 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, first reporter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today, and it will be posted, and it is posted to our archives for you to watch later at your convenience, sorry. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can view all of our show archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the shows we have. If you're not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. We are similar to your state library. So we provide services to all types of libraries in the state, and so we will have shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, et cetera, et cetera. Really, our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. Something cool libraries are doing, book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations for us, and sometimes we bring in guest speakers from around the country to do presentations for us. And today we have a commission staff, because it is the last Wednesday of the month. Last Wednesday of the month means it's pretty sweet tech day. Yay. Every month, the last Wednesday of the month, Amanda Sweet, our technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission comes on Encompass Live. Good morning, Amanda. Good morning. Talk about anything, the world of library related, pretty sweet tech. And today she's going to tell us all about the most recent Computers and Libraries conference, all the cool, amazing things that she discovered and learned here. So, Computers and Libraries is a conference that's done every spring. And it's an annual event, so definitely something I would recommend if you're able to attend on the East Coast. But they also do some online things, some virtual things, and Amanda's going to tell us all about the best things that you can learn from it this year. So I will hand it over to you, Amanda. And so this year the conference was actually virtual again. I have been hoping to actually see people in 3D this year, but maybe next year. Oh, they really should be able to do that, yeah. Yeah, they had just reached that little cutoff before it started getting safer to do it. So I guess better safe than sorry, I can't blame them. Absolutely, that's what I would go with, definitely. I'd rather be safe and still be able to learn. That's why these virtual events we've been doing, well, we've been doing, well, Encubus Live for over 10 years. But other of our virtual conferences are so great that everyone, so much more accessibility. More people, I think, are getting to attend and learn, even though it is a virtual environment. There is technology like that spatial and other things that we've done here on the show before that can make it a little more in-person-like. And in fact, that is actually the first trend that I'm going to cover is that everyone is going hybrid. So the first slide ahead of time, I swear. It was just one of those serendipitous things. So we'll go over some different ways that libraries across everywhere have been starting to tackle this. We've all accepted that hybrid, the combination digital in-person, it's not going anywhere. We all knew it. And so then we'll talk about some of the, in order for that hybrid thing to actually happen, libraries actually need to be able to do more with less and be able to expand their services, be able to do the in-person stuff and the digital. So I'll talk about some of the ways that libraries have used automation processes, powered by chatbots and different things to start making the everyday things easier so that librarians can focus on the harder stuff. And then I'll talk about how libraries are using, like introducing their communities to makerspace technology, how, and granted, these are all trends that are the stuff that I pay attention to. Someone else attending this conference might be paying attention to other stuff. But this is a tech show. We're here for tech. And so we'll talk about some of the trends over there. And then I'll talk about how libraries are starting to market and rebrand themselves to show, hey, we're not, we're not just in-person anymore. You can find our stuff online. This is how we're updating our digital presence and updating our in-person presence to be more interactive and bring more people in. And this is how we're showing that the library is updating, changing, keeping with the times and all that good stuff. And so the next trend on here is talking about, this is a lot of change up here. These first three are asking a lot of different people. So this trend is talking about how to build stronger library teams, keep up morale, and build and integrate the library into the community so that this is more of like a change is more cohesive. And then just because it's fun, we'll wrap up by talking about some of the tech gadgets that I came across and some of the makerspace innovations that happen everywhere. They're awesome. All right. And I will also share out a collection of resources that I put together. I found out it's easier to share this in a Google Doc just because it's easier for you all to access it and use it. So in the chat, I'm going to put in the resource page. And this is just the collection of links that I gathered, the trend recaps and everything like that. Awesome. I will grab that and make sure we will include. I'm just getting the link here for myself so we can have it for the archive later. Yes, both these slides that Amanda has here. I mentioned that while we're talking about it now here. And this Google Doc will be available with the archives afterwards as well. So you will have it to reference to. So if you forget to grab it now, you can grab it later. Yep. Yeah. So let's dig into the hybrid. So each one of these trends, I broke out into many trends. So each one of these many trends will also have a section that's in that resource document that I shared out just now. And the first one is that libraries are having a lot of trouble with being able to help their staff keep up with like learning the new digital skills and resources and helping their general public, like the library customers be able to keep up with all these different tutorials, trainings, resources, learn how to use the library, learn digital skill, learn, learn makerspace resources. So the first one is online learning resources, building out those resource repositories. And I know that here in the library commission, we started using Niche Academy. And yeah. And Niche Academy is great for putting together tutorials really quickly. It'll let you upload a video on top and then add in your explainer resources and links out to other resources down below. And there were some other libraries in the conference that were actually using Niche Academy. So different in its basically all it is is a learning platform. It's a resource repository and some other places might call it a knowledge base. It's a curated collection of educational resources, tutorials that you refer back to over and over again. If you sift through that resource page, you can also do a control F for find and search for knowledge base or learning. And you'll find all the resources related to that. I put in a guide that will walk you through how to build knowledge bases. And then the next one is