 Good morning. Welcome to the power professional section 2011 spring meeting. Collaborations across libraries. I'm Marguerite Miller, the power section chair. We are pleased to be co-sponsoring with our colleagues the special and institutional section. Thank you all for attending this meeting. We are glad that you are here and encourage any of you who are not members of the power to consider becoming one. The obligation is minimal and the benefits are great. We have 52 attendees all scattered across Nebraska from such places as Beatrice, Bellevue, Dewitt, Fairberry, Maywood, Papillion, Sydney, Norfolk, Lincoln, and Omaha. It is truly amazing that so many people from around the state share a common passion for library work. I would also like to thank Martha Grinsbach for all her time, effort, and expertise in setting up this spring meeting. This is her fourth year and each year it's getting better. However, Martha is retiring as chair, but this is a wonderful opportunity for someone to step up and become chair for next year's spring meeting. If you are watching with multiple people on the same computer, would you please type in everyone's name in the chat box so that they can get their continuing education credits. Carolyn Dow from the special and institutional section is ready to give some welcoming comments. On behalf of NLA special and institutional section, welcome to the spring meeting. You may have already guessed that the special and the institutional section doesn't have a monopoly on special. All libraries are special, as are the people who work in them, you who are here today. You could say we are exceptional because there are exceptions to every generalization about special libraries. The term special libraries usually conjures up libraries of law and medicine, but we're much more than that. We are unique libraries and collections developed to further the goals of the agencies, institutions, organizations, and corporations that we serve and who fund us. That means we are purpose driven. Our users are often defined by the organization and may be limited to employees, researchers, organizational members, or residents of our institutions. And while we hold dear basic core values of libraries, in our daily practice of special librarianship, we may have to, for example, limit access of materials to those deemed appropriate to the treatment plan of a psychiatric patient by his physician or therapist, decline to interpret medical or legal information, or select books only from the denomination's official publisher for our church library. On the other hand, special libraries may participate in interlibrary loan, may be open to anyone with an interest in the topics collected, and frequently must collaborate and cooperate to serve the needs of our defined users. I hope you learn something today and that you get lots of ideas to think about and to share with your colleagues. And if you get a chance, either later today or in the future, please come visit me at the Pauley Music Library, part of Lincoln City Libraries, just a block over from the Library Commission. Welcome. Thank you, Carolyn. We have three great sessions ahead of us, short break in between. I hope you will enjoy it and learn something that you can take home and take to your job and so that you can use on your job. Our first speaker is Deborah Dracos of the Nebraska Library Commission talking about let's work together. Thank you, Margaret. Good morning, everyone. I want to do just one little technology thing first. If you have problems hearing, please let us know. If you have a question, please be sure to raise your hand. If you have a mic and we will unmute you, for those of you in our remote locations, or if you don't have a mic, go ahead and type in your question into the chat box. And we do have someone monitoring those. And I suppose I'll let anybody who's here ask a question, too. Okay. Thank you for asking me to talk this morning. As the theme for this meeting is collaboration across libraries, I've titled my session today, let's work together. And I'm going to talk a little bit about how the commission helps libraries work together. So what does the commission do? Let me make sure I can move this correctly. There we go. What does the commission do in general? Well, our mission statement is a little lengthy. Couple sentences, but lots of words. What I'm going to focus on is that we advocate for the library and information service needs of all Nebraskans. Okay. The library commission provides services to Nebraska residents in a variety of ways. We are basically the library for state agencies, state employees. We also provide libraries across the state with library development help. We help provide technology access and other kinds of services. We provide reference service backup to libraries. And we also answer any reference question from anyone that is related to Nebraska state government, Nebraska publications and things of that type. We also provide the talking book and Braille service to Nebraska residents. But as I said, we do help libraries help their own patrons. And one of the ways that we do that is through Nebraska access. And I'll just give, for those of you who might have printed out the handout from the website, my presentation doesn't match exactly. I didn't put in all of the screenshots, but you'll be able to follow along here. Okay. With Nebraska access, over 1,000 libraries around Nebraska have passwords that they can give to their patrons to access these databases. The databases are available to all Nebraska residents, whether they log in with the password or whether they log in with their state driver's license, which they can use at home. And you'll notice that these resources are in pretty heavy demand. These are the statistics from 2010. Our full text databases, Wilson Omnifile alone had over 600,000 searches in just one year. So there is a need out there. Okay. But today, I'm going to focus a little bit more on some of those services or some of those things that we do that provide libraries with opportunities to share resources, ideas, and activities amongst themselves. For example, no library can purchase absolutely everything that their patrons want. And our patrons can be very demanding at times. But one of the things that we can use to supplement our own collection is interlibrary loan. Very often, another library has the material that our patron wants, and we can get them get that material for them. Now, the library commission used to be play a much greater role in interlibrary loan when we were the OCLC network, Nebase for Nebraska. That role has gone away, but we still do support interlibrary loan through lender compensation. And we fill interlibrary loan requests, file them with OCLC for the small libraries around Nebraska. Now, when we submit those requests, we always go to Nebraska libraries first, because we know that Nebraska libraries are very responsive. The only problem is, there is a good and a bad here, the only problem is that you all have raised expectations so high that when a library, one of these small libraries wants an item that's not available from a Nebraska library, and we have to go out of state, it takes longer to get the item, and they're saying, hey, how come I don't have it yet? But as you can see, in fiscal year 2010, which I always get these backwards, anyway, it's from June, from July through June, there were over 50,000 items that were borrowed by one Nebraska library from another Nebraska library. With lender compensation, we paid out to those libraries that did lend those materials over $165,000. Now, we cannot guarantee that that type of funding will continue because of the budget cuts that are being proposed by the legislature, we may not have the money to do that in the future, at least maybe not as much. But we do feel that we have felt that it's been very important to provide that funding to help cover the costs, because there are postage costs, there are staffing costs to pull those materials and send those materials. So that's one way that Nebraska libraries help other Nebraska libraries. Another program that has started a little bit more recently is the Nebraska Book Club Kits Sharing Wiki. And for those of you here in Lincoln, and those of you in Omaha, we did have, or we do have some bookmarks that promote this particular service. Book clubs we know are very, very popular. And of course, most libraries, the smaller libraries especially, cannot afford to purchase multiple copies of the same title. Sometimes libraries do ask other libraries to loan them a copy just for the time period of the book club discussion. But we also have been collecting fiction, mostly fiction books here at the Library Commission to loan out to libraries who have book clubs. And we've encouraged libraries and several public libraries have added their materials, as well as the systems to the book club Wiki. You can see there are a number of popular titles as well as classic titles. Any library in Nebraska that has multiple copies that they're willing to loan out for book clubs are welcome to add those titles to this page. It is very popular. We send out four or five book club kits every few days here at the Commission. Another way libraries can work together when they can't afford a service is to form consortia. Overdrive is a service that allows libraries to download audio books or allows patrons to download audio books and e-books. Now, in Nebraska, and I see a couple of people here who are participating in the consortia as well as libraries that aren't, Lincoln cities and Omaha were precluded from this particular consortia. Overdrive would not allow them to join our group. But we have 64 other libraries currently part of this group with two more joining shortly. This is good when libraries can't afford services. Overdrive as a service charges a maintenance fee of $12,000 a year, which the library commission currently pays. Then each of the libraries that's part of the consortia pays an amount each month that goes totally towards purchasing content. Currently, there are over 3,000 audio books that are available through this group and over 1200 e-books. The audio books have been available for three years now and there have been over 103,000 circulations of the audio books. Now, no one library could buy all 3,000 books plus pay a maintenance fee. With the e-books, the e-books became available just this past July and there have been over 8,000 circulations of those. So it's quite a popular service. There's high demand and getting together as a group can really help with the funding. Another way we can help with the buying power is through group discounts. We offer a lot of products from various vendors. They may be databases. They may be particular software programs. They may be books or supplies. If you come through us, you will usually get some type of a discount. It varies anywhere from between 5% to 60%. Some examples of where the buying power really helps are with OCLC products. The Cat Express and Web Dewey groups really benefit from buying as part of a group. With Cat Express, if you purchased individually, you wouldn't have all of the options to buy just the particular number of records that your library needs. Another example is Learn-A-Test because we have a large enough group of libraries initially purchased that. We got a really good discount and libraries that joined that group in purchasing that continue to get that discount. We do the negotiating with the vendors. We do trials every once in a while. If you're on our trial listserv, you can certainly take part in the trials of any of those products. Take a look at them before you actually plunk down your money. We also do the invoicing and renewals. Instead of paying 10 different vendors, you just pay us one invoice usually. It helps. Just to give you an idea of how many libraries participate in these group discounts. In the last fiscal year, 193 libraries purchased 215 unique resources. Not all 193 bought 215, but totally there were 769 subscriptions. We invoice libraries over $2.5 million. That $2.5 million would probably be closer to $5,000 if it wasn't for the discounts that we helped get on those. A slightly different way that we can help libraries share resources is through a project called Nebraska Memories. It's a database of digital items. A number of libraries around the state have participated. We've helped with a lot of these libraries. Some of them have worked on their own, but others have worked in conjunction with other entities, be they historical societies, museums, or students. We have had several UNO students who, as their special projects, have done digitization of items for us. They've worked with the Omaha Public Library. They've worked with the Allegiant Emanuel Health Center. They've worked with the Omaha Community Playhouse. I'm trying to remember all of these. There's a variety of ways that Nebraska Memories has helped get people entities involved with each other and brought in fresh people, new students, to work on these types of things. If you haven't already looked at the Nebraska Memories website, I really do encourage you. This is the front page. You'll notice that there are options for searching and browsing. Under the browsing, you can see that we do have 30 different collections currently. We have over 5,000 images. We have found that not only is this helpful for getting collections out to people all over the world to access, and we do get comments from all over the world, it also helps libraries, media centers, schools here in Nebraska. We have talked with teachers and media specialists when we've gone to conferences. They all comment on how they appreciate the fact that Nebraska Memories is number one, a safe place for children to go for images. A lot of projects that children do nowadays require that they get images from somewhere. The boys, especially like all the athletic pictures, and we have a lot of them from the turn of the previous century, late 1800s, early 1900s, and it is baseball season, right? The other thing that helps the school teachers, especially 3rd grade and 4th grade, is that they can use these pictures for local history in 3rd grade and state history in 4th grade. We would really like to expand our collections and the types of materials we have in here. We don't have as many materials from the western side of the state as we would like, but we have some, and we're getting there. We are working