 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We record the show every week as we are doing today, and it is available on our website for you to watch at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where to go to access all of our recordings. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. They're states that might be just your so-and-so state library. So we provide services, training, consulting, grants to all types of libraries. So you will find things for all types of libraries on our show. Publics, academics, K-12, archives, museums, historical societies, really anything and everything that has anything to do with libraries. That's really our only criteria, that it's library focused. And we do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. So you should be able to find something for you on our show. We sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations, do sessions for us for things that we're doing here locally or in Nebraska or through the Library Commission. But we also bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. On the line with us is all from the Fort Worth, Texas, public library is Amania Shore. Good morning, Amania. The library director there. Yeah, Marilyn Marvin and Tracy Lane. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, everyone. And Amania is actually, she's formally was here in Nebraska a while ago. She was at one of our libraries here for a long time and has gone on to other great things now being director here in Fort Worth. That's awesome. And they're going to talk about how they did this great new, even though they're a large city in a large library, how did they did a tiny library there? So I'll just hand it over to you guys to take it away. Great. Thank you, Krista. Hi, everyone. My name is Amania Shore, and I'm the director of the Fort Worth Public Library. Let's see if I can switch screens. Hopefully you all saw that switch as I did it. Someone will let me know if that did not work. But let's start with an introduction of the panel. So as I said, my name is Amania. And Krista, she revealed my secret. I spent five non-consecutive years working at the Omaha Public Library. And I love Omaha. I miss it. It was a great experience. I know not everyone here is in Nebraska, but I did just want to give a shout out to the Omaha Public Library. This is my 23rd year working in public libraries and my fifth large urban library system, aside from from Omaha, I've worked at Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon, Sacramento Public Library in California. And most recently, I was at the DC Public Library in the District of Columbia. And today, we want to give you a revised version of a presentation that we gave at the PLA conference in Nashville, the last work-related trip that I took, certainly, and that many of us took. So let me hand it over to Tracy Lane to introduce herself to you today. Good morning, everyone. My name is Tracy Lane and I am a LA library assistant with the Fort Worth Public Library. And I am going to be over the new formerly known as Cambridge Court, now Rise Public Library. I've been with the Fort Worth Public Library for over 24 years now and just worked my way up the ranks from Page to where I am now. It's been a wonderful experience and I'm glad to be here with you guys. And Marilyn, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, good morning, everyone. My name is Marilyn Marvin. I am the assistant library director of system-wide services. So the areas I am over things not direct public service related. Some of our communications, HR, IT, facilities, data and statistics. And budget finance. I have only been with libraries here at the city of Fort Worth since 2016. My background is IT and I got a great opportunity to come over to the library. And as Mania likes to say, I have become a librarian. So it's great to be here this morning. Honorary librarian. Yes, I think I call it a librarian by association. You know how it is, everyone. We draw them in and then they're converts for life. But I will say Marilyn's not giving herself enough credit. Prior to working at the library, she was part of a neighborhood association that fought very hard for a new library in her neighborhood. So she's been a library lover and user for a very long time. Okay, so what we want to talk to you about today is a project that we worked on in Fort Worth that, you know, it's not unusual to open a new library. But what we wanna talk to you about today is a little bit around why we fought for this library and how we think that this can translate to any city and any library across the country, especially when you're talking about being successful through working the political channels. So that's a little bit of a heads up. So first of all, because one of the things I learned when I moved to Fort Worth is that nobody knows anything about Fort Worth and they think that Fort Worth is Dallas and Dallas is Fort Worth. So I wanna spend a little bit of time just orienting everyone who's not in Texas to Fort Worth. Fort Worth is the 13th largest city in the country. Pretty high up there. It's much, much bigger than you think it is. This is actually think up to date, 910,000 people. We are actually gonna be bigger than Dallas in a couple of years. So it's the, as our mayor likes to say, it's the unfortunate DFW order. It