also different resources to find better tutorials than you would have been using before. And I guess that's a broad statement. You might have been using awesome tutorials. I don't know. You can always learn a new way. Sure, get great. And like eight billion in one of those like cropped up during the pandemic. So there's also if you chose one two years ago, there's probably a new one. So I'm going to drag over these resources here so you can see it on my screen. The one that I am talking about is. Down yonder. So these are some of the tutorial sources that you may have seen already. The way that libraries have starting started using these is the traditional way that people have done it is to offer a link on their library website that just goes directly to grow with Google. And then it's on the library user to be able or the staff member to navigate that website to find what's relevant to them. Instead, in a knowledge base, it'll start out with a category. It'll say web design and then people will be able to click on a web design and it'll open up a link that goes specifically to the link and grow with Google that has web design basics and specifically to the link in. I know that there's one in GCF learn for graphic design and for digital and for web development. So instead, it goes by topic category and then links up to these instead of the other way around. So that's basically the general gist of putting together a knowledge base. And then a lot of these. So for a lot of these, I'll also point out the different tools that were most commonly used and referenced during the sessions and for things like learning how to and I also put in different repositories and ideas sharing that came up during the sessions. So and a good example of that will be down here. So another trend that came up quite a bit during the like every single one of the sessions that I went to is tech lending. These are different brainstorm examples of how people actually how different libraries were able to reach their communities in different ways. Some of these are ubiquitous like at home crafting kits have been around for a while. Some of these are newer like libraries like allowing patrons to be able to check out a robot or drone for their homeschooling students because they have an excess of number of new homeschoolers that weren't there before. And so some of the tips in there were to allow a one week to a month loan period for more complex equipment so that people can learn how to do it before they actually use it. In fact, a month is actually the loan duration that we use here in the commission for the tech kits. And it seems to be well and there's also. So they also had a lot more people that weren't actually able to physically make it into the library. So circulation was starting to drop. And because circulation was starting to drop, like they had to find a new way to prove value of the library to still prove to people, hey, we're still providing resources. We're still providing services. There's still a need for this stuff. We're just doing it in a different way. So the resource packs of the mail was that there were several libraries that started doing outreach programs they would go out to. And I still think this is a pretty bold move, but some of them actually went to hospital waiting rooms and started distributing resources and I'm like, sweet. I heard that one before night. Yeah. And so I mean, it makes sense, though, because if you go to like anywhere there's a waiting room where someone is bored, they will. They'll probably look at your stuff. And then they started drilling in to be more specific. They would say, I'm going to go to a pediatric wing of a hospital or a pediatric doctor office, and I'm going to distribute parenting resources, tips for helping parents deal with technology and screen time. And I'll also put in some ways to upskill your career resources when you are a parent trying to balance your time, money and energy. So I'm going to distribute these resource packs where people are at. And then they also started to promote their online learning and digital skill resources through these partner programs. And so that was actually pretty cool. That's I talk a lot more about that down in the makerspace section down below and in the building stronger teams and communities because they reference a lot of building creative partnerships. So I talk about those creative partnerships and places that libraries did partnerships and outreach down there. They all kind of bring together. Yeah, this is something that a lot of libraries have struggled with over the years and talk about a lot is getting to the non-users, the people that aren't coming to the library. How do we, we've always, you know, people want to increase people use, increase, you know, knowledge about, you know. Awareness of what we do. And this is the way to do it. Yeah. And another cool thing that came up was so the resources that went out through outreach programs started cropping up when people weren't able to go into the library. But during the downtime, several libraries started creating more interactive displays. The coolest interactive display I saw in the conference was actually called The Wall. And The Wall was it's basically like a series of LED screens all stacked together where you can put up promotional materials, interactive education, resources, gamification tools, and you can refresh it more quickly than you would with a physical resource. And I'm going to pull up because this was actually really cool. A picture of what it looks like. And so it's the Richmond Library and this one, this article is called Collaborative Wall Art, but you'll still get to see what it looks like. And it's also linked on that resource page. My computer is taking a little bit to load because it's really image heavy. And I do recommend just going to this site and actually watching their full video because it's cool looking. And they've also included like a interactive touch table and like different stations that kids or adults can kind of congregate around to start playing with. So before you might have you may have had like parents that were coming in to drop their kids off at story time, but then they would just like maybe grab a book and then head out because they're like, I don't have anything to do right now. I'm just going to like I'm just going to go. But with more of these interactive activities, they'll probably stick around more. And when they stick around, catches their attention, gives them something to do. Absolutely. And then you might be able to engage them with different resource packs and promotional materials that are related to the exhibits that you're putting out. And so just we all know about wraparound services, it's a thing. And so I will close this. I won't share the link because it's already in the resource page. I already talked about tech lending programs. I jumped the gun on that one. So if you are thinking about digging deeper into some of these sessions, I did also aggregate a lot of the session listings that you might want to drill into and pay attention to if you do decide to get the access pass and start looking at some of this stuff. Right. And that's something that Computers Libraries