 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live, the weekly online event hosted by the Nebraska Library Commission. I am your guest host today, Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Commission. Krista is taking the day off and asked me to fill in. I don't have a lot to do today. I'm just going to kind of get things started. Like everybody know, we are recording. And so if you want to watch this show afterwards, you are welcome to do that. We will also take your questions via the Q&A interface. Or you can say you have a microphone and we'll unmute you and you're welcome to ask your question that way. We'll try to answer your question. You ask it, we answer. In this weekly show, we have lots of different topics varying. Sometimes we have commission staff. We have guest speakers coming on. And this week we have Richard Miller here from the commission to talk about library accreditation in the state of Nebraska. So Richard, I'm just going to go ahead and hand it over to you and tell us all about it. Great, thank you Michael. Glad to be with you this morning. I'm just back from Las Vegas and 100 plus degree temperatures for 27 days straight there. I'm glad to be back in Nebraska. Thank you very much. Where it's now like 63. Yeah, 63. It's a little bit cool this morning actually. Well today, as Michael said, we're going to go through information about the accreditation process. We'll also hit on the number of other topics because they're all related to library accreditation. And so you'll see the Nebraska Library Commission website here. We're going to be going to several sections of that website so that you yourself can go to those sections when it is time to do your accreditation. Very good. Thank you, Michael. If you have not been to the commission website yet, I would surprise me if you haven't, but if you haven't been there yet, the way it's set up is that there are topics along the left-hand side and you'll notice that when you go to that topic like about us, for example, there's what they call a flyout menu. Then if you're careful and go to the right, you can pick one of those topics under the flyout menu. Those are each live links. Well, we're going to be spending most of our time today on the accreditation certification flyout menu. That's the one that you would like to go to if you'd like to look at any of the stuff that we're going to be talking about today. Let me review briefly what we will be discussing. We'll be discussing board certification, librarian certification, and library accreditation. And the great amount of our time is going to be on library accreditation, but you need to know about board certification and library accreditation as well. We'll also be talking about strategic planning since strategic plans are required for the library accreditation process. So those are the four main topics. We'll review those. We'll go into a little bit of detail. And Wayne Public Library, Lauren Lofgren, the director of Wayne Public Library has again allowed me to use a live version of the library accreditation application form because they really have to look at a live one to see how it works. So we've got that loaded up on here and we'll be going to that shortly. We'll be talking about the 12 minimum requirements before you can actually apply for accreditation. We'll be talking about the five sections of the guidelines and then we'll demonstrate the form itself. So let's get started here. Let's talk just briefly about, we'll just take them straight down the list here, board certification. If you go to board certification about, you will find out of course that boards, that is library boards have to be certified in order for the library to be accredited. That's one of the links there. For those of you who've been in the field for a while, you know that library boards in Nebraska have to earn at least 20 hours of CE or CE credits during a three-year period. This page, which is put together by Laura Johnson, who is our CE coordinator, does have helpful information about the types of things that boards can receive credit for. Now library boards, unlike librarians, can take all of their hours that are required through videos, offline, whatever they wish to do. So as I say, and I'm sure Laura says this as well, library board members, since you have at least five board members and some have seven and some have even more, but since you have that many board members, for you folks to get 20 hours within a three-year period is really easy. So there's really no excuse not to have that. So that's that. All right, let's go back. We'll look at librarian certification. As you know, librarians in order to be certified have to earn 45 CE hours or CE credits within a three-year period. Now the one thing that, and I guess I should have said this when I was talking about boards, if for example you do a half hour continuing education experience during a board meeting and you've got five board members there, you earn two and a half hours because each board member earns those. In terms of public librarian certification, that has to be earned by the librarian himself or herself. So that's a bit more daunting, but again, in 45 hours over three years, it means you'd have to come up with 15 hours during the course of that time period. So we have three years in order to attain that. If you need to, for both board certification and librarian certification, if you have some difficulties you can contact Laura Johnson since she's in charge of both of these things and you can talk to her about earning those hours. Now there are basically five levels of certification which we'll see when we get to the accreditation application itself. But there really are eight levels because Laura points out here that we have everywhere from level five down through level one, or level one up through level five, however you want to say it, but we also have levels that have L's behind them like here's level two L, these are Roman numerals so you know that. So level one requires a high school diploma or GED plus the basic skills courses. Level two is high school or GED plus 60 semester hours plus basic skills. Level two L, 60 semester hours with an AA degree, and you'll notice that basic skills has dropped off there because the AA degree in library science or professional certificate in library science means that you do not have to take the basic skills. Level three is a bachelor's plus basic skills. Level three L is a bachelor's and if you have a bachelor's or an AA in library science you'll notice the basic skills has dropped off that one. Level four is a graduate degree but not a graduate degree in library science so you do have to take the basic skills. Level four L is graduate degree from an accredited college or university with a bachelor's AA degree or professional certificate in library science and there's the L again. And level five is a master's degree in library science from an ALA accredited school. So those are the eight levels, there are actually five levels but some with library science involved in that for