with other people out there. And of course, genealogists love to have pictures and resources. So, with the partnerships, we have also helped with funding by giving grants. We do pay for the software subscription for the content DM. That's the software that houses the images and the metadata records. And we provide the server space, so everything is stored here, at least for what goes up on the internet. And we provide personnel to help with training and actually doing some digitization projects if they're small, just to get libraries started. And it really helps to promote the libraries and their collections. As I mentioned, we have given grants for projects. Nebraska Memories projects have received library improvement grants. And as I said, we really, really encourage partnerships. Several of those grants went to partnerships between public libraries and museums or historical societies. We've also given grants to groups who have done projects such as instituting, I guess I would say, ILSs. The pioneer group right now is working on putting in the COHA system, a cataloging system, a Zirc system, for a number of libraries around Nebraska. At one point, I'm not quite sure how the Nebraska Association of Institutional Libraries, actually was a group of the institutional libraries that got together and wrote a grant for an automated system five years ago, seven years ago, something like that, ten years ago. Okay, it's been a little while ago. But we do give grants, library improvement grants, to group projects. If libraries work together, it helps everybody. Youth grants are another source of funding that can help libraries work together. In the past, we, for example, gave grants to Arapaho and Valentine Public Libraries. They brought in an author, John Erickson, who presented Hank the Cowdog in concert. And they shared transportation expenses and lodging expenses and other fees. Continuing education grants. We've had comments back from people who have gotten continuing education grants on how those grants have helped them in connecting with other people who do similar jobs. And in fact, we had one person who got a grant and actually drove to the conference with librarians from another grant. And she said, just driving in the car, talking to those people, was worth almost as much as taking in the sessions at the conference, because you get to share ideas, share problems, come up with solutions together. I did that. Internship grants. Yes, there's a question. Oh, sure, I'm sorry. It's memories.ne.gov. Okay. Internship grants. We've just started a new round, a three-year internship grant round, with funding from the IMLS. Plus, we have applied for grants from another foundation in conjunction with the Nebraska Library Association. The application deadline passed. So no one can ask for more funding this year, but there will be two more years of application opportunities. Okay. One of the things that the Library Commission commissioners really wanted to promote this time around was partnerships with those internships. So if your library maybe doesn't have enough to involve a student to work for you for enough to use up a thousand dollars, which is the maximum amount of the grant, you can always look around, see if you can strike up a partnership with someone else. Perhaps you could use that extra help during the summer, and a school could use extra help during the school year. If you made a joint application, you'd get extra points basically. Okay. And as I have mentioned too, the funding for the grants that we give comes from a variety of sources. We do get federal LSTA funds that we use for these grants, but we also do apply for grants to other organizations. And we work with other organizations to get these grants. For example, the Nebraska Library Association. Okay. One more grant. Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. This is a grant that we wrote because we have the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is funding from stimulus monies. And to get the grant we did have to put up matching funds. We did not have those funds, but Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was very kind enough to step forward and actually gave us about 30% of the funding for the total grant. The other 70% did come from the federal government, from the ARA funds. We are working with 147 library buildings around the state. And that's all from Panhandle all the way to the east. There are actually 140 libraries because we had several branches in both Omaha and in Lincoln. We are helping those libraries to improve their public computer centers. Some of those libraries are getting new replacement computers for old computers. Some of those libraries are getting additional computers because their demand is so high that they need more computers to serve their population. Some of those libraries are also having their broadband access, their broadband speed increased too as part of this project. We will be doing a lot of training across the state in these new PCC's public computer centers. We will encourage those libraries to do training together. We've already talked to some libraries who plan to do their marketing together to promote these new computer centers. We are working with partners, the state labor department of labor, the university, UNMC, various other partners to provide training not only to the staff, but to patrons. Libraries can work together with all kinds of ideas for this particular project. The question was with all these new computers going out, will every public library in Nebraska have computers, have internet access? The answer is no. There are still some small libraries that do not and will not have internet access for one reason or another. Yes. Well, we actually, and maybe Richard can help me out with this, but I don't believe we are putting computers into any library that did not have computers before. We're improving the equipment and the connections. There's over a thousand computers that will go out, both desktops and laptops. There are printers and projectors and scanners, ADA workstations, and if, excuse me, sorry just one second, and if the computers are additional computers that libraries were also offered furniture because, you know, where are you going to put that extra desktop if you don't have something to put it on? So, yeah. And we have, we actually hired three staff with the funding through this grant to manage the grant because 147 libraries is a fairly large number to work with. We have a project manager and we have an IT manager who will actually be installing, helping some of these libraries install equipment. Not everybody needs help, but those that do, Holly will be going out. And then our third person is the grants compliance officer because, you know, with federal funding, you have to watch how every penny is spent and we've got at least two auditors looking over our shoulders. We have to make sure that we document absolutely everything. So, a lot of work for that. Okay. Any other questions? Okay, go the right way here. Okay. Summer reading program. This is where we help libraries in Nebraska actually work with libraries all around the country. The collaborative summer reading pro, summer library program, I always mess that up. Sally's always correcting me. It's summer library program is actually run by 49 states, two territories and Washington, DC. So, you're getting ideas for your summer reading program from experts all over the country. You not only get the ideas and the programming, but you also get great discounts on any kind of materials that you want to buy to go along with your program. And you can contribute. Sally Snyder has recently sent out, earlier this month, she sent out a request for people to submit their ideas for future themes. And I didn't write it down. I don't remember what the theme is for this year. I always mess that up. That's right. It's one world, many stories for children, and you are there for teens. Okay. So, if you have any ideas for other themes, you know, speak up if you have some great ideas. And I know every year, it always amazes me. A lot of people, well, I shouldn't say a lot, several libraries almost every year apply for the youth grants. And I always say youth grants and it's actually youth, youth grants for excellence. We abbreviate things around here too much. Youth grants for excellence. They apply for funding to help them with their programming for their summer reading. And some of the ideas are just so innovative. And it's amazing how people will take the same theme and go in totally opposite directions with it. But they make it fun for their kids. And, you know, if you start from the same point, it's always helpful to have that initial idea and then use your own creativity. Okay. Okay. Encompass Live. That is our Wednesday morning webinar. It's normally held at 10 o'clock. It's on all different kinds of topics. Many times the presenter is somebody here from the Library Commission. But we do really encourage outside guest presenters. And we have been fortunate enough to have presenters from our Nebraska libraries. And they have covered all different types of topics. For programming, Carol Swanson and Catherine Kelly from Lincoln City Libraries talked about the One Book One Lincoln program. Mania Shore and Amy Mather from the Omaha Public Library talked about serving the underserved professionals in their community with the program that they have called Havelaptop Will Travel. Speeddating and Bored Silly at Your Library. I think those were three, I'm sorry, those were three different programs. But they talked about them all at the same time. As far as resources go, just last week, week before. Marta McGee talked about healthy kid resources. I'm going to advance this because you can see some of the different programs that we've had. Also, resources Gail Roberts and Wendy Lucart from the Blair Public Library did a program on collections for your community, tools, cake pans, toys. And others have reported what they've learned at various conferences. Just yesterday, our own Michael Sowers reported from computers and libraries, which was held in Washington, D.C. this week. And he dragged people in from the hallway to talk about what they were learning and what people were talking about at that conference. So there are a lot of different ways to participate to help out your fellow librarians across Nebraska. If you have great ideas about programming, resources, something that you would like to do, something that you have done, please feel free to contact Krista Burns here at the commission and volunteer and say, I will do a program for you. I want to tell everybody the wonderful success that we had. And for those who can't attend live on Wednesday mornings, as you see here, we do have an archived page where you can watch recordings of all those sessions. And we do keep statistics on who watches the recordings. And they are watched a fair number. We know that, you know, no one time works for everybody, which is why we record the sessions and make them available. Okay, another way we are trying to encourage libraries to work together is through a sense of community. Okay, a number of library staff took place in the 23 things, which then became Nebraska Learns 2.0. We put up a technology topic, one topic each month, and people are encouraged to do the topic, post a blog to their own blog site, and also comment on other people's blogs. If you go out and read what other people have been doing and comment, it makes, it creates more of a sense of community, and it gets a conversation going about how libraries are using these new technologies, maybe what's not working so well. But it always helps to talk with other people. Okay, another way that we're trying to create something of a community is through an installation of WordPress. And I should have put up the other portion of this. We are using WordPress software to offer library web sites to Nebraska libraries, and it's called Nebraska Libraries on the Web, which is what I should have put up here, and I didn't. Michael Sowers is our support person for that. At the moment, we have been working mostly with test libraries. We started with libraries who did not currently have a web page at all. We are now testing some video online training because I know everybody's budget's getting really tight on travel. So since we have the option of doing video recordings, Michael has done a whole series on how to customize each part of WordPress to set up a website for your library. That will be opening up probably next month to any public library across the state. The only thing that we do ask is that the library does post at least one blog post to the main web page once a week. And some people go, oh no, writing a blog post. Back up a minute. Don't you want to announce that you have some new books? Don't you want to announce your summer reading program? Don't you want to announce you've got something else going on at the library? That's all you have to put up for a blog post. And we only ask that you put up a blog post once a week because we want people to see your website as being new every time they go in. You don't want just a static site. If they log in see, hey, you have a new note, there's something, you may be a picture or something that's different from the last time that they looked at your page, they'll be more likely to come back and look at your page just to see what's going on. And with that, we do have a main site where people can put comments and again create that sense of community, say what's working for them, what's not working for them. You do have the option to choose from a number of different themes that create the look of the web page. You're not limited to just one look so that every library looks exactly the same. So you might say, hey, I tried this theme and boy did it, turn out lousy. Or you might say, this one's just so wonderful, I customized it and did this and did that. We've had libraries who said, oh, we had a local photographer who ran right out and took a beautiful picture for me so that I could put it up as a banner on my website. So that's just another way to help libraries do something in their library, but also work with other libraries around the state to improve their services and their programming. Okay, and I must be, I hope people have some questions. I must be talking faster than I had expected. I tend to do that, but you won't complain if I end up early