has done, which is cool the last years, their replay pass. If you weren't able to attend the virtual event when it actually happened, you can get access to. I don't know if it's all of these sessions or just selected ones. I don't know. So as far as I know, you can get to the regular sessions, but you can't access the workshop sessions unless you paid for the workshop access to begin with. That makes sense. It's an extra thing, yeah. And so if you want to check it out, it's there. And then so the next one is the automation tools. So these are the things that you can set into place so that you can start doing more stuff. And it's also a way to increase engagement on your library website. So sometimes they so they did a whole bunch of different studies and they did like an interaction user experience studies. And they found out that web pages and fact pages that have a chatbot interaction tool, they you can actually increase engagement that goes from the website and funnels over to a real human being. So and it's just like it's another way that it's a lower pressure way that people can interact with your website and head over to the person that they actually need instead of calling up your library and possibly going through three different referral systems just to get the person they need. It's a thing. And so the chatbots are the ones that would be embedded into your website. But the virtual assistant would be the things like the Google Home or Amazon Alexa, which is that little box that sits on your table that you can talk into and ask it questions. So and in that resources pack, I also put in some of the common tasks that people have been using to set up chatbots and virtual assistants to tackle. So if you're starting to brainstorm ways that you can do this, go to the resource page. And so some of the most common ways are to answer common questions. What are the hours? What are the services that you have available? When are staff available? What are the different things I can learn as digital skills? What is a digital skill? You can load in an entire fact page. And then the chatbot or the virtual assistant can be programmed to automatically scan through those your fact page and spit out the response that is most likely what the person is looking for. And you can also include a button that says, I want to talk to a human. And and then the next one is that this one is just kind of cool. These smart, they there were about three, four sessions that talked about smart cities, smart resources. But it was kind of cool because when you look at the resources that are available that help you streamline the infrastructure and streamline the processes that are available in your city. You can also look at different ways that smart technology can apply to your library. Like you have to look at the big picture to be able to translate it into something that could work for you. I'll give the example of. They have a smart technology integration that lets you know when parking is available. So you would download an app onto your phone and then you'd be able to open up that app and say there are three spaces of street parking available near the library. And if you have a library with a smaller parking lot or if you're in an urban area, that can be incredibly helpful if your parking lot fills up really quickly. And that app can actually be a greater draw for people to go there during certain times of the day. And there they did some a few studies that showed that people had stopped going physically into the library for longer durations of time because they didn't want to loop around to look for parking or loop around to look for open spaces. And all they had to do was put in little sensors over each a different parking spot that'll show it's they either use a pressure sensor or a light blocking sensor to be able to show that that spot is full. And then it just communicates at the app and lets people know. So simple. I mean, it's not a crazy amount of technology or anything. No, not at all. And then the next thing. So the smart cities, it's also kind of synced up with the smart lighting thermostat cleaning maintenance. If you're Googling some of these topics, you can also Google Smart Building and you'll also find all the different things that your library can do to start automating when your lights get turned on in the morning. So you don't have to have a poor circulation staff member going around flipping switches every morning, then forgetting one because she didn't finish her coffee. Then having a library customer come up and complain that the light in the back room of the children's room is not on because it'll go on automatically. Now that that happened in the library that I used to work in. But and then you can also regulate. So one of the my favorite ways that they started using smart tech and these sensors and stuff was to set up maintenance alerts. We've all heard about the library that got flooded or the library that had a like an unfortunate fire situation. There's no really good way to say that. A lot of good books died. But so you can set up an alert so that you can put a temperature and humidity sensor into the basement of the library. And you can set it to say if this humidity a lot, like if this humidity goes up above this level, it's an indicator that there's a problem and then we need to send a human down there immediately to be able to check this. So that sensor actually catches a flooding situation before it's a problem. And it saved a lot of books, a lot of materials, a lot of resources. And there's also a lot of special collections out there that can't go above a certain temperature or a certain humidity level. Otherwise, pages start to expand or materials start to degrade and it just it's not great. So those same temperature, humidity sensors can be included during in like display cases or in certain areas of the stacks to be able to start marking out where those bases are. And then you can also start using these smart devices in and of things, devices and basically I own and smart devices are kind of more or less the same thing. It's a way to use sensors to interact with the world around you and alert you that stuff is going haywire or to automate processes so that you don't have to have a human run around and do it for you. But for the sake of time, I also put in the resource pack some different examples of how libraries have been using in and of the things RFID devices to be able to track traffic around the library, update their layout so that they can encourage traffic to more different areas or be able to play around with space design and say like we just we put these RFID trackers on our the 50 display materials that we put up in our display. And now we know that these 20 resources got picked up the most and people carried them over to these areas to be able to use it. So now you know you're most heavily used items and you can use that to increase the your collection development and kind of make it more specific. And then you can also improve the spaces that are used most frequently, which is not something people are taking the stuff. Yeah, too. Yeah. So that's kind of handy. Absolutely. Yeah. And then the what time 1031 we can talk about