could have easily been FWD and then people would understand how big Fort Worth is. We're a relatively large land mass, 354 miles, not as big as some county libraries across the country. But that is how our growth is happening. It's happening in sprawl. We don't have a ton of density because to the north, south and west of us, there's nothing but land. And so as we grow, we are growing in those directions to the east of Cursus Dallas. So we're land locked in that direction. And then we have 15 library locations that's not nearly enough for the population we serve or the size of our city, something that we're working on and something that was in the back of my mind as we talked about this new location that we're gonna present to you today. We have about a $22 million budget and a little over 200 staff. This is the breakdown of Fort Worth, the city. And then we're gonna talk about a specific neighborhood. So we are a minority majority city and we have a medium household income of about 60,000 which is slightly higher than the state of Texas but on track with the rest of the country. And then the family income is a little lower than the state of Texas. As with so many large cities, we have a gap between the very wealthy and the very poor. But really what I want you to understand about Fort Worth which is really happening across the state of Texas but I'm not sure that people outside of the state understand the growth that's happening here and how big our cities really are. I didn't understand it until I moved here. So what I want you to see is our growth since 1960 and how quickly we have grown since the year 2000. We have approximately 20,000 new people moving to Fort Worth per year. That's a lot of people per year. That is a huge number of people. And so as you can imagine, the city has been grappling with this rate of growth for a long time. And you can see that when you look at how few libraries we have in the newer areas of growth which is not something we're gonna get into in this presentation, but impacts us and our ability to serve our public on a daily basis. Just to orient you a little bit to Fort Worth so you can see to the east is Dallas and like I said, we are landlocked but then if you look west and north and south you can see, I mean there's little towns but those are being annexed into Fort Worth. We are pretty far north. We're only about what, Maryland? Two and a half hours from the Oklahoma border, something like that, maybe less, maybe more like an hour and a half from the Oklahoma border. An hour and a half. So yeah, we're pretty far north which no one told me before I moved here which means that it's relatively cold here in February. It's not Nebraska cold, but it's a little colder than I thought I was gonna get when I moved to Texas. Is there snow? Well, we had, well, okay, we had, so Tracy's nodding and Marilyn's nodding but I'll tell you, we had snow over the weekend. You had Texas snow. I mean, yeah, there were flakes coming from the sky but they barely stuck. Although I'll say outside of the city I think they stuck a little bit more than they did where I live. Yeah. So one last thing I'll say about this map before I move on. If you notice, and I don't know if you can see my cursor but if you notice this highway of 820, that is the loop that's called the Loop of 820. The vast majority of our branches are inside the loop. We only have four locations outside of the loop. And when you look at how big the city is outside of that loop, it really highlights how much we're underserving our new areas of growth. And that does lead into what we're gonna talk about with our location in Las Vegas Trail. Okay, so Krista, oh there. So this is the area of town, sorry, I forgot there was a flying graphic. This is the area of town that we're gonna talk about today. It's an area called Las Vegas Trail. Don't be deceived by the name. It's not flashy, it's not nice. It is one of the most economically depressed areas in the city. And you notice that it's on the eastern end and that'll be an important part of what we talk about going forward. Okay, so this is the moment that Krista should get her the video ready, but as she's doing that, let me just talk through the demographics of the trail, Las Vegas Trail, not enormous. There's only about 11,000 residents. Of course, that's a moving number. It's a lot of rental properties. It's quite a young area with the median age being about 29 years old. But what I want you to notice is that 60% of the residents are considered very low income and that the majority of residents are renters. And with that, we'd like to show you a video that will really help you understand the Las Vegas Trail area and Krista is gonna help us step it up so you can hear the audio. You should see it. There we go. Poverty is a big issue at this school because we are in the area we are. A lot of our parents are just trying to survive or have come from the poverty cycle themselves. I mean, if you drive, you just look out your window, you see the drug and you see the violence. It's terrifying. I wanna take them all home that I can. I do see a high rate of abuse in all of the different forms. Mental abuse, emotional abuse is prevalent as well as physical abuse. And then we have quite often sexual abuse as well that we have to handle. We see kids arriving to school hungry. We see kids arriving