did want to read you just a little bit from the public library board certification slide that that you'll see after this it does say the public library board certification program is deciding to help improve your library increase board involvement fulfill library accreditation requirements and organize continuing education activities for board members I think what you're seeing here is that both these accreditation and the types of certification that we're doing are all tied together with the accreditation guidelines with state aid with all the other things are kind of they all mesh together in some ways so why do we why do we then have library board certification in Nebraska I read you those sections already but why does the library community feel it should be a requirement of the accreditation guidelines well by law most of our library boards in our state are governing or administrative boards and even though in first class cities first class cities have the option of having advisory boards most of our first class cities have governing or administrative boards so it's very important that they be knowledgeable about what it is they need to be doing and that's why we have library board certification now Laura said that getting 45 hours of CE within three years is really pretty easy for boards we just require that they get 20 hours of CE within three years so that should be really easy and yet we do have situations where boards do say that they have difficulty you can flip over the next one have difficulty earning those and we're going to give you some ideas here in the next one as well we're going to give you some idea of how you could earn some of those hours how your board could earn some of those hours they could attend workshops they could view library related videotapes in fact we just updated our list of videotapes that is of use to librarians and library board members and in fact unlike light public librarian certification in which they can only get 10 of their 45 hours using videos library boards could do all 20 of their hours using the videos if they chose to but beyond that we have other ways that they might do it they can discuss questions that appear at the end of the library board manual which all of you have in your library there are questions at the end of each chapter also at the end of each chapter there's an evaluation that you can do and each library board member that sends in an evaluation sheet if they do it very well just don't put down yes and no but to actually give us some feedback you can get one half hour of certification credit for that other ways that they can get certification credit are that they can in fact this is this is one example that I that I see from a library in our state every library board meeting the library board director brings four articles from library related journals and they discuss each of those articles for some period of time now one of the things that you have to realize also is that any one board member could earn all 20 of those hours if he or she wished to but it makes more sense for the board to do things together because you really double up on things let's suppose that the board has a half hour discussion about some topic related to the future of the library or some such thing well within that half hour they can get 30 minutes times five credit for their certification it's really easy to add up these hours so I don't think there's a really good excuse for a board not to be able to get there 20 hours within a three year period and move to the next slide so if your board is not currently certified you can go to our online application process and it's picture here for you on the commission website and apply we'll ask you to provide as you see their up-to-date information and accurate information about who your current board members are or whose board member names we should drop and there's a link on that page also to figure out what it is that we have currently listed on our on our list of your board members in the next slide once your board is signed up you can submit your CME credits to the commission electronically now please give us as much detail as possible I'll just reiterate what Laura said when she was talking about the details give us the title or the name of the event or the article that you read or the activity that you did make sure that you include the date include how many hours or CEUs that you engaged in this activity how many board members participated you don't necessarily have to list the board members names because we will have those just tell us how many of your board were there if there are only four board members at that meeting at which you discussed it then indicate that and please send in that information as close as possible to the event itself the the difficulty with waiting too long is that you forget and we don't know actually what happened and when it occurred and trying to piece that together after the fact it's very difficult there is a statement in here somewhere that says well you good way till the end of the three years to send it in but please don't do that use the 90 day rule that Laura was talking about this will help everybody in fact send it in just the next day and then you'll really remember what the story is once your board has completed its 20 CEUs it will receive a certificate i don't believe we have a picture of the certificate but it looks very much like the other certificates that you saw indicating that it was certified for those boards that are already certified they will automatically receive their new certification at the end of the three-year period of their certification if they have completed at least their 20 CEUs for that period and reported that to the commission now we might like to do this but we can't really allow for extra hours to be carried over to the next certification period there's really no way to record that or keep a record and it really does defeat the purpose of the library board keeping up with what's going on for you keep that here uh yeah go back thanks um we have a link on their website and there it is there and as as we said earlier these links are in our delicious accounts you can find those later on but you can check the status of your library or any other library as far as their certification goes on the commission's website the expiration date you'll notice is listed there on on the website and so you can check your board certification or anybody else's for that matter and the last slide finally we wanted to show you a picture of Lynda Janssen who is our staff assistant within library development because she actually is the one that you'll most often talk to about board certification you will be sent when you send in your online board certification i receive it and she receives it but she is the one who records the hours that are sent in um let's keep Lynda smiling as she is in this picture by sending in your info on board ce use in enough detail so that you can figure out what you're talking about and sending it in very close to the event itself thank you very much i've got a few more facts and figures i brought along in case you didn't ask any questions i was going to answer some questions for you but let's give you an opportunity