this. So the last one on here is that so there are libraries that are using this automation technology. But the other way that they're doing it is to provide information resources to patrons that says this is what a smart city is. These are what smart devices are. This is what a smart home is. And they're using this to drive innovation and kind of help people connect the problems in their community with the solutions that could exist and give them the tools to experiment and try it out. So one example of this is the iLab that's in St. Pete's. Chad Marin is the one that leads it over there. And so he has partnered with a whole bunch of different groups across the city and they've worked with like Sea Life. They've worked with they've done a ton of different stuff. I included an article over to the makerspace over there in case you want to find out how they're using tech to be able to solve local problems. So the innovation ecosystem of it part like the innovation ecosystem is the set of organizations and partners that have to work together to be able to create new jobs, solve problems and do the awesome things that tech can do to make your community better. So that's an innovation ecosystem in a nutshell. Read the articles to learn more. And so if you want to learn more about the automation tech stuff, these are the sessions that you can go to for that. And I also linked a whole bunch of stuff in there so that you can learn more about it. So the next one is that if your library decides that you want to do some of this stuff, most people aren't used to the library being like a smart city tech hub innovation ecosystem, like RFID tracking awesomeness that libraries are turning into. So the marketing and rebounding is starting to tell a different story about the library. So we still do the book stuff. We're still awesome. You can still take your kid in for story hour. But maybe you can turn around and learn about smart cities too. And so and you'll start to see that a lot of these different topics start to bring together with the previous and future topics, including these interactive digital displays. As I talked about, you can also like imprint, like include a lot of your marketing and wraparound services into those digital displays. I also put in some keyword searches that you can use to find better vendors. I hesitate to recommend vendors because this is not something I've used personally. But I did find the keyword searches that you would need to find what you're looking for. So that would be LED video, while interactive library display and gamification in libraries. Those searches will all lead you over to the resources that you need to get where you want to go. And then you can find which are which products might work best for you because that's been exactly just because that one library is something for their walls. There might be something better for you or different that works with your situation. Yeah, or you might have a local. Exactly. Oh, yeah, look for some local. Absolutely. I think it's important to talk about the rebranding of the libraries that people do need to know. The library is changing, but you're not losing what you always loved about it, too. Yeah, it's OK. And so another thing that libraries have been doing for a long time is they have been doing collaboration spaces and meeting spaces, but they're starting to do it in a different way. So if you remember that picture of the digital wall, there was also that basically tabletop version, which is a giant tabletop TV. And so they started using that digital collaboration space to start building out shared brainstorming walls. And there's a tool called Miro M I R O that you can pull up to. So it's basically a giant digital wall of post-its or a digital planning wall or a digital brainstorming wall. So you can visually see a shared collection of ideas and planning resources right in front of you. And if you have one of those digital tables or even just a table that you can stick a mess of post-its on, then you can put that together, take a picture of it, archive it and then use it for future sessions. So it's basically don't just do a thing in person, then let it end. It is turned it into that hybrid format so that you can translate that in person over into the digital and reference all of that stuff and all of that great idea generation that happened and people that weren't able to attend are going to be able to look at that and then add in their ideas and a digital platform. And so that's where it starts to translate over to say our physical space and digital space are blurring and blending together because now people want to be able to transition seamlessly to say I visited in person, but now I'm going to do that exact same thing and revisit that from my computer at home because that's when I have time to do it. And that's data that libraries need because that's use. Yeah. Yeah. And then so I thought I also found there were about three, four, maybe five different sessions. I didn't have a chance to go to all of them or review all of them, but they all talked about using design, how to use color palettes and how to use and how to take inspiration from the big brands to be able to implement better services and layouts into your own library website. So in the resource pack, I also included tutorials that are free and online that you can use to learn about graphic design. One of the best ones on there is Canva because Canva is like that marketing tool that everyone seems to be using anyway. I know I use it. I do. Yeah. Yeah. So they also have a course on there that will show you how to make your stuff look good. And that'll work for both print and graphic stuff. And I also put in user experience resources so you can get a better understanding of how people interact with your website and the best practices for how to lay out navigation. And there's also a way to kind of build better videos and resources. And since in this one, you can start tracking your. I also put in tools and the keywords that you would need to start learning how to track how people use your website. So instead of just clicking on page views, how many different unique visitors went to this page, you can start finding out which sections of the page they spend most time on. How long do they spend on this page in general? Which links are they interacting through and clicking with most often? What is the navigation path people took? Are people getting confused about how to find stuff? Like, do they have to click back and forth between four or five different sections before they actually spend time on one page? When people spend time on one page, it means that they actually found what they were looking for. So they spent two seconds, two seconds, two seconds, four seconds, two seconds, four seconds and then five minutes. You know that that is the path that they took to get where they want to go. And so in that resource pack, I put in some different tracking stats and some different ways that libraries have been using to better understand how users are interacting with their services and how to use this to also track ad traffic. Like you can also view how long people have been actually viewing your YouTube videos or viewing Vimeo