anyway, will you? Another way that libraries can work together is through their regional systems. We have six regional library system administrators that go out and work with libraries one on one, but the systems also provide opportunities for libraries to share ideas and programming, to do a lot of networking. You can volunteer to serve on their boards. You can attend, well, a lot of people attend their meetings that they have for library directors, for children's librarians, youth services librarians. They offer a number of different training opportunities, and it's always great. We always get comments. People say a good part of the meeting that's beneficial to them is talking with the other librarians during breaks, during lunch, hearing what's going on in other places. The systems are funded by us to about 95% of their budget. If you would like to participate in any of the activities that I talked about this morning, you can contact us. You can check out our website for more information. Give us a call. We'd really like to talk with you if you have new ideas about how you think we can help you work together, to share resources, to share programming, to do training, whatever. Yes, we have a question at the back. I didn't mention that. The comment was about the book club sharing, wiki that I talked about. The book club kits that are listed on that wiki that belong to the library commission. When they are sent out to libraries, we also include a list of discussion questions. And sometimes a little bit of information about the author. So there are extra resources that go out with the books. Yes, sure. I'll let Janet run the computer and I'll talk. If she'll let me. Okay. I'll just say Marguerite and Carolyn didn't take enough time at the beginning. That's why I'm running fast. Wouldn't want to go over it, right? Yes. Right. And with this, if you get a book, if you borrow a book club kit and your discussion group absolutely hated it or absolutely loved it or found the characters wonderful, you have the option to come in here and leave comments for other people to see too. We're going to share the mic here. We have a little bit of time because we're supposed to last till 10 tell and maybe a little further. And so I just wanted to, in addition to the book club sharing wiki that Deborah had talked about, if it happens to be one of the book club kits that you get from the library commission, just bear with me a second. You can also go to the library commission website that lists just the commission book club kits. And I'm not trying to highlight the commission one any more than the others. But if it's one of the books from ours, we will also have some of the let me find one other information about it. There's a reading guide for this one in particular. There's information about the movie that goes with this. There is reviews, that kind of thing. And it also tells you how many copies that the book has in case your book club is 12 or 15. You don't want to get one, get a kit that's only two books. Just some additional information. I was going to show something else if that's okay. Okay. And I know Deborah chatted a lot about Nebraska memories and pictures. And I wanted to bring up on our commission website. We have a blog. And one of the things that several of the people that work with Nebraska memories has been doing in the key or anymore. You want me to I'll just talk about this one. Okay. We started publicizing Nebraska memories a little bit more trying to promote it here about a month ago. So we've been writing a blog entry a week about some special feature about Nebraska memories. I guess we started last month because we did one for Lincoln's birthday. I should say I did one for Abraham Lincoln's birthday. And then we did one featuring the Capitol for a legislative day. Emily did one last week about grocery grocery shopping. The inside of the butcher shop from the 1890s compared to the inside of a little grocery store in the 1940s with little ladies dressed up all in their best pushing little shopping carts. So you know how things change over the years. But we also did one at the beginning of the month to feature pictures about women for women's history month. We're going to try to feature something that relates to things that are going on. And actually this week, I'm not sure if Elana has it up yet or not. She was featuring the tornado pictures from there you go from the Omaha Public Library. It's the 1913 tornado that actually the anniversary was yesterday. Right, Marguerite? I believe. Yeah, 23rd. Yeah. So this is one way to promote Nebraska libraries, but we also find that when we do this, in most of the blogs, you'll find pictures, links to pictures that cross a number of different collections. We might sometimes just feature one particular picture. We also did scores. Carolyn Dow is sitting in the front row here from Lincoln City Libraries Poly Music Library and she and Linda Healthman did a lot of work digitizing musical scores from their collection as well as concert programs and other materials related to Lillian Polly who who originally funded that particular collection. So there's a lot of different things that that libraries and school libraries can use in that particular database. So do you want to check, Janet, if there are any questions before we wrap up? Yes. So yes. Yes, you can friend the commission on Facebook. Please do. We also have. We host the site for the Nebraska Center for the book, which you can also host and I'll I'll promote the book festival that is that we do a lot of work on for the Nebraska Center for the book will be held here in Lincoln on May 21st. It's a Saturday. It'll be downtown. Please join us. And we had was there another hand that I see. We we do ask that the requests for the book clubs come from libraries. So we would ask that your book club go to you and you ask us for those. But anybody can look at our website to see those. But if you would like to put a link on your page to say, you know, hey, here's some book club kits. Contact me if you're interested. That's perfectly fine, too. Sure. I have to admit I haven't seen that on any web on any library's web page if they how they're promoting that. Yeah. Well, well, I it could be a lot of the library clubs actually meet at their local libraries. And they talk to the librarians and the librarians have said, oh, well, you know, here are some more options for different titles for different ways to get the books. Right. Yeah. And we're trying to promote it a little bit more, too, with these bookmarks. You know, if you're interested, we can sure share the excuse me. Share the template to make more bookmarks to hand out in your library if you would be interested in that. Sure. Richard, did you have a question? Right. Right. Right. Yes, libraries do put out requests over the their regional library. Their systems lists are asking for extra copies of titles because of book discussion groups. OK, anything else? Well, thank you very much. And I hope I gave you some ideas. As I said, let's work together. Call us if you want to participate in anything or if you have any questions. Thanks. Thank you, Debra. We're going to take a short break and start promptly at 11 and if there are any questions, any technical difficulties, any comments you want to make, please call 402-471-4035. See you at 11. We're back. I'd like to introduce Maureen O'Rearden of Collie Jessen and Mary Staltz of Baird Home. They're going to speak about the law firm librarian. Good morning. I'm Mary Staltz. This is Maureen O'Rearden. We work in Omaha at two different law firms. I work at Baird Home. I work at Collie Jessen and we are very happy to have this opportunity to talk to you about the profession and the importance of paraprofessionals in our law libraries. We will be providing you with an overview of the law firm environment and talk about the paraprofessional in the law firm library and the duties and responsibilities of the law librarian. I might need some technical assistance here when I. Yes, I was pressing it. It worked earlier. Yes, we will discuss the necessity of collaboration and networking with other libraries and organizations. We will include anecdotes about our work without discussing any confidential information. Names are not used to protect confidential confidentiality. And feel free to ask questions anytime. Each law firm is very different, varies in size, administration, staffing, culture and practice areas. Of course, the best law firms employ librarians or information specialists. Our firms are similar in some ways, but very different in other ways. For example, Collie Jessen is a West Omaha location, which factors into its culture. It's also a younger firm having just opened its doors in 1988. There are 50 attorneys. It's a general practice firm um practice areas include banking, finance and creditors rights, general business, employment, benefits and labor, estate and business succession planning, health law, intellectual property, including trademark and copyright protection, litigation, M&A securities, real estate, environmental and tax. We generally don't handle a lot of family or criminal law unless there are matters for existing clients. I've been at Collie Jessen since 2001. Right now I'm working part time as is the library assistant for six years. In the 1990s, I was a librarian at a large international firm that had over 400 attorneys. Two hundred and fifty of them were in the New York City office where I worked. The culture was very different there. It was always fast paced. Spending was much less conservative and personalities were extremely demanding pretty much across the board. Working in a law firm comes with certain pressures and requires the ability to be able to handle urgent requests. But in Omaha and Nebraska, I found that there is much more regard for people's personal lives and families. And I'm employed with a firm founded in 1881. There are seventy five lawyers in this firm and it is led by a managing partner and executive committee. I report to a library partner and a legal administrator. And I've job shared my position the last 17 years. My job sharing partner is Anne Baumgartner. And we've shared this work arrangement for quite some time. The and works four days a week. So I'm able to get out on some days like today. And I work three days a week and we overlap two days. We have two part-time assistants and our attorneys practice in many of the areas that Maureen described. But they practice in civil law and that includes banking and finance, bankruptcy, business, tax, estate planning, corporate education, environmental affairs and legislative services, health care, employment, litigation, real estate, securities and intellectual property and all the subsections that will come underneath those areas. It's it's always very interesting every day at the firm. Any type of question can come up at any time. Our collection contains the leading treatises, current awareness materials and primary materials to support the firm practice areas. We're located downtown on five floors of the Woodman Tower and we're near the county and federal courthouses. Time is income and the lawyers provide clients. The lawyers provide clients with accurate, timely and result oriented legal advice and representation. They apply the law and solve legal challenges. The law changes daily because of new legislation, new regulations and court opinions. For example, the Nebraska legislature introduced nearly 700 bills this year and as of March 22, 97 became law or will become law soon. Attorneys do not always go to court either. They work with clients to be compliant with laws and regulations. An example of something that constantly changes that affects the work of the attorneys. If you think of all those notification letters with the small print that you receive in the mail from insurance companies, telephone companies, credit card and energy companies or utilities, these letters are required by law, are sent to you and that's a requirement by law to ensure that you've been notified of your rights and any changes to the regulations. So not only do the attorneys have to be up to date on if they're representing any of these industries, be up to date on the law so that they can amend any of these notification letters. I mean they're writing it as well as having to be aware of it as well. And one of the ways we kind of monitor how much we're spending on our library for our legal research materials as other firms are spending on theirs is looking at data and this data is from the American Association of Law Libraries salary survey, average information budget per attorney and I always find it very interesting because if I look at this chart and 100 lawyers on this chart it may show that per lawyer a locker might spend in the midrange $7,000 per lawyer for materials. So if you have 100 lawyers you can see it's quite an investment and there is a range in data on this chart but the research materials cost money and this is table 33 and there's other charts like this that I also find very interesting for us to kind of gauge where we are in the whole cost aspect of having a law library in a law firm and staffing a law library. And information budget usually includes the books, serials and electronic resources ordered and processed as part of the law library. Costs vary from firm to firm. For example tax and labor practices in particular need materials that are updated frequently because of so many changes to the laws and regs. So if your practice is limited to tax or labor that's all you need. If you have a general practice firm like our firms you need to get materials from all of the practice areas so that the more research materials the more expense to the firm. And I'm going to I will point out on this slide. That way I wanted to point out on here I was going by this medium number for law firm totals but if you look in the minimum some law firms are spending the reporting spending less per attorney and some are spending a little more per attorney. So there's there's quite a range in the rate and that may be because some of the firms are only practicing in one area so they're not having to buy materials to cover all the practice areas that we cover. The library professionals add value to the law firms investment in resources. It's a constant challenge to communicate your value to the organization but it's important to promote the library function, the library professionals