certification. The reason I spent some time on that is that the accreditation application itself mentions the certification and the levels that are required depending upon your service population that your library is responsible for but it is not spelled out there so I did want to take some time to do that. Okay, let's go to the library certification section. A couple things here. I'm sorry, I said library certification didn't I? Yes you did. Michael was going to tell me that. I could see it on his face. Let's go to library accreditation. The way you remember whether to use the term certification or accreditation and don't screw it up the way I just did is that remember only people are certifiable and you can take that any way you'd like to. It's institutions that are accredited. Here we go with library accreditation. There's an information sheet here about the accreditation process itself. As those of you know who are up for accreditation this year, you did receive an email from us specific to your library. We actually sent it out before July 1st this year, that's a first. And by October 1st you must have responded in terms of filling out the accreditation application, sending in your strategic plan, and so forth. So you've got over a full three months this time. And please call me if you have any questions. The library accreditation, we worked with a group for almost three years, a group of librarians from around the state who developed the new accreditation guidelines and we all agreed working with them that there are some minimum qualifications that a library should be able to fulfill before it can ever even apply for accreditation. We'll be talking about that a bit later. Also, as I mentioned earlier, accreditation does require an up-to-date strategic plan and we'll be spending some time on that as well. This page on Nebraska Public Library accreditation has links to all of this information and we'll be going to some of those links. The accreditation application itself is divided into five categories, which we'll be talking about, but they're listed there, governance slash planning, resources, services, cooperation slash collaboration, and communications. Also, in order to be accredited, the library must have sent in its annual public libraries survey, and there's a link to that, and also the supplemental survey, and that's a change on the form this year. In past years it said you have to have sent in the public libraries survey, but it did not mention the supplemental survey. There's a supplemental survey that goes out to every public library that has submitted its public libraries survey, and these are the things that are covered in that supplemental survey. Staff, their names, addresses, email, phone, salary, education level, board membership, their names, addresses, and contact information. We really would like to have board email addresses because when we do emails to board members, it's really appalling the number of board members that we do not have email addresses listed for. Contact names for friends or foundations that you may have, your open hours, and be sure to include summer hours if they're different from your regular open hours, and check your photo on our website. If we have a photo of your library from 2001, we'd certainly like something more up to date than that, and we do have a number of 2001 photos. So that supplemental survey, as well as the annual public library survey, both of which are annual, of course, must be sent in as part of this whole thing. One thing you'll notice here is that there are nine guidelines in the accreditation application. Most of them are in section two, which has to do with resources, in which your library is compared with peer libraries, and I'll talk to you about peer libraries in just a second. These guidelines, for those of you who have been through the old accreditation process, you may even remember that we had some arbitrarily designed population categories. If your library was under 500, if your library served from 501 to 1,000, et cetera. Well, the group that we worked with on the new accreditation guidelines said that's really not fair, those boxes are arbitrary, we should be comparing ourselves with libraries of similar size. So that's what we've done on these accreditation guidelines. Your library is compared with public libraries, which serve populations from 15% higher to 15% lower than your library, and you're right smack dab in the middle, you're right at the median there. So that should be a fairer measure. Now, you'll notice that for some of these libraries, and you'll see this when we go to Wayne Public Library's accreditation application, there are a number of Nebraska public libraries on there, but most of their peers are from Iowa, because there were not enough public libraries in the population size, 15% above through 15% below, to provide enough comparison. So we did pull from Iowa libraries for some of our libraries, and there are a few libraries that we pulled from South Dakota libraries as well. But most of our libraries are compared just with other public libraries in Nebraska. So those are your peer libraries. You can preview an application here. If you click on that, it'll take you to an application, but that's not a live application. And we're going to go, as I said earlier, to a live application. This does not allow you to put things in and watch the number of points change and so forth. But if you're not a Nebraska library and therefore do not have username and passwords to get into your own public library application, which has your name at the top here instead of the word preview, then you can look at this to get a pretty darn good idea of the application form itself. But we're not going to be doing that, so let's go back. Is it a good thing to print maybe two for reference? Yes, you can certainly print this for reference. Good idea, Michael. So let's go look a little bit at strategic planning. And I want to go up here to this strategic planning because of the importance of strategic planning to the accreditation process. Empty your library and your community, actually. Now, strategic planning is meant to, and let's talk about the word strategic for just a minute here. We all know, and you all know, that plans are often done, made, completed, and then sit on the shelf for years and nobody ever uses them. That's not a strategic plan. A strategic plan is one that you use and you develop strategy within that plan. That's why it's called strategic, of course, and use it on a regular basis. A strategic plan is based on the needs of your community, not based on the needs of your library. That's one thing that people often don't get the connection of. And what you'll see when you do use strategic plan is that if you look at the resources we have on strategic planning, you'll notice that we're asking you, first of all, to figure out what the needs of the community are, apart from the library completely. Almost every community that does an analysis of the community will find out that the top 10 things that people are worried about