or viewing whatever or interacting with your learning management system to find out. Sure, we put together this tutorial, but are people using it and is it helpful? So cool. And these were the sessions. If you want to check them out, there are a mess. I think that graphic design thing that you're talking about is something that scares a lot of libraries, especially our small one person, small staff libraries, is like, how do I do something cool like everyone else? I don't have a big staff and I'm not a graphics designer. I haven't trained for that. I can't hire a graphic designer. But things like Canva, especially with that training they have, it can make you look like a graphic designer. Yeah, that training that some things I've put together. I'm like, I'm impressed that this even looks like anything. So don't be afraid. You know, that's that's what that is there. It's not well, I know professional graphic designers do use it, but it's there for those of us who don't have that training to make us look good when we can't afford to hire somebody. And I mean, there's also websites like coolers.co. And I mean, it's it's an online color palette generator. If I didn't have that thing, I would not be able to match any colors to save my life. Like, yeah, that's I would not know what's supposed to go with which. Yeah, yeah. Like my dad can do it just on site, but he's taken art classes. He went through like graphic design, but I need that website or I am lost. Yeah. So now we're on to. We want to be able to support library teams and be able to kind of improve morale while they're trying to face all this stuff because all that stuff that I mentioned before is a lot of change. And it's not stuff that people are necessarily used to doing. It's a little it's a lot of uncertainty. You have to have an open mind, be experimental, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. So this is kind of like the background theme that went on that is like behind library doors about how you actually implement this stuff and keep people from shooing out the door as soon as something new happens. And it's also a way to build in time management and project management so that you can actually track everything like I'm addicted to Gantt charts. I'm not afraid to say it. I don't know what I would do without them. It's basically a chart of stuff that you put together that has your overarching project, then you break it down into little mini subtopics, then the subtopics get broken down into like the individual tasks that a person does with a time associated with the tasks so that you actually get it done. If you don't associate a time frame with the task, other things flood in. You get customer service requests. You get a million and one things that go up. But if you have that time attached to it, you say, this is my priority. This is what I'm doing. The team understands that this is what you're doing. Let's do this thing. And the only challenge is updating it all the time. And that's where that's why I just chose a. I'm working with another person that recommended a project management software. So one of the first things that I put on there is the project management software tools. So if you jump down to the building stronger teams and communities, the first thing on there is a guide to project management. This one is from Richmond Library. I think, yeah, so. Richmond Library was awesome because they put together their entire guide and methodology for how they do the things. And they also gave a handout for activities that you can use to kick off a project to get everyone on the same page and to share out all of your resources and get everything set up. If I had had this like a year ago, my life would be a lot easier right now. But you have it now. Going forward, your life will be much easier now. And so underneath that, once you have your those are the project management options that you have to sort everything out underneath it on that resource page you'll find. And I'll just drag this over just in case you don't have it open. So these are the project management resources and guides underneath it is the possible projects that you might be inspired to do. And once you choose one of these projects, you would need the project management guide. So I know that the story walks actually came up a lot in these sessions. I know Nebraska has quite a few of those. I think Cozad has one. There are a few that we're looking to put it together. But they ran the last couple of years for quite a few libraries to do them as well, trying to do more outdoor, more places for outdoor activities due to the COVID pandemic. Yeah. And this is one that I referenced before. That they called it a pop-up library. I know others have called it a pop-up library, but they have also called it outreach programs. The outreach over to laundromats has been around for a while. There was a craze where that was everywhere. The hospital waiting rooms and the mall and the bus station and the airport station or the airport, those are all starting to crop up. I'm sure there are other libraries doing other places, but they just didn't do a session about it here, but it's everywhere. And the book vending machine is also starting to get more popular. So if you, yeah, and it's actually, it's kind of cool looking. I might have to log back into the portal, but I'm just going to search book vending machine and see if I can get to the one that they had. Oh, this isn't the one they had, but it is cute. It's called Inchi's bookworm vending machine. And that one's just cute. It is. Cool. Yeah. Yep. For kids books. But they also had like, I'm sure if you Google Inchi, like bookworm or book vending machine, there's probably going to be a lot of them online. But I'll spend about two more seconds trying to find the one that they had used. If I can't find it, I'll live. It looked like something that had jumped straight up out of Japan is like this futuristic, amazing thing that integrated perfectly with the environment around it. And it was just awesome. But I can't find it. Google it. Let me know if you see it. But let me close this. And there are also more libraries that are getting added into their city tour. And instead of just being a stop on the tour, they will also add like an interactive game that you can play like a activity spinning wheel that you can put up there or a the digital signage that you can interact with, the touch table display, the there's a bunch of stuff. And then some of these have been around for a while, but I put them on there just because it can. And the bus ads were actually really cool looking. And I'm just going to sift through here to see if there's anything I want to touch on more in depth, or if it's something that you can just as easily just look at and read more about. And the one that I want to talk about is the there was a session called Living Our Values, and it was sort of like I went to that session. And it was like, I made a cup of chamomile tea and just wrapped myself in a blanket. It was just she had like this calm, relaxing voice. And it was just super chill. And I was like, this is like ASMR. It's a but she had some good points like she talked about. She was the one that talked about how to