and advocate the needs for the firm. And at the same time you're just busy doing your job. Library professionals management of a collection adds value to an investment in books and databases. We make the resources work for the firm. We manage renewals, subscriptions, updating password access and who needs what materials and what materials are the most useful for the firm's practice areas. We monitor changes in format and content of materials and make recommendations for cancellations and purchases. Paraprofessionals are valuable to the law firm library. This is a job description for paraprofessionals in academic libraries. It was written by the American Association of Law Libraries. This is an international association that we often use as a resource and it's comprised of librarians from law firms, academic law libraries and government law libraries. Some of the things included says this position provides support to the basic functions of the library. Responsibilities may include any combination of the following. Provide guidance to library users on library policies and procedures. Order and process invoices for new materials. Maintain subscriptions. Communicate with outside suppliers and so on. The position really requires someone who can give attention to detail and manage multiple tasks and has basic computer skills. Law firm library positions, paraprofessional positions, are very similar to this. It's, except there would probably be greater variety and additional responsibilities as a result of just having a smaller staff in general. And staff in the law firm environment must comply with ethics rules related to confidentiality and the unauthorized practice of law. Salaries for paraprofessionals also vary. There's a range in salaries because of a variety of responsibilities in an environment. These figures are from the occupational outlook handbook employment statistics. The medium hourly wage is $12 for clerical assistance. For paraprofessionals, the hourly wage is $15 according to this chart. Midwestern salaries, as compared to the coasts, are usually lower because our cost of living is lower. And if you, I might not be able to see the chart, and I'm not supposed to turn around. Okay, but that does, that does show like the minimum, the maximum, and the medium. And those are things that our law firm would look at when they were going to hire for that position. Yes, no, no, you'd be trained, you'd be trained on the job. But we have worked with Creighton to allow our staff, if they were interested, into audit, like general research class or basic legal classes at Creighton University. I don't know if any, I don't recall that anyone actually did that, but we would allow them to do that and give them the time to do that if they were so interested in that. In our firm, with just the two of us, and we're both working part-time, I know the library assistant sometimes gets asked questions that she really, she likes the variety, but she really has not worked with materials a lot, and she doesn't have access to some of the online services where you'd go to pull up some of these things. So sometimes there's, it's not required, any knowledge, you know, is beneficial, especially in our, in my situation. But yeah, really, and it really depends on the size of the staff that you're working with, I think. In the law firm library, most paraprofessionals do the following. Processing the library's mail. Many titles come in the mail, but they also arrive electronically via email, and sometimes they need to be retrieved off periodically off of websites. After processing, there's the check-in of the titles, which ensures that we're getting what we paid for and getting it to the lawyers and or on the shelf. Materials need to be filed in order. In an update or if an update or issue does not arrive, it is requested or claimed from the publisher. That's usually a requirement of a paraprofessional staff. Filing should be timely, and the goal is to get the new materials on the shelf within the day or two of its arrival. The card sets are generated from our software program, and that's usually a duty of a paraprofessional staff. And materials are collected from our return areas checked in and reshelved. And I also utilize paraprofessionals, special talents. So if there happened to be an MLA program at UNO or they have an interest in blogging or they have an interest in technology, then I will utilize those strengths. For example, because of their interest in technology, they helped us build our research tools portal on our intranet at the firm. And I mentioned that we do use software to manage our library. We do have an online catalog. And this is a screenshot of my first page of the catalog in the software format. Maureen and I both use in MagicDB TextWorks software. We use the software to create an online database to search our collection. And there's a check-in database to manage the collection. Check-in is automated and the library catalog is online. And there's also a a web version of the catalog at my location. And this screenshot at the very top is our when you click on that, you'll get into a menu for doing a search in the catalog, which will show the person that's doing the search where the book is located. And I don't have just one physical library space. There's four floors of where books could be. And so it's how I need to do that too, because sometimes our collections have to be shifted around and moved to different floors. And I only remember where they were 17 years ago. And then there's check-in database that will allow us to manage when things are coming in and out. And then I have an index of ethics opinions in our collection. And the record to the records are attached the actual full text, but they're also indexed. And then OPS experts is a where I've collected materials about educational professionals and what they've written about, what they testified about. And that's searchable. And then we track legislation for our attorneys. And this allows us to it allows us to know who wants to know about what and how often from the Nebraska legislature and accounting and ordering database helps me manage our budget. And the research tools on the portal is built to then go provide a list of research databases that we use with the password information displayed so the attorneys can go there to see what it is that we have access to and what their passwords are. But we create that database on a magic. How do you do a lot? It's a mix. It is a mix, yes. Yeah, yeah. There are a lot of attorneys that like to do things themselves. And then there are others that. But this, yeah, but this menu, we find that probably mostly library staff actually go into the catalog to look for a book. They'll come into the library or call the library and ask, do we have any materials on a certain topic? And so sometimes I catalog into the chapters and we were going to talk about that later, how our creative cataloging we have to do. But so that so that we can find maybe up and coming areas and certain types of materials that we may have not written really a treatise about or we may not have felt like we could purchase that at this time. So we probably access this database more than they do, but we have some other collections and lists of databases that they go to to look to see what they can do searches in. I don't. This is this is a sample of a library check-in record from my firm. Most of our the library probably gets more mail than any other area in the firm. So once it's processed, we check it in. This is a typical title that's routed to attorneys or paralegals or administrators. The record lists the we use initials a lot. So this record lists the people who want to be notified of updates or provided with highlights pages or table of contents pages or sometimes the original. The format and manner of routing varies depending on attorney preferences as well as licensing and copyright considerations. In some instances, we're not allowed to copy anything from the publication. So we have to route the original. This, you know, the unfortunate thing is it not always comes back, but generally we're allowed to email a highlights page or a table of contents provided by the publisher. When we need to forward the hard copy, the system will print out the list for us and then we just attach it to the item and send it on its way. This particular this particular system allows us to move fields from the catalog record into the serials. So when we're checking in, I've sort of adapted this to what we'd like to see when we're checking something in such as the frequency and that's actually in the catalog record, not in the serials record, things like the place, the location, retention and any other notes, such as when it was last paid, it's possible it's something comes in and you don't remember seeing it and it was something that was cancelled a long time ago and they're just trying to get us back on the subscription and so it helps us figure out what to do. It also offers note space. So if there's any special handling procedures for any particular title, then it's all right there. It's important to get the materials out as quickly as possible. We generally route after the filing is completed as long as it's getting out quickly. Sometimes that's not always the case and we send it out and then file. And in my library, when we're really trying to manage our costs and make our collection match what the practice area is, sometimes we use that check-in record with notes in there that our assistant bring us any new editions of books or anything that a publisher sends out that's extra, you know, because you own this title we thought you'd love to pay $700 for this title. And so we instead of having or process it, some things are tagged like we want to see everything that comes in. And sometimes we do things like only purchase an index every other year because we see that the attorneys aren't using the indexes. They usually know what section of the law they're going to. So we may not purchase the index every year and that check-in record allows us to tag that information that they won't automatically process it through that it'll come back to us and we can make a decision if it should be returned or not. So I find it very helpful to have that database and it's very easy to change it, to change the routing order and things like that if as needed. I have a question. How hard is it to find material that's been routed? Somebody calls up and they need it. And you have no idea where it is. Well, fortunately, we go to the list. First thing, we go to the list. And you get to know people pretty well and sometimes people will volunteer to be put on the bottom of the list because they know things sit for a while. So we do a lot of, there's a certain amount of time spent tracking stuff down in general. But yes, it's always a challenge. The filing formats for legal publications include a lot of loosely binder sets and they're updated sometimes weekly, sometimes bi-weekly, sometimes monthly. Another format is called a pocket part and I don't know how unique this is to legal materials, but what they do is a supplement is inserted in the back of the book and it's a pocket is provided by the publisher in the book so that you can just slide in the updates. And then eventually this will get too fat and they send you another volume that's twice as expensive. And publishers have also started a trend, things that get annual updates. They've been reprinting entire volumes instead of supplying you with the loose leaf pages to be filed. Another opportunity for financial gain. And recently we received a notice that instead of getting a tax code and regulation set that we purchase every year and it's very large, they were gonna send it to us on CD. And that wasn't gonna work for us, but other publishers were offering this step in to provide the paper copy that we might need. We do have access to that kind of information online, but really when some of those materials just need to be utilized in print format. So that's an issue that came up and then we saw that in our listserv and kept our eye out for it. So we could make a decision too as to what we should do. All right, some filing is tedious. There's small print in the instructions and small print on the edges where the page numbers are, the paragraph numbers are sometimes very closely formatted to page numbers. You're not sure, am I supposed to be pulling out the paragraph number or the page number? And they'll replace just like 100 pages in here but they won't all be together. It requires attention to detail. And so that's a really important aspect of a paraprofessional's job. Paper can be also rather thin and hard to handle. So even though we have an automated catalog, we also have a manual checkout system. Our books are not in, okay. Materials are not shelved in a contained space. There's no one entrance and one exit. And so with floor floors and collections and hallways, a tax library, a main library, titles do need to be tracked down but somebody has to stop and fill out a card, put their initials on it and then someone on the staff will file it in our filing box but that step doesn't always happen. And even when I bring people materials, I sometimes have to remind myself I need to check it out to them too. This chart, it includes three months of statistics kept by myself and the library assistant. It was an effort to determine where we were spending most of our time. I decided to combine our time because there are so many things that kind of overlap between our jobs. But as every month is different for both of us, this was a combined average of our time. Certain months of the year you seem to get a lot of updates for publications. So this is for October, November and December of 2008. Let's see, filing is on the top of the list. It does take the greatest amount of time in general just because it's so specific and we both have to, we'll both be notified if there are issues where things aren't consistent. And it's just keeps us busy. Okay, well, I think I really mentioned that, but okay. Okay, so then the next on the list is research requests. And this particular percentage of time includes everything from intensive research that I might handle to copy requests, tracking down books, do you know who has this? Or where can I find that? And we have a similar situation where we're on a couple of floors and a lot of materials are shelved in the hallways or in