to ask some questions of laura for me before we move on to that so does anybody have any questions about the um library librarian or board uh certifications and accreditation you can either um you can either use your microphone if you want to or use the text chat um jennett says in the text chat how do you get to the commission slide share and delicious account okay and a great picture of Lynda i'm sure we'll be happy to do that i noticed she said it was a great picture of Lynda but she didn't mention the one of richard did she that was pretty grim pretty grim um are the powerpoint slide share and delicious accounts are will be on the recording when this is put up you can also find information links to them if you just search the commission's website um on slide share or delicious we have a whole web page of all the different things that commission is doing 2.0 type stuff like this for sharing they're both on there but the specific link for the slide share and the delicious will be um on the recording when it is posted up on the website too anybody have any questions go right ahead we'll wait for you to type if you're trying to type something into the chat or if you want to use your microphone you can go ahead and do that as well and i see you have a question i think you're going to use the text chat don't forget if you do have a microphone just hold down your control key while you're speaking and it will uh broadcast to everyone okay can you hear me this is Karen okay am i too loud i don't i my sound was real low yesterday um the basic skills program once do you ever repeat that again like can staff use come to those sessions as a refresher for c credit they certainly can if they want to um in fact if you haven't done it in 15 or 20 years it's probably a great idea um i think we probably need to work on a basic skills refresher course for people too okay thank you anybody else have any questions you either click on the text chat button to get that open or hold down your control key to use your microphone try to throw my factoids out he stunned you into so you tell them everything they needed to know go ahead maybe put them asleep here are a couple of facts for you of the 277 of them are accredited so there's work to be done out there folks let's get those other unaccredited public libraries accredited and i wanted to uh just uh tell you again about the due date to submit your annual statistics the accredited or unaccredited your library to get those statistics into us if you're unaccredited you can earn that $250 for dollars for data if you are accredited if you're at a higher level you can both get your state aid of course state asian and uh i brought along the state aid formula in case you'd like to know how we figure state aid we should be getting the state aid out in the next several weeks we are behind i will take almost full blame your state in the near future for those of you who are interested in state aid for libraries in populations of under 8 000 the formula is six hundred and twenty five dollars plus 10 cents per capita and for library apita we also pay a one percent incentive for those libraries that receive other public funding let's say from the county we pay one percent of that as an incentive and uh we may have to state aid for all of our public libraries so really how much and how we push the formula around or how we push the incentives around may be affected by by that this time for example under that are currently unaccredited because they didn't meet what's called the maintenance of effort which means that they have not come up with local funding that is higher than the lowest of the three previous fiscal three previous community is lower than the lowest of the three fiscal three previous fiscal years uh we can receive a waiver if everybody in town was cut the same amount but if the library was cut more than you know foldable for state aid so we will be in contact with those 12 public libraries as well that's the end of the factoids i brought along in case there are any questions on those i'd be happy to try to answer them um we have a request from the text chat that i like to um uh what am i trying to say i i call it BASC BASK because otherwise we could call it BS and all that um yes our the basic skills class uh we're going to be offering this spring is um public service that covers basic customer service reference leaders advisory programming and outreach it will be held in six places around the state um so if i can remember them all seward bretna north fork carney north platt and alliance um though it'll be different times um different dates but it's pretty much all in april and like first week of may oh except for the online class we also have the online class and that will run from april 15th to june 17th i think um registration opens today so you just go to the library training calendar um the brasska library commission website and sign up um and we'll be happy to see you there if you have any questions just let me know can i convenient that i open today you do yeah oh karin you have another question yes i have a question about the statistical report i thought the due date was march 31st that's i think you're probably wrong i think i messed that up oh i'm so glad we just double check it is march 31st i had it in my notes but didn't read it correctly sorry oh thank you i can stop having heart failure before you from stupidity sorry uh deb you have a question as well go ahead i do thank you christa uh richard um concerning uh the statistical reports how is there a way that we can be certain that our report has been received for which report that is for our statistical reports john felton is the one who heads that up he's not here but i will ask him that question and we'll pass that word on to you okay i appreciate it thank you let you know who was that camera um yeah that was deb finnard deb finnard okay yeah okay anything else any other questions oh apparently john is in our other room here the commission he says you can email him if you want to know as well anyone else is curious about what's going on john felton here at the commission if you've got his email that would be j f e l d on at mlc dot s e a t e dot n e dot u s wow you're brown i've said that a couple times if she can give us all the words to misty she can give us that right any other questions anybody has about any of the certification and creditations that we talked about this morning no looks like everybody's pretty quiet all right anything else you guys need to have up with all right if nobody has any questions now that's fine we can wrap it up for today you do have the contact information from these slides for uh richard and laura and linda so feel free to contact any of them when if you do have any further questions anything that didn't get answered or mentioned here today session has been recorded so we will um have that up and out to you probably this afternoon oh we're getting some applause thank you very much thank you for attending this morning we hope it was helpful and hope you'll join us next week when we will be learning about the new nebraska access website that just went live thank you thank you very much you should have a bow button thank you very much bye