always include stray dogs, bad streets, the downtown looks terrible, people don't keep their property fixed up, almost every town I've ever dealt with in doing strategic planning. Those are among the top 10 for sure. But if you're doing a strategic plan, there are several ways of doing it. If you already have a strategic plan and if it includes these seven elements, whoops, these seven elements that are listed here, then you don't have to come up with another strategic plan unless it's really out of date. Your strategic plan has to be no older than three years old. So these are the elements that need to be in a strategic plan. You have to have a mission statement for the library. You have to have done a community profile, not a library profile, a community profile. How many people do you have of a certain type? What trends are going on in the community? All kinds of things. You have to have an assessment of community needs. You have to have an analysis of the library's strengths and weaknesses, and then an analysis of the opportunities and threats outside the library. And the reason we divided it this way, and I think Laura Johnson came up with this, is that if you do a SWOT analysis, which this is, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and if you do them all together, people start mixing up strengths with opportunities and weaknesses with threats. That's just the way it happens. Whereas if you keep it internal versus external, it really helps clarify things. So do it that way. Do this one analysis that way. Then you have to do an analysis of what it means that you have found in your community and the strengths and weaknesses of your library and the opportunities and threats outside the library. Then you have to come up with specific goals that have measurable goals or measurable objectives with an evaluation and then a plan for evaluation. Now, if you have all those elements, if you're not sure, you can send your strategic plan to either your regional system administrator who would be happy to review it or I'd be happy to review it ahead of time if you're not sure of it. And here's an opportunity right now to get going on it because you have about three months and you have not done anything on that so far. There's also information down below that we put together. The first year we use these new plans, there's an introduction that I did. You probably don't want to watch that at this point because it's dated and we've made some changes. But we do have worksheets. We do have explanatory videos that were done by Laura Johnson and by the system administrators. We have how-to guides over here. These are all live links that you can go to that will help you with these processes. Each of these videos is about 20 or 30 minutes long or so, some shorter than others. They can be helpful. It's the worksheets over here that I want to draw especially to your attention. These are all live links. Let's just look at community profile for fun. These sheets can be used if you go to look at census data on American Fact Finder. And if you're going to use census data, which I would suggest that you do, going to American Fact Finder, which is produced by the U.S. Census Bureau and really is quite friendly, especially compared with census data in the past, it's really easy to use. You can get a pretty good breakdown of the community, the number, the percentage of the total population. There are various things here which we're not going to go into because we're not doing a strategic planning session today. If you want to go to training on strategic planning, the Panhandle is planning a strategic planning session. I'm going to be involved in that at Eric Green. He's going to be involved in that. It's in alliance. I think it's August 3rd, but look at the Panhandle Library System website and the newsletter to figure it out. In each of the other systems, the system administrator so far has actually made contact one-on-one with the public libraries that are up for accreditation or re-accreditation this year. And I don't think they're going to be doing workshops, but that may change in the future. We'll see. So, that's... There's Michael back there. Thank you, Michael. Let's go back to this. So, the help sheets are all here. And the reason I call your attention to the worksheets here is because if you don't have a strategic plan already that includes these seven elements that I drew your attention to, then you can start from scratch. You can use these six worksheets. And the last sheet here is a strategic plan summary. So, you can take those worksheets up above, and this is just an outline of what the strategic plan would look like. It's obviously not going to fit on less than one sheet, but these are the sections of the strategic plan that you can use. Tell us who your planning team members are. Tell us the dates, the beginning and end dates. Summary of important demographics. This is what you get from your analysis of the community and getting into census data. And certainly, if anybody else in your community has already done community or economic development, get a hold of that. That can be actually part of this and a very important part of the whole thing. They've done a lot of your work for you already. Summary of community needs and desires in priority order. You're going to see in the worksheets that what we recommend that you do is that you either have community meetings or focus groups or if you have to, surveys or some way of getting input from needs and desires of the community. And then do a tally sheet. Put them in priority order. Many dogs are number one. That's number one. If all the kids are leaving town and they're not coming back because there are no jobs here, whatever order it's in. And then start addressing those. And we'll talk about addressing those in just a minute. Summary of the library profile, including that SWOT analysis that we talked about. And it shouldn't say library profile because it should say library profile for strengths and weaknesses but for opportunities and threats, outside the library. Maybe I can change that before you use it. List of goals and objectives for the planning period in priority order and these should be measurable goals and objectives. When you get to the information that's on our website, look for the term smart goals because there's information there about how to make them measurable and smart. And then a summary of the projected evaluation criteria for the project itself. This is just an outline that you might use. It's there for your information if you'd like to use it. All right. Let's get on a strategic planning. I think that's enough on that. Let's go to the 12 minimum qualifications and then we'll actually get into a website. I will show you this first and then we're going into the live website which we already have loaded up here. When you want to apply for accreditation, you have to first go to this page. You have to be able to truthfully check all 12 of these. These are your library legally established under state statute. That means either chapter 51 