people's offices. And so you do find yourself looking for things. If we did this chart today, however, I don't think the percentage of time for filing would be as high. Kind of about what we mentioned earlier. There's a definite move from print to online resources in general, but because it's not always the most cost-effective way or user-friendly way to do research, books will not be extinct in law libraries. This is where I'm just telling the story. Yeah, the filing. Well, and my previous law firm, not the Baird-Holm Law Firm, I had heard this story that before the library staff was responsible for updating the books, the other staff, maybe law clerks were to do it. And they were at a downtown location and they moved out west and they found filings that hadn't been filed but hidden away in ceiling tiles and in different places. And that impacted our collection. It still impacted our collection when I left there in the 90s because some of these sets are just large and you'd be looking up something and you could tell there was a gap. And so other librarians have the same issues so we try to work with each other and the publisher to bring our sets current. But I think after that then they saw that it was important to have library staff doing the updating and because we do know how important it is to file on in order and actually do the filing. This is about skills for law firm library employment. And in a law firm library environment we need a variety of skills. And we might turn to the American Association of Law Librarians' core competencies to describe those skills. The outline of the skills are in the areas of library management, reference, research, information technology, collection development, cataloging and teaching. For example, one skill is teaching and it is effectively teaches library clients with differing needs and tech. Technological skill levels, that's one example. And then another one provides leadership, including negotiation and collaboration with relevant members of the organization to ensure that the library is vital to the parent organization. And you can go to a website at AALL and we had handouts, I think you had to pull them off of the email you received and it has an address there for AALL and then you can see the list of skills that are required. It's not really a job description, but it could be a goal to make sure you learn how to do all aspects of your job. The librarian as administrator, our tasks include scheduling staff, making online resources accessible. By working with outside vendors and internal IT departments, monitoring the budget, working on departmental goals, handling purchases and renewals. We also train staff and attorneys and paralegals on library procedures and research services. That involves usually one to one training at the point of need, but we do schedule group training and promote them attending review sessions. And I also take training continuously online, like go to meetings and webinars so that I can stay up on the newest computer assistive research techniques. And I think of an example of using a cell phone or one of these that you might get, you might know basically how to answer your phone, but when you learn some of the other functions and this is true in databases, and you adapt the ones that make you more efficient and more effective than you do a better job with your job. And I think of it that way. There's always a level in these databases or even utilizing some of our research print books to that you can use to access it, but to actually get the most value out of it. It's better to know about some of the advance capabilities of the system. And we also do cataloging in our library, but we do it to a level that's appropriate for the organization. They would never say I need to have a technical services department at the firm that would not happen in our size firm in the Midwest, but did you have a comment? Yes, in the New York firm I worked at, they did have a technical services department, but they also with the trend towards more online. Again, it's kind of affected cataloging as well as you probably know, and our libraries are different, but they process cards and pockets for the books. We don't, a lot of that is because a lot of our materials are in the hall and at the time as a small firm they kind of wanted people to stay together as a group and it requires more communication to track things down when there's not a card and pocket in place. But we just do very basic cataloging and then the assistant will do some, but also mostly run the card sets to put in the new books and into that updated books. So you're in charge of budgeting your own area, so you have to make purchases and then purchases by actually approved people? This is about if there's an approval system for purchases and after the budget's already been decided and our system is rather loose. At one time I reported to a library committee right now I don't, but oftentimes the requests for new publications come from the shareholders or the person in charge of a particular practice group. So it more or less comes with approval and in my case it's sort of a support for me because if at the end of the year I'm not within the budget I can point specifically to a specific request and then other things happen too during the year you might start to do work in another practice area so your budget's gonna increase because you're gonna have to get some additional research materials. Librarians are also timekeepers. So we bill any time spent working on client matters back to the clients at rates determined by the firm in agreement with the client. In addition, expenses derived from fee-based databases, online services, document retrieval services, the use of messengers, that is also generally billed back to the client as well. The major fee-based databases that we use in the legal online services I should say. It's Westlaw and Lexis. Those notebooks were complimentary from our Westlaw representative. Other online databases that bill back are the 50 states or federal courts for different filings, administrative online databases and document retrieval services, interlibrary loan services and fees may also be billed back. As a result, it's very important that we provide research in a manner that takes into consideration both time and expense to the client and firm. The cost of materials, services and time is always in our minds as we determine how we handle research. And it's really part of, I found it part of my job to have to assist attorneys sometimes when they're trying to figure out, it might be a smaller client, they wanna really keep expenses down and they will sometimes ask for recommendations. And some of the questions that we get in projects we may ask to work on are compiling legislative and regulatory histories for specific language or for an entire act or a section. Finding language in SEC documents and locating court filings by or against specific individuals, locating specific types of forms or clauses used in those forms, finding census data, obtaining lists of top taxpayers in a city or county and compiling information about and written by experts or testimony of experts and find out who's representing a potential client in court. Those are some of the, the list goes on. They can ask any type of question and we provide an answer. Not all research is client related. We also, or billable, we research some things such as how are other law firms using the iPad in their practices? Questions about vendors, who can monitor trademarks internationally? And also how successful are alternative billing arrangements in other firms? And we have two questions. Do you think this is the finishing of the question? Well, there were two questions and we have a few more slides. One question is the AALL survey says that libraries with from 91 to 150 attorneys spend at the following levels, mean 9,700 or median 6,894. How does your law firm compare? Or is that private information? Our law firm, the rate, I haven't checked recently but because we have such a large practice, many practice areas, we see that our costs are on the higher side but we work with this all the time. It's something that we keep in mind. We look at our collection and see what can we do to trim back here or there. But because we have so many practice areas and we wanna have the basic materials for the attorneys to use our costs in the, I'm gonna say in the median area but hopefully less because that's what we've been trying to work on. I haven't checked, I didn't check for this program whether it is right now. And did you wanna answer that question? I'd have to say the same. We might be a little less. I think because it's a newer firm, like certain things, we've gotten things as we've needed them. There aren't a lot of things that we've carried over a really long period of time. So we might be a little towards the lower end of that. And I had another comment too. The data that gets collected here might include things that we do not include if we were report, when we report this. So that's, there's such variation as to what people will count as a legal research title. It could be their whole electronic budget. It may not include their electronic budget. So those are just things to keep in mind. But this is just one source of the data. There are other law firm management companies that also report this out to our management and our executive committee. And do you have a question? Could you mention? There was a core collection because the firm sort of originated with a group of attorneys that were in pretty much one practice group. It was a lot of estate planning, business succession of that area. And as it's kind of as business grew, as the firm grew and we acquired more and more. They started with some of the basic print materials. And then at one point, like say our litigation department, business really increased, so those materials increased. And then we added an environmental, a few environmental attorneys. And so it really, it grew with the need, with client need. So, and the American Bar Association, when they accredit law school libraries, they have certain requirements that those libraries need to contain certain materials. Well, back when our law firms started, those were all very affordable. But our collection has changed greatly. So we do not maintain a lot of things that were there before. And there's also a book that I keep on the shelf called Recommended Law Books. It's interesting to see that. But there's a lot of digests in the case law from all the different states that were required. And the statutes of all different states were required to be in an academic law library. And so many law firm libraries would have reflected that, but that's not the case any longer. Another question is, I sent you guys have to dress better than in many other types of libraries. Do you receive clothing allowances? I've asked for them, but no. Yeah. Either that or a comfortable uniform that we would wear. They say you can wear the same thing every day. They don't care. They don't care, but no. But it's a professional law firm environment. We have very, very few casual days. Those are tied to fundraising days, like for the American Heart Association or for cancer contributions. So thank you for saying that we look nice today. Yeah. All right. So you're like part-time, full-time? Yes. How does that work with your health insurance? I mean, law firms must be very good at giving you sick time, sick time. I'd say it's pretty standard with any, with any business. I'm sorry. How did you phrase the question again, as far as? Your benefit packages. Benefit packages. Well, I was originally full-time and had a temporary job share, and then we did not replace the other person. So that's how I became part-time. But so our firm is pretty good in regards to part-time. If you're there a certain amount of time, you can have PTO. But you might be, I think, insurance packages are the same, getting worse for everybody. No, I'm part-time as a job share, but I have benefits at the firm. But insurance wasn't one I wanted, because I have insurance from another source. And then I was going to say, did we do the networking slide? No. No. OK, we're going to do that, because we're times up. Oh, OK. Two more slides. Because we can't own everything, and materials are so expensive, we often need to borrow materials from other libraries. This work is shared by both the librarian and the paraprofessional, and our professional contacts that we develop through the various organizations help us get these materials in a timely way. As law librarians, professional associations like NLA, AALL, the American Association of Law Libraries, Special Libraries Association, which is known as SLA. And especially SLA Nebraska, our local chapter, gives us the opportunity to meet other librarians, especially law librarians in Omaha and Nebraska. And we support each other by providing information via a listserv or a telephone call to other librarians in these organizations. SLA Nebraska has also helped us develop leadership skills as officers past and present, planning and leading meetings, and participating in programs at the national level. If you're a student and the MLS student, we'll pay for your SLA membership right now. And you could just complete a form that we have. And you can just hand it to us or mail it to Maureen. She's our treasurer. And we do. If you are interested in becoming a member and you're not a student, and if you're really interested, we'll see what we can do in our budget. We'd like you to join and maybe attend a few of our meetings. We're meeting every other month. Sometimes we've come to Lincoln a few times to meet with people that are members in this community. And because our field is so specialized and commercial, because it's not an academic or state funded, it's kind of been a good resource for us. So well, thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today. And please contact us if you have any questions now or later. Thank you, Maureen. Thank you, Mary. We're going to take a break till noon and we'll be back. Welcome back. Our next presenters are going to be presenting from the Omaha Eastern Library Service Office. It's Nancy Schmiel of Omaha Public Library and Deb Venapal of the Omaha Public School Librarian. The Depplement of Libraries. Unmute, what? That won't let me go smaller. The red thing. Thank you. This? Yeah. OK. Thank you. There you go. OK. Can we? All