adapt to change how to help like help teams communicate better, share ideas and to she also shared out these worksheets. So these worksheets were some that helped you out. So these worksheets were some that helped you understand what was important to the individual and align what was important to the individual to the values and what was important to the organization. So if you cared about a lot of the parents cared about supporting family raising good healthy kids and then you connected over to the library and that's a lot of what they do. That is like one of the core missions is what a library is all about. So that is a way of connecting your personal value to what you do at work and have kids, but that was one of the recurring themes that came up. And a lot of this is just opening up conversations and communication. And it's a way to humanize things like just bring people together so that they start actively thinking about what you do and why. And so these are just some kind of cool tools they're linked over in that resource back to you. And then this is something that I looked at in the past. So I grabbed a few resources that I just kind of stumbled across before. So some tools to understand values. I think every single like career exploration resource I looked at as I put them together like the workforce innovation stuff for libraries. It all talked about values. But then I started doing some different sessions about values and I just point blank ask people what are your values what do you care about. And it was dead silence. And until some guy just commented out. No one ever asked me something and I never thought about it. Yeah. And I yeah and I was like I wonder how like how much of a problem this actually is because it's like I thought about it and I thought about my elementary school high school college post college and he was right. No one ever asked me. And maybe some schools do maybe some organizations do but yeah this is just a way to start doing it. And then there were also some different ways and platforms to be able to increase communication share ideas and get everyone on the same page. So the cheapest quickest easiest idea sharing platform is what we're looking at right now. Google Docs. It's the you open up a free Google Doc account create a new comment hit share share with specific members of your team or share the link with anyone and start building out topics and ideas and start putting together a knowledge base that way or an idea sharing platform that way. Gather feedback about your organization gather examples of tutorials people use on a daily basis that you might want to share out with other people and start putting together different tools and start asking yourself questions like. If you're the leadership in an organization do your employees actually feel comfortable with giving either good or bad opinions about the workplace and how things are working overall or is it just like a I can't talk about this because it's going to be terrifying and they're going to fire me. Like do you have like anxiety inducing or you just like open you can talk about it. It's a thing. Oh yeah. And so there was just like a whole bunch of this about tips on communication and then down here are a lot of these they kind of multitask is both communication and project management tools. So you can actually multitask and do them all in one. So you can gather feedback about the organization and organize files and workflow for a project and something like a sauna or a sauna also works with air table air tables like a way that you can collect resources together and put them into put in all together into a big database. So if you were collecting tutorials or collecting resources you wanted to share and make available air tables also an option. And if you're wondering we never like we started a project and never seem to get anything done on it. Where is our time actually going and is there something that we can change or adjust so that we can start getting this done. I know that this is something that is probably true of me. But it's true of everyone. Yes. I've totally lost track of everything. Yeah. And so there are time trackers which is you would start a task in the day and start measuring out how much of my day is actually spent on updating spreadsheets. How much of my day is spent on assisting customers. How much of my day is spent on reference questions. And then say is this stuff actually necessary. Is there someone else that can take over some of these tasks so I can get this stuff done. Or what does this actually look like and what can we do about it. And there's also Kanban boards are a really good way to say on the left hand side these are the things that we want to get done in the middle. This is the stuff that someone is currently working on right now. Then on the right hand side this is the stuff that is ready for review and has been completed or ready to have a second draft. And so there's just a bunch of stuff that you can look around to see what you actually might want to do. And the last thing I'll go over here which is the one of my favorite ones is the tech gadgets and trends. So there were quite a few sessions about tech gadgets. But so the recommendations that I would actually do is most of the gadgets that were referenced during the session were also curated on a website called at a podium. So like the Finch 2.0 was talked about like the DJI tele-edio drone. The Finch robot. And so if you sift through this at a podium website. This is a good way to get classroom packs. You can find coding. This site is actually where I ordered a good bunch of the tech kits that we distribute here at the commission. And so they also have a makerspace consultations so that you can reach out to an actual real real human. And you'll start talking about what your needs are goals are and they'll help guide you through the process of putting that stuff together in your own library. Or a school library. And they cover everything from makerspace stuff to tech kits to all the things. So the other things that I added in were some stuff that wasn't mentioned in at a podium, but was still really cool. The Tony box was featured. It's basically like a little cube that you can. It's easier if I just pull the thing up. So this is a, hey, they have a big sale coming soon. Close that. So this is a Tony box. So this is a little, it's basically like a little speaker box, but when a kid picks it up, they can either tilt it to change between different tracks. Or you can fast forward or rewind if you tilt it in different directions. I think it's if you shake it, it turns off and on. And don't take my word for this. Read the instructions. But you can also. So this little figurine on top. It will change the types of stories and interactions that are played through the speaker in the box. So they have Disney stories and songs. They have nighttime songs. They have calm, relaxing songs. They have just, and this is this little dude is called a Tony. And you can also record your own story and put it into the box. So this is a good way to like start sharing stories or passing stories down to kids or. Stories libraries. They just go together. And then the other thing was. The pie top. So