or chapter 16 or 17. If you don't know what that means, you can contact me and figure it out. Do you comply with all library laws, regulations, and any local or Nebraska or federal laws that affect library operations? For example, if the feds decided to change the minimum wage up from where it is and has been forever and you don't comply, you can't check that. Do you possess a governing administrative or an advisory library board that operates under written by laws and that operates under Nebraska's open meeting law? That should be posted of course in your meeting space. Is your board certified? Is your director certified at the proper level? At the required level? Do you receive local funding from a city, village, town, and community? If it's just volunteer, then you cannot check that one and therefore you cannot go on to try to become accredited. Did you submit your most recent annual public libraries survey using Bibliostat? And here's where we added on and the supplemental survey. Most people or most libraries that send in the annual survey do send in the supplemental survey, but now it is required. Staffing the library during all open hours. Now there can be exceptions for this. If let's say the librarian is going to a workshop, for example, you might fill in kind of temporarily, but volunteers, people who are not paid by the library should not be staffing the library during open hours. Does your director have an email address which is used and checked regularly? Regularly. We were going to define that and decided not to do that, but regularly used and checked. Do you make your basic services available without charge to all residents to supply the income? Do you provide access to Internet for anybody who comes into the library, whether you're, whether they're a local taxpayer or not, and do you make your annual report to the governing body of local government and to the public every year, and it's supposed to be the second Monday in February of every year according to state statute. If you've checked all of these and you say, yes, then it links you to say, then you can click this and say, yes, I want to apply for accreditation. When you get to that point, you have to put in your user ID and password. That is the same user ID and password that you use for turning in your annual libraries survey. So let's get out of here and go to here because we are going to go to Wayne Public Library's application form, complete with false information that I have put in. So don't believe anything you read on here, except the nine guidelines that have either a green check or a red X, because those come right out of BiblioStack Collect. Let me explain that just a little bit before we go to their form itself. First of all, there are 41 public libraries that are up for re-accreditation this year. There are 25 or 35, I forgot the number, libraries that have sent in their statistics even though they're not currently accredited and because they sent in their annual statistics and if they send in their supplemental survey, they are eligible to apply for accreditation even if they're not currently accredited. So let's go to Wayne Public Library's. Now, when you put in your own username and password, it takes you to your own unique form. This is nobody else's form. That's why I didn't want to show you Wayne Public Library's username and password. I fiddled with this enough, we don't want other people fiddling with it too. There are a couple of elements in this form I want to show you. First of all, there's a floating totals point in the upper right-hand corner. As you go through here, that travels with you. You can take a check in here that affects the total number of points as you'll see when we go through here. So that's a handy-dandy little thing to let you know how many points you've accumulated. If you've accumulated the number of points you want to accumulate, you can quit at that point. Under the old guidelines, you had to attain the essential level completely before you could move on to the enhanced level and those first two levels before you could move on to the excellent level. We have three levels, but they are bronze, silver, and gold. The number of points you have to accumulate for those are right here. There are 275 points total. If you get to 175, you are credited at the bronze level, 200 silver, and 250 at the gold level. May I ask a question? Certainly you may. You said if you get the number of points you want, they've got 235, so they're at the silver level. And you said they can quit. Is there a benefit to keep going to see if you hit gold? Absolutely. Would you want to do that? Certainly. He's a good sideman here. I like this. Now, there are instructions on this first sheet here. I'm going to show you a couple of these things. In the nine guidelines that are filled in from the Bibliostat information that you sent in, they already have been compared with your peer libraries. So if you met the guideline when compared with your peers, there's a green check. If you did not meet that guideline when compared with your peers, there's a red X. There's also information in here from the supplemental survey. For example, do you have a friends group? If you do, there's a green check mark. If you don't, there'd be a red check. So that comes from those two surveys that you sent in. So we need both of those surveys sent in in order to lead toward accreditation. I talked about the peer libraries. When you're first starting out, if you want to view your peer libraries, just click on this live link and you'll see, as I mentioned before, that there are a whole lot of Iowa libraries that are compared with Wayne Public Library, all of them larger in terms of service population. But below that, there are a few Nebraska libraries. Valentine and Shadron and Schuyler and Platsmith, which are in the amount of service population that Wayne Public Library has. So in terms of the numbers, it should be right in the middle. There won't always be an exact number above and below. Our goal, or John Felton's goal, was to have at least five libraries above and five libraries below, so there could be some comparison. So let me... Is this the one that's open? Can I shut that? Yes. Okay. So let's go back here. There's another feature on here. If you look at there, there are yellow... there's a yellow circle in here with a black question mark in it. That takes you to a help page. If you want to see the entire help page, you can click on this one. And maybe it doesn't work there. Let's go down here and click on it. Okay, let's click on this one. And that'll take you to a help page, which you can blow up and read the whole thing if you wish to. It goes through everything that needs to be here that will help answer your questions. This is the help page. It's also the Richard Miller sanity page. Because for those of you who work with me on the old guidelines, you may remember that I probably sent out, I don't know, a couple hundred emails every year saying, oh, well, let me explain that term to you. Oh, or here's an example of... well, I think Laura