right. You can go ahead. Oh, and mine's the microphone. Here's the mic. We're hoping everybody can hear us. Do you need me to open up something so you can see? A touch louder? That was awesome. OK. Are you guys? You're probably not seeing us. We can't figure out how to get us in front. Right here. All right. How's that working for everybody? Deb and I will try to make sure that we pass the mic back and forth. I'm Nancy Schmiel and I am the children's librarian at Saddlebrook Library, the public side of the building. And this is, I am Deb Venapal. I am the school librarian at Saddlebrook Elementary. And Nancy and I work together frequently. So what we're going to do today is, oh, and this PowerPoint will be available to you online. We didn't get handouts done in time. So you'll have this PowerPoint. It might not be as flashy as you would like, but this is what you get. And technology is fun for librarians. So what we're going to talk about today is, first, we're going to tell you about the facility. This is called the double minute libraries because the library is both the school library and the public library. But we actually are an entity that is three things in one. Our building houses an elementary school, a public library, and a community center. So we're going to tell you a little bit about that. We're going to tell you how we work together as librarians because we both have full-time jobs doing what I do as a public librarian and Deb as the school librarian. And then we talked about how you get your foot in the door of schools. We're going to talk about schools because it's what we do. But anything we talk about getting your foot in the door is getting your foot in the door anywhere. If what you want to do is take your services from your library to someone else, things that you can use to do that. So first, Deb, is there anything you'd like to say about our location? It's in Northwest Omaha, very conveniently located. And it's a good location for that particular area because there hasn't been a lot of public library influenced in that area forever. And so I think it's well utilized, a little bit tricky to find. You don't know where you're going. But anyway, it's a very nice place. So what we're going to do is I'm going to show you a video. I can tell you that your video, the visual, may not be very clear. And I'm hoping that the audio comes through. We'll hold the microphone as close to our computer as possible so that you can get the audio. When you get this PowerPoint, you can go. It's the video on Omaha Public Schools, Saddlebrook Elementary School. It's on their web page. They're the ones that construct it. But this will just give you a good idea of what our facility is. You can see pictures here now. That's the commons area on the left and right over here. And then this is our rotating bookshelf in the library. This is the community center. And then this is the library. So we're going to go to, hopefully, the video. Keep your fingers crossed. But in terms of community, when you walk in a cell, take a look around the Saddlebrook Short Use Facility in North Pierce, Omaha. And you'll see a center dedicated to lifelong learning, health, and wellness. Saddlebrook is the first building in the United States. It's a community school with library and recreation center under the same roof, which provides exceptional convenience for visitors of all ages. It's definitely a one-stop-stop. Well, we can do everything in one place. Yeah, it's playing. The problem is it's the loading. Yeah, and everybody knows the camera. And you're building the Saddlebrook Short Use Facility in the body. You get to listen to it, because our wires communicate to the community sessions and provide its suggestions that influence the architects final design. The Omaha Public Schools, the Omaha Public Library, and the City of Omaha Parks and Recreation Department fully commit to a unified partnership vision. That cooperation resulted in inviting, secure, and environmentally friendly space that serves the entire community. Yeah, well, I'm all for better. I would come here every day after school to check out books from the library. And almost every weekend, we can build a community center and play games. The building is strategically arranged to optimize shared usage. A centrally located commons can be flexibly used as they log in, assembly space, or exhibit area. The stage can open to the gym or commons, and a community room, cafeteria, and art room are available for public use. The public library and school share books and resources that a rotating bookshelf provides a barrier during the school day to keep student safety a priority. The school uses the library for classroom lessons and computer use. And teachers can conveniently check out materials for their classrooms. While school is in session, the gym needs to be divided, half for PD classes, half for recs and losers. The Recreation Center often supports teachers with games and activities and offers students, their families, and the entire community a wide range of fitness classes and recreation opportunities. Time for the so-called visit to learn, be it the library, and the access at the same time. The Saddlebrook partners made every effort to implement effective security measures, including electronic ID badges for staff, nearly 50 security cameras, limited access points, and security personnel. Modern technologies are visible throughout the entire Saddlebrook gym and youth facility. An extensive grade of code is 25% of the length and helps with temperature control year round. Members of the school's green team help maintain the growth and compare its effectiveness to the traditional growth by monitoring data provided by advanced climate sensors. Impressive and care labs are available to students and library visitors. The in-house TV studio provides an opportunity for creative instruction and allows students to produce more new announcements. And high-tech teaching tools like interactive breathing boards and visual presenters are used in each classroom. The Saddlebrook Joint Youth Facility is more than a building. It's a model of cooperation. It's a center of learning and wellness for all ages. And it's a valuable resource for a growing city. It's okay. We can bring it back. We won't make you watch it again. You can do it on your own time. Now, there we go. So that's the entire building. As we talked about, we are just one part. The library is one piece of that building. And we share it between the two of us. The one thing we missed them seeing, I think, was the rotating bookshelf. They saw it. They saw it. So you've got to see the bookshelf. So what we're going to talk about now is a little bit about how we work as librarians together for the school. So we're not going to spend any time right now on what we do with the community center because we have projects with them as well, but just between librarians. There we go. So one thing that we share is our collection. And I'm going to let Deb get started on things about the collection. OK, there are many benefits that the Saddlebrook Elementary gets from being a part of Omaha Public Libraries' collection. And one of the main things is that students have a larger availability to a number of items that possibly my budget wouldn't be able to accommodate otherwise. And for some examples, that might be lower level readers, such as your beginning readers and early readers. I may not, in a school setting, be able to order quite as many as are available at the school, at the library rather, as well as they are in a little niche area where students can go to them and find them rather quickly and easily. Larger, another way is that students who are above level readers may be able to find more materials that are on a fifth grade, sixth grade, or even beyond level than I would be able to house in a school library. Teachers benefit because they can use the online catalog and get materials online and then pick them up right at their school. They're delivered right to their location. So that's also a benefit. Holiday books, superhero books, Where's Waldo books, all of those novelty type items that I possibly wouldn't be able to furnish students on such a great level are available to them. And teachers have much more access to the classroom card use that OPL offers. And that's offered to all teachers, however, anywhere in the city. However, I think our teachers have a better availability to use that particular feature of yours. Yeah, I would agree with that. Every teacher at Southbrook Elementary School has a classroom card. And what those are for people that don't know, if your principal says it's OK and they give us a letter, Deb Baralos, who's here, or was here, she's still here, our circulation manager, she approves them. They get a classroom card. And for Saddlebrook Elementary, it is a K through 4 soon to be K through 5 school. So they do juvenile materials. And so they get a card that they can use to check out materials for their classroom. And by the principal saying, it's OK for you to have this card, it doesn't go on their personal card. So if books get lost, if books get damaged, somebody else is responsible than having it on your personal card. Because that's a lot of responsibility for a teacher to take for their students. And so every teacher in our class, the art teacher, the music teacher, everybody has that, has a card. Last year, one of the classrooms was doing research on Omaha. But Deb wouldn't be able to afford all of the materials that the Omaha Public Library has on the city of Omaha. So we were able to bring in a multitude of materials for them that the students got to use to do their projects that they were having. So that was great. For us, as a public library, the great thing about having a teacher and having her be able to order things that have to do with the curriculum, we don't have to spend our money filling that need. She can spend her money filling that need. And then we have more money to spend on things like media, because the school doesn't mind media. So we have more money at Saddlebrook to spend on things like music CDs and books on CD and the new play aways that are out. We can shift how we spend our money over to there. So that's been a really great asset to us. She can order certain periodicals. We get other periodicals. We had a collection development person come into our library just recently. And she actually said, the depth of what you have here is better than almost anywhere she's seen, because we have both of us working on it. So that's our collection. Anything else on the collection? The only thing I was going to mention, too, was that the book sets that teachers can use for level reading groups within their classroom are much easier to achieve, because they can draw from the whole city library and bring them in. And that's very helpful to them in their instruction. So that's our collection, one of the ways that we do stuff together. The next thing is doing programs together and partnering. Our ultimate goal at all times is to get kids excited about reading. We know K-4 kids as our readers do better in school. They get higher achievement marks. And everybody knows that in the state age of education, we want those high marks in the state tests and the national tests and that type of stuff. And reading helps them achieve that. So some of the things that we're able to do together, I literally can walk across the hall and be in a classroom. A teacher can say, hey, we're having, we need a mystery reader. Would you like to be our mystery reader? And it takes, I'm only going to be in there for 15 minutes to 20 minutes. And it only takes me a total of 20 minutes to do that. I don't have to drive across town or do that type of stuff. So the kids get to see me in the public library setting, and they get to see me in their school, which is something all librarians want to have. You want the kids to make a connection between school and you. You don't want them to think teachers only live in the school and sleep in the school. They have an outside life. It's making that connection. And I can do that very, very easily. PTA meetings are held in the library. So I literally walk across the library to attend a PTA meeting. Those PTA moms and dads know what we have to offer. And so access is an immense benefit that we have for those kids. And then there's some other programs that we do together. One of them is Lunch Bunch. And we started doing that this year. That's basically a program where Nancy wanted to create some kind of a little group that we could work together on, not necessarily within the classroom, but outside of the classroom. And I wanted to promote the intermediate, golden, solar nominees a little bit more. And so what we decided to do was create Lunch Bunch. And that is because we only have fourth grade at our school right now. It's for fourth grade students. And they bring about 20 students out of both classes bring their lunch to the commons area that you saw in the video. And they eat their lunch while Nancy and I read aloud. We read excerpts from the golden solar nominees, such as Masterpiece, Novels. And we try to get them excited about not only listening during Lunch Bunch, but continuing to read the book above and beyond what we can cover through the Lunch Bunch area. It has increased their exposure. It has increased their interest. I'm pretty sure that we have a higher number of golden solar voters in the intermediate level. And that's worked out really well. And it's just a good excuse to do a read aloud, which is fun. We actually had one of the students. We were only going to do it through March because voting for golden solar is in April. And the kids were like, why aren't we doing Lunch Bunch anymore? And we're like, OK. So we're going to do it in April and May. They won't be golden sores. We'll pick a different book. The kids get to come. I don't know about you, but when I was in school, what I remember are field trips, people that came to visit the classroom, anything that's a little outside the norm. So for them to get to bring their lunch and leave the group, they line up to sign up. And so it's been great. And also it's a good PR tool because while Nancy and I are in the commons area reading, many patrons to the library as well as users of the community center pass by and they smile. They're paying attention to what we're doing with students. And you can tell they're appreciating our efforts. It's