a lot of people ask me about the raspberry pie and what they can do with it. So the raspberry pie is like a great big hot mess mystery for a lot of people because the tutorials are everywhere. They're not all organized with the pie. The thing that has been like known for years and everyone keeps hearing about it. And then what? Wow. It sounds cool and I think I get it, but I don't know. And so the pie top did something about that. The pie top makes the raspberry pie makes sense. And so they have like a, and these, so they have a collection of kits and resources that are all together with guided education resources and tutorials that are all put together for you. And so you can go into the education. And find a collection of activities that you can do. And you can also find a collection of kits that are curated or things that you can customize. And it's all in step by step directions that actually make sense. I know it's radical, but it's there. And so those are the gadgety goodness, but they also talked about a lot of non non gadget stuff. So one of the best things that I came across was this. It's a organization called tech girls and tech girls offers free workshop curriculum so that you can, it's basically like a grab and go resource so that you can start implementing the STEM and steam stuff into your own community. What they ask you to do is to sign up to use their curriculum and then they will provide resources for a facilitator training tips and tricks for how to guide people through this stuff and how to use the resources. And then they also have a collection of workshops for everything from web design to using they focus on the Microsoft suite. So like visual studio code, Microsoft office and things that you're the library is likely to already have and build skills that the kids are likely to use in their real career. Not too long from now. And so this is an awesome way to start implementing this. It's geared toward. Like it basically like a girls who code club. But oh yeah. Yeah. What I don't know is whether or not they'll let you use it with like a mixed audience, like girls, boys, genders of any definition that you choose. And so I like that. I haven't reached out to them to ask them whether you can use it for anything except specifically a girls who code club or girls who I identify as girls. Code club. There's better ways to say that. And so that's a cool resource. And so there were also several sessions about. Augmented reality and coding. So I pulled a bunch of the resources that were talked about during the sessions and included some of the ones that I came across on my own. Or just as I was searching for stuff. And the augmented reality temp tattoo is one of the fun, cool ways that is the easiest thing to implement. So if you want a temp tattoo or a frog stuck in your arm, then you want to hold up your phone and be able to see a digital 3D image of a hopping frog in your arm. This is the way to go. Cool. And then the Halo AR app is a free app that you can use to build your own augmented reality apps. So if you're trying to build training tools, information tools that you can use to build your own augmented reality apps, interactive exhibits in the library, you can use this to overlay digital, overlay pictures of photos, videos or 3D models over real objects in the world. An example would be you would download the Halo AR app. You would click on start a new project, you would click on the digital object to appear on. For example, if you were using a book, you would take a picture of the front cover of that book. And then you would upload the video that you want to be overlaid over it. Load the video in place it, save your project. Then all you would have to do is reopen that app. And every time you point that your phone camera at that point, the video would pop up over your book. So it's kind of cool looking. They also have videos and tutorials. So you can check it out. And the augmented reality coloring pages are the next easiest thing that you can start implementing for younger students. And the machine learning for kids is also a fun one that you can use scratch to the scratch the drag and drop coding interface to start experimenting with how machine learning works. The best way to find out more is to click the link. Check it out. It's free. And so I'm at 1104. So we can call it good for now. And I'm going to close out this. And put up this. If you have any questions, want to learn more. Yeah, definitely. All right. Thank you so much, Amanda. So yes, anybody, nobody typed in anything while you're talking, but anybody does have any questions, comments. If you want to know a little bit more about anything. We still have time. We don't get cut off here just because we've reached our hour. If you do have want to know more about anything, go ahead and type into the questions section of your go to webinar interface. Or if you attended any of these things and have any insider thoughts about what. I'm going to close out this. I haven't had computers and libraries this year. Let us know too. As I said, the recording of the vehicle. So while we're waiting to see if anybody has any questions, the recording will be available for everyone to watch afterwards. Of course. Amanda slides and her research document on Google docs with all the links, everything you need. Be available as well. And also we'll recommend while if you, you know, she did talk about very, you know, this is a lot that happens. Computers and libraries is three, four days. Three this time. Yeah. Online even that's a lot. So, you know, a lot of different sessions that you could be interested in. Go to the computers and libraries website. They've got that replay pass that you can purchase and then actually see the recordings of these sessions that happened in March. And see if you want to watch any of them or just jump into our resources for it. What I think is. I'm glad that we do this every year. We've been doing this for a couple of years now. We've done it in the past to talk about what happened at computers, libraries. A lot of, I think people think of and I sometimes do computers and libraries is all techy stuff. It's all computers and robots and tech. And also because when we have, you know, Amanda coming on and pretty sweet tech to talk about it. But there's so much more to it. The things about values and marketing and programming and things that it's not, you know, it's not just all technology all day. I guess it's the way to put it. So it's good to see that there's so many other types of sessions that happen at the conference and different things being discussed. It is one of the conferences. This one that is, I've attended in the years, years ago. As well. And if it does get to say, you see, they do have their announcing at the moment. We are planning in to be in person next spring again. Typically it's in Virginia and Washington, D.C. area. If you do go in person, it is a smaller conference and things like ALA or PLA. So that's good too. It's a smaller group of people. So you can get a lot more, I think. Interaction with other people that are attending. And the presenters because it is a smaller group. But I would highly recommend it. Either attending in person or virtually