Johnson came up with this page also. But this has a whole lot of really good information that it will explain. And depending on where the question mark is in here, it will take you to that specific section that will pop up for you to read, so you don't have to scroll through the whole thing to find it. That's really useful. If you have a question about anything on the accreditation guidelines, please go to that first before you give me a call or send me an email, because I bet your question is going to be answered. All right, I think that's enough up here. This last statement does point out that when you get to the end of this form, you can either save it and resume it later, and it will save everything that you put in here, which is a nice development, since last year it didn't always work. I mean, it didn't always work on the old form. But you can also just exit this form, and it will not save it at all. So it depends on what you want to do. Now, even if your library is not up for accreditation this year, since the data that you sent in for the 2012-2013 are already in here, even if your library is not up for accreditation until 2015 or 2016, go in and take a look at it, because I'm going to show you how this application is really a good planning tool as well. Let's start going into the form itself. Governance. There are a couple of things about this form that you need to know. I need to get that box out of the way. You are to make a check mark if it's available, if the box is empty. Make a check mark in here if you meet the guideline. Now, in almost every one of these, it says, list the goal or the goals in your strategic plan. Hey, do you get the idea why the strategic plan is important? You've got to fill in the pieces here. So list the section or sections of your strategic plan that apply to this particular goal. Notice the conditional word, if, right there. It says, list the permanent goal or goals in your library's strategic plan if the plan touches upon that subject. The wording here before seemed to indicate that every one of these guidelines had to have something in your strategic plan, which is really kind of nuts. So it's if the plan touches upon that subject. I used to have the word where in there, and Becky Baker from Seward Public Library may be changing it to if, because that's a better word. So only if it is related to that. This is automatic. After you check those 12 boxes and the minimum qualifications, this automatically turned to a green check here, a number one. So that's out of the way. Do you have a strategic plan? If you do, you check that. If you don't have a strategic plan, you might as well not go on with the rest of the form because you need a strategic plan. Your strategic plan, you need to send a URL to me, a link somewhere on your website so that I can get to it, or you can attach it to an email and send it to my email address. Either way, I need that plan. I don't want it in paper. Thank you very much. He's got enough paper. Yeah. Michael can tell you from looking at my office I have more than enough paper. All right. Now I told you the strategic plan has to be up to date. That means it can't be any older than three years old. Otherwise it's not strategic by our definition. So I told you that I made stuff up on the Wayne Public Library's form. I have indicated here that every May they review their strategic plan. They've done it in 2011, 12, and 13. So they're in pretty good shape. This date is filled in by you. You put down month, month, year, year. All you put down is the last two digits of the year and it does fill it out in four digits. I don't quite know why it does that, but it does it anyway. So you just put in 05, 13, or 05, 12, and it'll pop it up into this. Now this is a section of the application that you can chunk up a whole lot of points. You can get as many as 19 points on this because you get a point for every up-to-date policy that your board has approved for your library. The policies are listed here. You will notice, follow the bouncing box over here, that if it turns out that Wayne Public Library does have an exhibits, displays, and bulletin boards policy, I can check that, and it should change the points by one. Bingo, automatic. This is such a cool form. It's developed by Vern Bios, who's our IT guy, and I love it. It's fun to work with. Let's suppose they have a marketing policy. Check that, get another point. Now it turns out that their gifts, memorials, and donations policy is not three years, is older than three years, so they can't claim that. So they take that off, points go back down again. Michael? Now when you say older than three years, it's not that they haven't updated in three years. They haven't re-approved it in three years. Either, well, they should not just re-approve it. They should review it, too. Well, review it. And you don't have to change the language. Yes, if the language is still appropriate, but it means that the board really does review it and look at it and not just say, oops, this is three years old. Let's change the date on this. That's not review yet. Now here, you'll notice that it goes 1.03.16. So there are 16 policies listed here. But if you have other policies that did not fit into those 16 categories and can make a case, you can list it here. So I put down, remember this is fiction on this form, I put down that they have, since the Wayne Public Library is located in a dual-use building with the Public Library and one part of the building, a lobby, and then the senior center in the other part, oh, they happen to have policies dealing with cooperative activities with the senior center, which is very logical. So I put down that they have a policy there, and they can claim that. Do you have a tech plan? If you do, what part of the goals is that addressed in? Now, you want to figure out what I mean by tech plan. You can go here, and it takes you right to has reviewed the tech plan annually. So there's a definition of what it means by reviewed, and there's information for assistance on tech planning if you need some help with that. And by the way, Krista, who's usually here, is our tech plan person. In case you need some help on a technology plan, she'll be able to help you with that. All right. I'm not going to go through every one of these guidelines, but I do want to point out when there are certain things that I think would be useful for you. We've talked about the help page. We've talked about filling in the appropriate section of your strategic plan. On this technology plan, just as with the tech plan above, you need to list when it was reviewed. And it looks like Wayne Public Library, since we know that Lauren is a very organized person. Every March, she works with their board and they review their tech plan. Now, I don't know if that's true. It wouldn't surprise me, but I don't know if that's true. Friends Groups Foundation, those come right out of the supplemental survey that you send in. If there's a section of the goals that addresses it, put it there. You'll notice later on in this forum, I gave up listing