been really fun. Summer reading program, for those of you that have any knowledge of summer reading program at your location, whether you're a school or whether you're a public library, whether you work at a public library or whether you go to a public library, you probably see lots and lots of kids over the summer at your public library. For us, for me as a children's librarian, the hard part is getting the kids to know about it. The benefit, again, at Saddlebrook, I'm right there. So Debbie lets me have one classroom period for every single classroom that comes in. I go talk to them about summer reading program. Every year, I do a challenge where I used to work with teenagers and they picked interesting things like dressing me golf or riding a bull. It was a mechanical bull, but riding a bull if they read enough books. It's some challenge that if they read enough books, I'll do something. Saddlebrook Elementary Kids got to be my voters this year, this past year. And they came up with 96 ideas having to do with make a splash at your library from swimming with sharks at the zoo, which they said I couldn't do, to jumping off a roof into a vat of electric heels, to what ended up being my challenge, which was I slept on the roof and we had a water fight. They did not know that we have a green roof and there's a hose on the roof. So I won the water fight. They had a blast. Kids like to get wet. But the school then, all the students, we put up a poster in the school. I had a whole wall to display past challenges, to put up ideas that the kids had come up with. And then when I went and talked to their classrooms, I had little coffee cans and everybody got a poker chip. And I dwindled it down to four. I did not let them choose between 96 options. But dwindled it down to four, told them about summer reading, told them about if they read 20,000 books, I would do what they voted for. They got to vote for it. They saw the results of their voting and then they got to participate in the water fight. And they read so many books that not only do we have, I stayed on the roof and had a water fight, but then I came down and we had a water balloon fight after that. So they were very, very involved. And Saddlebook of the nine schools that I am responsible for getting the information out to. Saddlebook had the highest number of participants and the highest number of kids that made it through level one of any elementary school. It's due to exposure. They got that exposure. And then our classrooms. We have summer school at Saddlebook and we do large programs. A lot of libraries do over the summer. You can see to the right, there's a teacher, they're actually holding a huge snake is what they're holding. We had the reptiles come and we also had mad science Iowa come. And in that common space that you've seen, the summer school kids got to come during summer school to the programs that we were able to offer and afford for the library. And Mr. Zook, who's the gentleman there, anecdotally said, Saddlebook had the highest amount of retention for summer school. 92% of the kids that started summer school finished summer school. And that's the highest, from what he knew for Omaha Public Schools, elementary schools. He attributes it to the fact that we had fun programs for them to participate in. And that was because of the library being there. Okay, what I'm going to talk to you about is L with the librarians that you see there. Sometimes we call it L-ing with the librarians and the L comes from the picture right next to the picture of Mr. Zook and the students and other teachers there. Licorice is one of the L's that we use. We've used lollipops, we've used lemon drops, we've used lemonade, we've used... We've not yet used lasagna. Not yet, not yet, no lasagna yet. But what this is, is partly a behavior incentive in the library and partly a reading incentive in the newsletter. And students submit tickets to a drawing pot and then we draw their names. And those students that are drawn each time a newsletter comes out, they get to tour the library from behind the scenes so they can see where the books come in, what happens to them, how they're processed, that sort of thing. And then you show them our offices and try to get them to guess which one's... Mine's the messiest desk. They get it right most of the time. And then we serve them, Omaha Public Libraries, serves them supports or benefits or... I buy. You she buy. The licorice, the lollipops, whatever the L word happens to be, whatever the L food happens to be. And so we share conversation, we share laughter, it's a good way to build relationships with the students in a different way, in a more relaxed way. And for me, I mean, Deb has to know all their names because she sees them. She learned that. I don't have a classroom setting where I get to know all the kids' names. And so it's one way for me to have... She says she tries to learn all the names. So that gives me also another opportunity to get on a name basis because kids do... Whether it's children, teens or adults, people respond to somebody who knows who they are. They respond if you can say hi, Martha, how are you? Hi, Debbie, how are you? It just makes them feel more comfortable around you and it makes them feel more valued. And so all the opportunities that we get to do that we try to take. Oh, you have the next one, Omaha Kids Read. Omaha does a yearly, mostly. We pick a book, one for kids to read altogether as a city and one for the adults to read altogether. And this year, it was The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I think I got that all right. So we advertise it and then Debbie took it one step further and she actually put it into her curriculum and I'm gonna let her tell you about that. So if you look at the picture, the long picture at the bottom of the screen there in the bottom right-hand corner, what I did was found a picture book version of The Secret Garden and I read it in the computer lab to every class. And then we talked about what a story map is. We talked about that in the story map we discussed the characters, the setting, the problem and the solution to the problem within the story and I assigned each grade level a beginning with first grade, a certain section of that story map. So the first grade students typed in who they thought the characters were. The second grade students did the setting. The third grade students talked about the problems in their part and then the fourth grade students did the solution to the problems and it just became an all school story map for the Omaha Kids Read this year. And it was, the nice thing, you see it displayed there. Well, that's displayed in the space that is both the public and the private library or public and the school library. So not only did the kids get to see their stuff, they could bring their parents in. Kids from other schools, because we get all the surrounding schools come to our public library. They got to see what the kids at Saddlebrook Elementary did. It's up there for them to see. So even that has helped. Our Zia, the Labradoodle, that's something that's on the horizon. Kids love to read to dogs. It gives them somewhere to practice what they do in a very non-threatening way with someone who is fully accepting of them, tripping over words and it's a great thing. So we have found a woman, Stephanie Janssen, who has a Labradoodle. And so in the evening, two evenings a month, she's gonna bring Zia to the library and we'll have anybody that's affiliated with the public library, which can be students from Saddlebrook or students from other surrounding schools, they can sign up for a time to read with Zia. We're also gonna find a time during the school day when Zia will come and Mrs. Venapak can use Zia and the teachers can use Zia in ways that will help encourage the students in their reading as well. So it's, the one program isn't necessarily joint, but because we have access to presenters, we're able to utilize them both in the school setting and in the libraries. And everything that the kids see in the school that they also see in the library just makes that connection all the stronger that your life is all related. What you do at school, you can do the library, what you do the library, you can go, you know, we've got community center there. We just try to make those connections for kids. Now on to wanting to get outside of your library and to let people know what it is that you do. How do you get your foot in the door? These are things that we've come up with and we're gonna leave lots and lots of time for you guys to share what you've come up with or to ask us questions about anything. I'm gonna let Deb talk about the first one. The first thing that you should probably do is make contact with the school librarian and make sure that he or she understands that you want to supplement whatever it is that is going on in the school library. Just to be sure that nobody feels like their toes are getting stepped on and you're going to find that some are going to be very open and some are not and it's just going, but that would be your first place to start, I would recommend. And as I have just found out recently, somebody's past experience can really hinder your current experience. If they have had a bad experience, and they might not be as open to you coming, so you might need to work around that a little bit. And you may have no idea why it's not going well with whoever you're contacting. And we're talking specifically about schools, but if what you wanna do is you wanna get into a business because you wanna tell them what kind of offerings you can help them with, like the databases that you have available. One of the things you need to know is you need to know what you have to offer. You know that you're great and everybody should like libraries. I have found that just saying libraries are great doesn't work because they don't know what you have to offer them. They might say, well, they're just for checking out books or they're, I don't use the library because I go to boarders. I have the internet, everything's on the internet. No one's ever heard that before. So you need to have, in a sense you need to have something to sell and you need to know how to sell it. So if you're a public librarian going in, you can talk about summer reading program and the fact that having kids read over the summer has been proven to help them retain what they learned in the spring through what they learned in the fall so that there's not as much repeat going on for the teachers and it makes their job easier. Anything you can do to tell them it makes their job easier. If what you know is you can help them with research because you do have databases that you're paying a lot of money for or that the commission is paying a lot of money for you to have access to. Teach them how to get there. You can show them how to get there. Teach them how to use your online catalog so they can get the materials. But have something specific to offer them, not just libraries are great and we can come and tell you how great we are. It probably won't cut it. If your first contact doesn't happen, if, you know, you always wanna find the one person that you can start that relationship. I think you said it really well earlier today. What was your thing about one person? You might know of a teacher at a certain school and you know that that teacher is open and practices within his or her classroom that they're open to more off the wall type instruction. And so they might be more interested in having you come in and assist them. Team teach whatever you are attempting to do with them. I would begin with a teacher and if you can start with one teacher, even though it's just one teacher and start small, believe me, the word will get around and pretty soon you'll have more than one teacher and more and more as the years go by. Yeah, start with the one really good connection and then it will grow from there. You don't need to hit everybody at once. Other ideas, pardon me, like for schools, I go to PTA meetings. If you have a library patron who you know is a room mother or a room father, they have parties all year long. Be in their bonnet about you could come and do a story time at their classroom party for Valentine's Day. Get in in creative ways and get in small, have it be a positive experience and then like I said, that will grow. If you know the principal, see if you can come and talk at a staff meeting about how to get classroom cards for us. Like when you go tell them how to get classroom cards and how great that is. Talk to the principal because he or she has to give permission first, so let them know. One of the big things, then there's some other options over there, teachers, room parents. Is there preschool affiliated? You could do stuff with that. We had, last year it was really, it was pretty fun for me. We have an early childhood special ed class and Mrs. Venapal, God bless her last year, had to open a brand new school. This is only our second full school year. She had to open a brand new school because we are a joint library. The catalog that she was used to for all the years working for Omaha Public Schools changed because she had to learn Omaha Public Libraries catalog. So she was opening a brand new school. She was learning an entirely new system of how to do things. Everything was new and so we had early childhood and I said, I'll do early childhood. So twice a month, that early childhood class came around to the public side and I did story time for them. So invite people in, invite them to do, possibly invite them to come and have a field trip to the library where you'll provide some things for them that's possible. Do your homework. Know if you're working with a school, what are the curriculum requirements for your district, for the schools that you wanna get into? Try to anticipate what their needs are and provide it for them before they know. That always impresses people like, wow, you have that and you knew that the fourth grade was studying vectors. So you put out a display at your public library on vectors and creative paper mache things you can make with vectors. Whatever it is, find out what they're studying or what they're interested in. The more you get to know individual students, the better. And Deb can certainly talk to this next one. Make it easy. Definitely. Definitely, I would try to make it easy for whatever teacher you are pinpointing as beginning this relationship