at their dress in the morning, the biggest problem is take care of those basic needs. So when we see our kids walk in, we realize, all right, it's time to help these kids feel nourished. This is a safe place. But out on the streets, it's very different because they're surviving. There's a lot of students who pick up their four, five, and six-year-old siblings and it's a primary. And then they all walk home when they try to read. And you look at them and you say, you're a fourth grader. You should be able to read this very well. But then you have to understand from where they came and why, hey, they might not be around to you every night. They're dealing with surviving every night or getting to a safe place every night or finding the next meal or helping home. Quite frequently, the kids come to me and disclose, we were evicted last night. We're living in the car. And that's when we get them to the correct resource. And a lot of the resources, unfortunately, do a drug test. And quite frequently, our parents cannot pass that test and their court cannot get that service, which then keeps that child out of the home and in the car. Just teaching them the basic social skills and understandings of life, conflict management, of anger management. The example at home is, I'm angry. Marissa, I'm frustrated. I need a second. Give me a minute. And then the parent coming back. The hope is that we ignite within our student the new idea of a different style of life. It's about the beginning, giving them that hope. Hey, there's something different out there. The timble in the water, we take our fourth graders and fifth graders and to see their eyes, you know, wow. This is me. And it's a whole new perspective. They're right to have been open. These kids need somebody to invest in them because they have no neglect and abandonment. They deserve less just as much as anybody else until we can come together and stop this cycle of violence and drugs. We're gonna continue to battle this, but to battle on, I mean, we have to. So as I'm getting my screen back, that was a little choppy for me. So I don't know if it was choppy for everyone else, but I hope that you got the gist. I know, that's always how it is, Krista. You know, Krista and I knew we were taking a risk showing you a video, but I think it really helps illustrate what the community looks like. And when we do the, we put up the archive, I'll put a link to that video as well. So if anybody does wanna know about themselves again, you'll be able to see it. Okay, great. So now I wanna flip a little bit away from Las Vegas Trail and talk to you about why I thought it was important that we focus on Las Vegas Trail as a potential service area. Obviously there's a need, but as a library director, I believe that part of my role is to think higher than just the immediate need. And one of the reasons Tracy is here today is to talk to you about serving the community directly. But for me, when I got here in September of 2017, I set up meetings with all the city council members and the council member over this district, he has our busiest library in his district. He at the time had two. And all he, okay, so let me flip to the next slide because this will illustrate to you what it was like to meet with him. This is a direct quote from council member Brian Byrd when I met with him in the fall of 2017. After this, he asked me about pornography on library computers. And that was pretty much our entire conversation. With him telling me he doesn't use the library and asking about access to pornography. Now I learned later that his wife runs a nonprofit that tries to combat sex trafficking. So I understand now where that question came from, but at the time, I left, and Marilyn knows this, I left that meeting thinking, oh man, we have a challenge in front of us. This guy doesn't even know that he has the busiest library in his district and he doesn't seem to care. And we have to get past this with him. So I started thinking about what's important to him. And I think this is where it gets a little, sometimes people feel like this is where it gets a little dirty, right? Because our sole focus should be on helping the community. And I believe that's true, but we can only help the community sometimes when we play the political game successfully. And so our problem at the library is not just this particular council member. And I feel bad saying negative things about him at this point because we've, things have changed so much since I put this presentation together, but I'll get to that later. But it's good to understand where things started and because I'm sure many people have this, this is so common unfortunately in many communities. Yeah, I think that's fair. And the preview is he's now running for mayor and I'm so glad that we put all this time and energy into him because I think that's gonna pan out well for us. But back to the fall of 2017 when things felt kind of like a dead end with him. And as I was looking at the library, so what I want you to notice here is on the far left it says Walsh Ranch Parkway. And then the map ends on the right at the Ridgely Library. The Ridgely Library, and remember we're still in that eastern part or that western part of the city and there's the loop of 820 about halfway through. The Ridgely Branch was open in 1967 and renovated in 2012. And it is our