these things. I was tired of making stuff up, but I was trying to be consistent in my lies, but it wasn't working after a while. Did I say part four? What did I say there? Part two has to do with resources. Again, check the boxes if you meet it. List a part of the plan if it is addressed in your plan. Now, this part two of the accreditation guidelines is the largest part in terms of the number of points you can either earn or lose. You'll notice that a lot of these are from the statistics that you sent in via bibliostat. And here is where we list the average of your peers and the median of your peers. Now, even under the old guidelines, we added this some years ago to include not just the average, but also the median, because these figures are different, usually very different, and the median is often lower than the average. Not always, but it is. And Michael will correct me if I'm wrong, but the median means that your library is right smack in the middle of the funding that's available, so that if you listed an entire list of your peer libraries, your library would have local income of $289,559, and that's right smack. No, no, no. They're doing much better. But the median, the X library would be right smack in the middle of that list of all the libraries listed. They're doing much better than the median. The average simply means that you take all of the local incomes and divide it by the number of libraries. So that's not really a true figure of a true measurement of the whole thing, because you could have what are called outliers. You could have some library that has $500,000 for some reason, and some library that has $2,000, and that screws up the averages. So you have the opportunity of either meeting the average figure or the median figure, and as Michael points out, Wayne Public Library goes considerably over that. So they're in good shape there, and automatically there would be a green check mark there based on the stats. Now we go to facilities. In this case, this is the number of hours open annually, and in this case, the peer average was $2693, the peer median was $2548, and again, Wayne Public Library exceeds that by quite a bit. Schedule of open hours. Now remember that all of these guidelines that you're able to check yourself, as opposed to things that were automatically filled in from the stats that you submitted, these are self-reported, and it's the honor system here. So if you say that you schedule open hours that reflect an attempt to meet the needs of the community, then we're going to believe you. We're not coming around, we don't have library police coming around and checking to see if you're absolutely told the truth, but you also have to record the last date on which you had some contact with your community somehow asking them their preferred open hours. So in this case, in April 2013, I made up as fiction, they asked their community open hours, or they listed their open hours saying, hey, do you like this, do you think it should change, whatever. All right, let's scoot on down to staff. Here, this is the amount of money that is spent by the library, by your library, by the Wayne Public Library, on staff. In this case, the average and median, and you'll notice the median is, oh, I'm sorry, my glasses are fogging up here. You'll notice they're well above both the median and the average in this case. Professional education level. All right, we talked about certification level before that is required. In this case, according to these statistics, given the population that is served, the LSA population, the library director needs to be at least at a level three. She happens to have a master's degree in library science, so she's at a level five, and so that meets or exceeds the guidelines. And there's a chart there. We don't have a level four. We just jump from three to five. Three or four, you fit in there, that's fine, but 10,000 plus is a master's degree in library science. All right, number of additional, notice the word additional. Number of additional library staff that must be certified based on the LSA population. Director plus X, director plus X. So if you're in a library that's above 5,000 and below 2499, you have to have a library director plus one additional staff. Now, we had some discussion about this and the group that we worked with felt that it shouldn't just be the director. We do know, however, that in libraries that have 500, 1,000, whatever, that's often the only staff member. Well, in that case, that's fine, but if you have some additional staff, you need to have those members attempting to be certified. They don't have to have attained certification because people have three years to attain certification, but they have to be working on it. And if you figure out that you take three years, you have three years to earn 45 hours. If they earn 15 hours a year, they're going to be in good shape. So just to clarify, if you have additional staff, at least one, two, three, or four need to be certified, but if you only have one staff person, you don't have to hire someone else to meet this. Absolutely right. Number of FTE that you have. They're the figures for the meeting and the average. Again, Wayne Public Library does exceed that. Financial resources that are committed to and expended by the library for in-service training, basically for continuing education. They meet that based on the data. They set aside $3,659 in 2012-13 for continuing education for their staff. So they meet that. That's automatic. Okay, I'm going to start moving a little bit faster because I want to talk, I think I'll go through the whole thing and then come back to this part two. Technology. They have an integrated library system. Their catalog is on the web 24-7. And this we pick up from the statistics or the supplemental survey, in this case from the library survey. They say they have broadband internet access adequate to meet their growing user needs. That is self-proclaimed, but they do say that they have it in their plan as fabricated by Richard Miller. They do have it in their plan. Under collection. And here are a bunch of things coming up. I want to draw to your attention on this because there are a couple here that they are missing according to or they weren't able to attain according to the statistics they sent in. Their weeding of 3% per year averaged over a three-year period. They met that. Their rate was 5.8%. You know that it's 3% not per year, but 3% per year averaged over a three-year period. So that takes into account the fact that perhaps one year you heavily weeded in preparation for a move or a renovation project or who knows. Some new director came in and said, let's throw this crap out of here and did 10% in one year. And the following year you weeded nothing and the following year you weeded nothing. So you'd still have 3% average per year. I don't recommend that you do it quite that way, but that does take into account varieties of situations like that. I said here that the staff does not use online websites to provide information to library users. However, I should have checked