with and this program with. Try to make the teacher feel like there is very little that he or she needs to plan for or prepare for. And I think you'll have a lot better time convincing them to work with you. That's true. Other ways to make it easy from a public library standpoint, if you're gonna show them how to use the databases and library cards are necessary for them to access them, have library cards with you that they can use to access it. Take applications to them, let them complete them and deliver applications or deliver completed cards back to them. At times, you might find out what will make it easier for you to get into another location. Might be a little bit harder on your own institution. And so work within your institution to help solve those problems. To start those conversations. We are very fortunate at Omaha Public Library that Deb Baralos is right behind me. They make that very easy. I can go into school. I can take, they've worked out that they will look at addresses for me. So the address check is done and if the parents have approved then we can take classroom cards back to them. So things that you do to make it a smooth, simple, easy process will guarantee that you get asked back and will guarantee that you get asked by more people to be there. That's one thing. And last but not least, don't get discouraged if the first time it doesn't go right. Just keep trying. If one location doesn't work, let them go for a while and then try it somewhere else. Learn from how it went and continue on from there. So now comes the easy part for me anyway. If anybody has questions, if you guys have ideas, we're gonna see how all this sound works and I promise we'll repeat questions from here for those of you out there. And we're hoping they have them. We thought discussion would be nice and big and great and are you all just ready for lunch? I have a question in... Okay, I'm getting feedback. I have a question in Lincoln. All right. When doing the pros and cons of co-locating public and school library, one of the cons is how to handle the presence of adult level materials, fiction, non-fiction and online. How do folks handle this when your population is K to four, soon to be K to five? Deb, you wanna take that one? Okay. Basically, we separate the adult materials from the children's section by the, I call the lazy Susan bookshelf, but it's a rotating bookshelf that stays closed during the school day and locked and nobody can get through, although we have had a few... Toddlers can get through. Toddlers can get through and they go. But basically that's how we separate that and I've had students ask me if they can go next door and pick up a video or something and I don't encourage that because it's just, would put them into the public library scene and it's just not something, a place where I want them to be during school time. But it's worked out just fine. My instruction area is not really an eyesight of anywhere in the public side. So it's worked out quite well that way. There is every so once in a while an issue of appropriateness for a school child and it's more my personal preference of, what is a parent gonna think if I, or say if I let the student check out this particular book. And that comes up not very often at all. But I just tell them that they'll have to come back after school and with their parents and check it out then. Yeah, we haven't had too much difficulty and part of it is also educating the parents of the students that one of the benefits they get is that their child has access to so much more than they would get being in another school. And so Deb can say they only get two books during library time. They can check out two books and so she can say look during your library time here, this is what I'm limited to letting you check out. And then the kids can come after school and they can check out what they wanna check out. The rotating bookshelf does do that. Only children's materials are available on the school side during the school day. Come on you guys, it's not lunchtime yet. What about online? The adult material during the day. Day. Students are not, they don't have the computer, they only have computer access to catalogs on when they're in the library and then if they're in the computer lab with Debbie, then they have all of the same, they're on the OPS, they're on the OPS network in our computer lab. And so there are so many filters on the OPS network that there's no way they can get to anything inappropriate and if they do, I can have it blocked in a matter of seconds. So it's not, that's not an issue really right now. Is there any cons of being in the same building today? A question here in Omaha has been, are there any cons at all in working in the same building? We intentionally did not put those in our presentation because we thought they'd probably come up and you guys would ask us. I don't know, I'll let you start. This isn't really a con, it's just that it takes a lot more time to do ordering for me because there's another person, a very good person that is ordering wonderful materials. It's not me, it's somebody else. And I may find a fabulous book that I'd like to order and Joanne has already ordered it and that's not a bad thing, that's, it's already a part of our collection. So that makes it more time consuming. I don't know of any other cons with ordering than that. And as far as the school setting goes, there are no cons. There are none that I can think of at all. We have been extremely fortunate in that the Omaha Public Library, Omaha Public Schools and Omaha Park and Rec, they chose people at this point who are overseeing these three entities who are very much into collaboration. And so it has been very fluid. If I need to use the gym for something and it's available, the community center is very helpful. If the school has been extraordinarily gracious for the community center because everybody knows budgets have been tight, they started building our building when gas prices went up and so the building is smaller than it needs to be for where we are. The community center has tons of classes they need to have so the school has allowed them to use classrooms for certain things. It's been great. I would say one of the only glitches we've had is the fact that the entire children's section is not available during school day. Home schooling has somewhat been an issue that if homeschoolers come and they're not really young, like if they're fourth, fifth and sixth graders, they don't have free reign to go onto the shelves. We can take them over there. So it's just one more educational piece and we're gonna work on that a little bit more next year. Possibly looking at Debbie's schedule, when are the kids in the computer lab so that I could be over on that side and we could actually take a homeschool family. We could have homeschool research day and the homeschoolers could come. But I would say that's been it. Or when toddlers squeeze through right here, right there. When the toddlers squeeze through, we have to go over and get them. That's kind of an it. On the green roofs, we have to squeeze through. The question is what do we plant on the green, pardon me, on the green roof, we don't plant it. So that's the good thing. We're not responsible for that. They have planted lots and lots of sedum types of plants that retain moisture and don't need a lot of moisture or drop resistant. So they take the rainwater and they grow from there. As you saw in the video, I don't think there are any pictures here. You all have to go back and watch the video because you missed part of it. But in the community center and in the library, we have a computer that shows you the difference between how the roof is heating and cooling on the conventional side and on the green roof side. And in the video, and I might have blocked it out. I might have walked right in front of the camera. It does show you some of the plants that they've planted up there and the kids weeding. I think it showed you the kids weeding. And there's actually a lot of weeds up there. I think they forgot that the winds blow and seeds land on roofs. But it's a lot of, it's drop resistant. And there is no watering system up there. It's rainwater supposed to cut it. So we'll see. And it is amazing to look. They take a temperature at three different levels of the roof. So like right where it needs the building in the middle and then what it is on the surface. And there can be dramatic temperature differences, especially on a conventional roof. It'll be really hot and really cold and you'll get a more mediated or closer temperature differential on the green roof side. Who provides the support for some of the janitors and the gardeners and so forth? Is that a city responsibility or a school district responsibility? I'm just wondering financially how they interact. The question is here in Omaha. Financially, who does what? Who provides like janitorial service? Who provides gardening care? Who provides staffing for things? And we actually have, if I say something wrong, our facilities person is here, so we know. I believe the school, the Omaha Public Schools own the building. Is that correct? Okay, so if we get this wrong, pretty much the school actually, the school system is responsible for the physical building. So their janitor, their custodians take care of cleaning. They take care of security. They take care of snow removal. They take care of icing. They do all of that. So anything structural to the building, if a window breaks, it's them. If the roof leaks, it's the school. If the air conditioning doesn't work, it's the school. They provide that. Even if it's on the library side? Yes. Even if it's on the library side, they are responsible for the care and maintenance of the building. And then we pay for it. We pay for our share. So the public library is so big of a percentage of the entire space of the building. So I'm gonna make up a number. 20% of the entire space is that. So we would pay for 20% of the custodial services of that bill. It's kind of like if you have an apartment building and you have your own meter, you pay for your part of the meter. Does that answer your question? Mm-hmm. Okay. Enough? I've got a question about adult programming. Can you share a little bit about how you handle your adult programming on this? I didn't do a little bit about it. I mean, is it successful or is it more just kids? We have a question here about adult programming at the library and on site. And we do have adult programming as well. There are people that are not just families with small children. Those do tend to be, from a public library perspective, they are the largest number. We get the largest numbers for those because we're so visible to families. They're coming in and out of our doors every single day. So when we have Santa Claus, we have 300 people. When we do something weirdly, Halloween is much more, I don't know, popular. We had 500 people for that. But we have had adult programming. We have book clubs. We have three successful book clubs going right now. We have a Get Crafty, a joint program that's actually gonna be between the school and the community center and the library, sort of joint. The school is having a, they're gonna have a craft fair. And it's gonna be in mom's night out. So they'll have, they're providing all the crafts, but we'll have a table and our adult services librarian will be over there and she's doing green body care and green healthcare where you make your own. Baking soda and vinegar do lots of great things. So she's gonna show them that. She'll have that available to them. So also even the parents will know we do stuff for them, not just for children. So it's the exposure out there. We can't have, because we are on school property, some of you may have heard about our board silly or our, what's the dating one? We have speed dating. The speed dating event, those, we are able to get liquor licenses to hold some of those adult events at other libraries. We cannot do that because we are on school grounds. And so liquor licenses will not be had for us, for any adult programming that we have there. Is this the first year you've had your reading to the dogs? Actually, yes. I mean, that's in the works for next year. I know OPL, I'm gonna work. Oh, it's the Labradoodle. The Labradoodle. Is our dog reading new? Yeah. We, I'm going to be very much involved with that. And I am really going to try to get students to sign up and they will. They'll sign up to read to Zia. But probably that's going to be more realistic a program for next year, rather than this year. We've got five dogs in our children's community. That's great. Someone here has five dogs that the kids read to. We might be calling her up. We're going to get some contact information. Because we have 300, this year we have 325 students, I think. Right. That's how to book. And next year it's slated to be, because we're going to move up to fifth grade. So it's slated to be 455, I think. And then for one more year, they're going to actually add sixth grade to the building because a new middle school is being built that will be six, seven, and eight. And it won't be ready yet. And they don't want to send children to a middle school that's fifth, sixth, seventh. So we're going to, next year and the year after that, especially we are going to be loaded. And I think it's, is it time for a break? It is time. Oh, I bet you guys are hungry. It is time for the break. There is our contact information. And like we said, the whole PowerPoint will be available to you guys as soon as it gets uploaded to. Thank you very much for having us. I don't know what to do with this one. Okay. We hear you guys are going to take back the call. Or not. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Dev and Nancy. In the other room, help yourself. And I'm sorry you have to balance. Thank you, Dev and Nancy. That concludes our program. We have just a couple of things to talk about. Evaluations, they're on the Para website and please send them to Martha or she or her email and her Gmail addresses are on the website. Also, we have seven free Para or Stilkey t-shirts. Five in medium, one in extra large and one in large. First come, first served. Just email us and let us know. And remember again, evaluations, we need the evaluations. The general meeting follows at one o'clock. You're welcome to eat during it. You're welcome to stay for it. But thank you all for coming and attending this with us.