depending or hybrid depending on if that's what ends up happening next year. But, you know, with the COVID-19 pandemic still going strong. And no signs of slowing down. We'll see what happens between, you know, a year from now. Who knows. There is a companion, I think I would say, conference in the fall of Internet Librarian run by the same thing info today. And I always think of them as the East Coast and West Coast version of the same conference because they pretty much sometimes are sometimes some of the same presentations you would have attended in person in Washington would then be redone in Monterey, California. So that people, you know, you can figure out which direction you want to go depending where you live in the country. But we're here dead center. So for us in Nebraska, whichever way you want to go at which time of year, when it is in person, is fine. And I'll be speaking at Internet Librarian this year. Nice. Okay. Cool. If you're planning in person for now too, we'll do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That'll actually be real humans. Yeah. Moderate is both places. Both areas are great to visit. I think I've been to both. I've been both Internet Librarian and Monterey. Nice to go somewhere. Summary in the October. And I've been to DC in the spring. When the. Cherry blossom trees are blooming. I mean, it's anyways. Yeah. But it's about technology about going to the conference. Not going on vacation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I look into both of them. That doesn't look like anybody had any questions. Just. I have to watch. Thanks for all the information. Oh, so I did. Oh, good. Thank you for asking. So we did ask about continuing education credits for watching this. And I let's forget to mention that. For income is live here. Whenever you attend a live session within about an hour after the sessions over, you ever want to be emailed an email automatically from the go to webinar system saying you're supposed to be in the meeting. Or you can submit a message to the Go to the chat. And both of those can serve as your proof of attending the live session. If you watch the recorded session, we don't have the availability to know that. Here in Nebraska, we have a. A team education form you can submit and saying you watch the recording. If you're not from Nebraska, you would have to work with whoever is your C. of tracking and knowing who watched our recordings. But we do for this live one. So if you're a live attendee, you don't have to do anything. You'll just automatically be sent in a certificate. So you have that proof. If you're a Nebraska library, I will automatically send on to our CE people here that you attended here live today, too, so you don't have to submit anything to us here today if you're about that, if you're a Nebraska person attending. And we do have that info on the website. Yeah, but I always forget to mention here. But yeah, CE is available from us, of course. And anywhere else, check in with your CE person. Many places do use this. And this is as I'm going to show in our archive shows here. So and while we're on this archive page, I'll just leave it here on your screen. I mean, it's just showing it, which is great. These are our show archives. You can, today's show will be posted to the top of the list there, most recent ones at the top. I'll email everyone who attended today and registered for today's show to let you know when it's ready. And as you can see, this is a ridiculously long list because this is our show archives going all the way back to the beginning when Encompass Live premiered, which is, there we go, January 2009. We have all of these up on our YouTube channel right now. And we will always keep them up there. As long as we have a place for something to host, similar place to host all these, we will keep them up there. But pay attention when you are watching in our archives to the original broadcast dates. They're all on there. Some things will stand the test of time, have good information, still be valid. Some things will become old and outdated. So do pay attention to when something was originally broadcast. We'll always keep things up there. It's what we do sometimes as librarians, archiving, historical preservation type things. We'll always keep them out there for anyone who wants to know what we did do in the past, but just pay attention to what you do watch. There's a search feature at the very top. There's a search box. You can type in and look up any topics that you might want to know about, see if we did a show on a particular topic. And you can search just the most recent 12 months or just all the show archives. Yeah, if you do a pretty sweet tech, you'll get a lot of all of Amanda's pretty sweet tech days. Yeah. And we have for all of them, the recordings, the videos, slides, if there's any other documents or anything. But yeah, back to our Encompass Live main page. You can go ahead and click on that there. Yeah. These are upcoming shows. We've got all of June booked. I've got more dates coming up for July and August. Next week's show, we do have a Facebook page. You can see there's a link up there at the top to like our page. It's on our session pages too. If you like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. You get reminders when things are going on, when there's a reminder to log in today's show, et cetera. We also use the Encompass Live hashtag on Twitter and I think Instagram is what else our social media people here use. So you can definitely follow us in all those places as well. Yeah. So next week's show, I hope you're joining us, is the Heartland Honors 9-Eleven Victims and Survivors. This was the 9-Eleven Museum and Memorial Museum provided this exhibit to any libraries that wanted to use them in their libraries. And we did have quite a few here. It was last year, it was the 20th anniversary of the 9-Eleven attacks. And we had a few libraries here in Nebraska that did it and they're gonna talk about what they did with that poster exhibit. Yeah, the information is still out there too, if you did still want to use it, but being the 20th anniversary, they would create a special set of things that libraries could use. So you can see here, the poster exhibit, you can download everything, it's pretty slick. We'll have these libraries talk about what they did with it. So please do sign up for that show or any of our other future episodes of Encompass Live we have coming up. Doesn't look any of the questions, just thank yous and thanks for the information. They're definitely gonna watch the recording and watch some of these sessions. So thank you so much, Amanda. Amanda will be back with us last Wednesday in June, June 29th. Do we have a topic for that day yet? Are we still gonna think about it? Get off to the side. I'm reaching out to a couple of libraries to talk about what they did with the tech kits. Nice. Oh, yes, we've been circling these tech kits. I'd love to hear what actually happened to them. All right, so sign up for that too. Other than that, thank you everybody for being here with us today. Thank you, Amanda, we'll see you in a month and if we'll see some of you at a future episode of Encompass Live. So bye, have a good day.