this because you'll notice I said it's in section one part A of their plan. So I must have made a mistake. So I'll check that and I should get the points added to that score. Taking me up to what, Michael? You want me to do math 2-4-2? Yes, 2-4-2. There we go. Okay. All right. He passed the math test. All right. Now, notice here in this next one, annual expenditure on materials as a percentage of your total operating expenditures has to be greater or equal to the median or average of the peer group. Well, in this case, those figures are 13.85 and 14.09, and they're spending 11.1%. So they're not up to snuff on that one. And that could be either good or bad. It doesn't say it's good or bad, and we'll come back to this when we talk about planning, but they don't meet that particular peer measurement. Annual circulation of items per capita, look at that. They're at 10.76, well above their peer average and peer median, even though they're below what they spend on materials. So you need to look at some of these together. You can't just take one and say, oh, that's bad. That's bad. That's good. That's good. Their turnover rate, and this is another measure. Turnover rate, if you want to look at the definition, basically is if you have your entire collection, let's say you've got 20,000 volumes, and you divide the amount of circulation that you have by that 20,000 volumes, you figure out how many times each one mythical book on the shelf circulated. And here are their peer averages and peer median, and they're above the peer average and peer median, which means their collection is turning over quite nicely. Thank you, even though they spend less on the collection, which might mean a couple different things. It might mean they're doing really good selection of materials. It might mean they have a very efficient use of the collection. It might mean a number of different things. You have to do some interpretation. And then when you look at the collection size per capita, again, it's below their peer average and peer median, but hey, their turnover rate's good and hey, their circulation is above that, too. So these are the kinds of things you can look at. I don't think I'll come back and talk about planning. You can do any of this stuff yourself if you look at this and make some interpretation. You could, for example, let's suppose you want to argue with your local funders that, you know what, our annual expenditure on materials is well below our peers. We really need to spend more money on materials. Couldn't we increase our budget by a certain amount to come up to that? So you can use this for planning. You can use it for advocacy. You can use it for whatever you want to use it for. It's how you interpret it. All right? Michael? So if you wanted to use that for planning, is there a way to find out what those numbers are from your peers so you can figure out how much more you need to get you up? Yes. Okay. You can do it a couple different ways. If you've got a lot of Nebraska peer libraries, in this case you don't, but if you've got a lot of Nebraska peer libraries, you can look at theirs and go to actually our website which has our annual statistics on it and look at that. However, the difficulty with, in this particular case, is that Wayne has so many from Iowa that you could, what I would recommend for Wayne to do if they want to do that is to actually look at the Institute of Museum and Library Services data, the IMLS data that's on there, but the disadvantage is that that's a year behind this. For the data that we have on our website, it's from 2012-2013, but the national data is 2011-2012 because they're always a year behind. However, these data don't change that much year to year, so it still could be useful. The other thing we could do is that if we needed to, if Wayne Public Library asked us to do this, we could probably have our data coordinator get in touch with their data coordinator at Iowa Library Commission. I think it's... We can find it. We can find it. We have the number somewhere else the form wouldn't work. Yes, we pulled the numbers in somewhere. That is true. So probably our IT person can do this. By the way, we're sad to report that John Felton, who is our data wrangler, is gone. He's retired for a second time. He retired once from Lincoln City Libraries. Now he's retired from here also. So we're really going to miss him because he was our... He did good stuff for us after watching the timer. All right, let's go to Part 3, Services. Again, some of these are pulled from your statistics, so we'll look at those. Here is Outreach Programs, that's self-proclaimed. What did I write down here? Oh, here's where I stopped making stuff up. Yeah, that's what I wrote down here. Okay, as I was going through it, you'll notice that none of these other goals have anything written by them simply because I got tired of writing fiction, and I figured you probably got the idea from looking at Parts 1 and 2. So that doesn't mean you shouldn't fill something in. That just means I got tired of making stuff up. So in this case, let's look at the comparable data from other peer institutions. Attendance per capita. This is based on, of course, the number of people you have coming through the doors for your programs, the number of people that, let me get this right, your service population. So in this case, again, Wayne Public Library has a healthy program, Attendance Per Capita, this isn't programmed, I'm sorry, that's down below. This is just people coming through the door and using your library. So there is 0.81, what? Attendance Per Capita for programs. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Michael, I only help write these things. So I'll program to the next one. Thank you, this is for programs. Thank you very much. And then access to licensed databases made available, do they use that? That we already know because that's reported in the information that you sent in your survey. Then if you have databases that go beyond those that 20 that we make available through the Nebraska Library Commission, you can check that and you have to list them here. I made up that they have tutor.com and Ancestry Library Edition. Wait a minute, is that one thing or two? That's two. They probably should say something else. Anyway, okay. Well, I was making it up, so I wasn't sure. Anyway, and do they have wireless internet access? Yes, that's based on the service of that's built in there. Cooperation collaboration, this has to do with the relationship that your library has with entities outside the library itself. So let me get down here to just this one, because I'm not going to go to all of them, but I well, I did think of something here. Okay, well in 4.04 does the library cooperate with other local entities? I put down the Wayne Senior Center and the local FFA. I know it cooperates with the Wayne Senior Center just simply because I know what they do at that library. I don't know about the FFA, but it wouldn't surprise me. And then under 4.05 this says your library board members and staff participate in activities outside the library, basically, like national advocacy efforts, like NLA's annual advocacy day, and you get one point for every person actively participating. So you can check here, but you don't get points until you actually list a name in here. So I put down board member X, Y, and Z and you'll notice that I take off board member Z because you decided not to go. The points will go down by one. They should. It didn't work. Thank you, Michael. He knows how this form works better than I do. Okay. All right, let's go to communication, the last part. This has to do with both print and online communication. In this case I didn't list goals, but I did make up some stuff here under 5.02 that Wayne Public Library does send out information and have interaction on its website, so I say they use Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. You put down whatever you're going to put down there. Now, at the very bottom here, this yellow box is put here to double check to make sure we have the name of the library, the name of the library director, and the director's email. Correct. And you can correct it here if not. Now, in this case, they have accumulated 241 points, which as Michael pointed out earlier is still at the silver level because you need it for gold. If they are at 241, they should very well go back and see if they can find some other points. That's why this floating box here in the box at the bottom is really helpful because you might be able to figure out some other points that you can honestly claim to see if you can get up to gold. If you are up for accreditation, then you can submit your application. However, if you want to save and resume later, you can come back later as I pointed out so you would hit that button. If I want to just get out of here, I can X out of this box and it will say, do you really want to leave this page? That message will come up for you also. If you say, yes, I really want to leave this page, the subtext there is, you are going to lose anything you put on the form. So it doesn't make sense not to say save and resume for later on. All right. Michael, any questions coming through yet? All right. Let me see if there is anything else I want to talk about. I think that will do it. Yes, thank you. Michael pointed out here that there are benefits of having a higher level of accreditation besides bragging rights and in fact, there was one public library last year that got to the gold level and the library director went nuts. He sent me an email with about, I think it was 15 exclamation points on it and was going to get the word out to the community as fast as he could. So it's very interesting. In terms of state aid to public libraries, if a public library is accredited it receives state aid at a certain level. If it is accredited at the silver or gold level it receives some additional state aid. Now the additional state aid, the state aid that we give is not that much money. So the bragging rights are probably as important as the additional money, but it does mean some additional money for your library. It also shows that you're really doing a good job. I think it's great. I think it's wonderful to use with local funders. I think it's wonderful to use again to say, you know what? We're at 241 points this time. Can we work for the next three years and get enough in here to earn the next level up because it'll give us money back on state aid. It's just a wonderful idea to do that. Remember that if your library is currently accredited and it's up for re-accreditation this year, you need to use this form and get cracking on this plus your strategic plan. If you did send in your annual survey plus the supplemental survey and your library is currently unaccredited you can try for accreditation this year and you're going to have to wait three years if you didn't make it last year. You can try again this year or next year or whatever it is. So I think that's about it unless there are questions which there apparently are not. No, we just got a question from Janet. All right. With respect to policies if you're weeding, gift, intellectual freedom and challenge materials are included in your collection development policy can you count each or only collection development? If they are separate policies feel free to list them under other policies down below up to three and then that's all you can claim beyond that. You can split those out because we've had libraries in the past say you know what we have our internet use under something else or whatever kind of situation. So yes feel free to split them out if they are split out. That's fun. And Janet I will get cracking on your strategic plan. I saw your email this morning thank you. He was busy practicing for this morning. He was in Las Vegas baking. And now you're having a wonderful fall day in Lincoln Nebraska. Yes I am. And she says thank you. Any other questions we'll kind of vamp here for a moment in case anybody's typing. I will tell you one thing. One of the questions that came up was that can we have an example strategic plan up there. We will put Shelby Public Library strategic plan up in all our training. It's really quite a good strategic plan. So we'll put a link up there. And I think that's all I need to tell you. And maybe one last question is what is the deadline again for anybody who is up for accreditation this year? October 1, 2014 no later. Before conference. So you can kind of cross that off your list and then go to conference. On October 2 I'm going to the Bahamas. I'll take no applications after that. Actually on October 2 the form will no longer be working. Okay. That's a threat. That's a threat. Hey carrot in the stick. Alright. So thank you Richard. I don't see any other questions coming in. You're welcome. I'm going to go ahead and take the keyboard back here for a moment. Thank you everybody for attending. And I didn't bring up this page before. So bear with me here as I head over to that. So thank you for attending this week's episode of Encompass Live. We are on our website there or as I just did just Google Encompass Live will be the first thing that comes up. You're going to be hearing a lot from me lately because next week Lauren Johnson and I are doing a session on copyright. Is it copyrighted? Can I use it? This is going to be an interactive session. I'm a little off the camera there. This is going to be an interactive session. We want it to really be discussion and that probably not your typical what you would expect out of a copyright session too. We're going to try to have a little fun with it as we do that. So join us next week for that. Also, if you are a Facebook user Encompass Live is on Facebook and you can go ahead and follow us there and it's a great way to find out what's coming up and keep an eye on what we're doing there and we're always looking for speakers in that. Next week, Krista should be back as our host but you'll get to hear me again and Lauren Johnson. So thank you all for attending Encompass Live this week and we'll check in with you next week. Thanks a lot. Bye. We'll be right out.