western most location. However, the city goes all the way to that Walsh Ranch Parkway. That is a new development. And at this point, the end of the city but guaranteed to not be the actual end. The city will continue to annex closer and closer to Marilyn's house despite her wishes and the growth that keep happening towards the west. Maybe even all the way to California. So we have a problem. We have people who are 15 miles west of our western most branch. This Ridgely Library is in that same council member's district. So we have an access issue in his district that he doesn't really know about. But what he does care about and what I learned in the fall of 2017 is he cares about the Las Vegas Trail area. And he helped form this nonprofit called LVT Rise, Las Vegas Trail Rise, which was to help improve the lives of people living in Las Vegas Trail. So after that, when I realized that sort of this became my goal, right? Get Brian Bird, council member Brian Bird to advocate and become a champion for the library by putting something in his area that he cares about that will then bleed over into everything else in his district. The other two libraries, which are so important, and to get him to stop saying to me, my family doesn't use the, although I don't care if his family uses the library or not, but I wanted to get away from the spirit of what he was saying to me in that first meeting. And I think for many people, something that they have to understand, it's okay if your family doesn't, but other people do, and as someone in your position, it's your job to be aware of that. It's something that people do use and need support. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. It's always helpful when they're library users because they understand how it works. But I think that Pew showed us with their decade long study that people don't have to use us to be supporters. So I don't focus on that. But it's really what he was saying to me with that statement that I'm trying to get away from. Okay, so now I'm gonna turn it over to Marilyn to talk about the solution we came up with at this time. Okay, so as Mania said, we focused on the Las Vegas Trail area because that was absolutely important to Brian Byrd. And our western most branch was Ridgely. While Las Vegas Trail isn't that much further west, it is further west, and especially in this community where transportation is problematic, it made a lot of sense. And so as Mania said, killing two birds with one stone, this became our solution. We, before I start about where the solution, where we put this little bitty library, things to remember. And I won't take very long because what you really wanna hear is Tracy and the impact that this little library made. So I'll be quick, but it's important when you're looking at ways to stand up a small library or a large library, it's important to remember a couple of things. You always need to have partners. You need to make sure you have all the right people in the room. You need to know your audience and you need to obviously know a timeline and a budget. So for us, our timeline was less than three months. That's not very long to stand up a little library, but that's how important it was for us, for the reasons Mania's already mentioned. We were very fortunate in the partner avenue. We had two great partners to help us do this. We had the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Tarrant County. That's the county that the city of Fort Worth is in. And we had the Fort Worth Public Library Foundation. Our budget was extremely small, which we got completely from the foundation. We had $22,000 and our little library was 450 square feet. So extremely small and you think in your head, how in the world can we provide any services in 450 square feet? But we did. On a budget of 22,000. In fact, we didn't even use the whole 22,000. We had two thousand. Sorry, do you want me to start flipping through the pictures? Not quite yet. But I'll let you know. Okay, you tell me when. Okay. So we didn't need, we had $2,000 left in our budget. We met our, we had our first meeting on January 7th of 2019 and we had our grand opening on March 21st of 2019. And it's all due to the hard work of the team, the library of team and the partners who helped us. So you can go ahead. So you can flip, Mania. So Cambridge Court is an apartment complex. It spans across the street and it has two clubhouses and the Boys and Girls Club had one of those, one of the clubhouses was not being used. And so the Boys and Girls Club was using two thirds of that clubhouse for their after-school programming. And we partnered with them to use a third. And so you can see in this slide, there were two rooms that they were not using. And we came in and said, we can make this, we can make this work. Now our initial was we were gonna segment the library into two rooms. One was about 250 square feet and the other was 200 square feet. And the great partnership we had with the Boys and Girls Club, they said, why don't we just tear down a wall and we'll cover the expense. So when I say it's extremely important to have great partners. So if you wanna flip, Mania, to the next slide. Oops, that's not, this is what they did for us. They took out the middle wall and we had one great big room. Big room I say, 450 square feet, but it was bigger than two little rooms. And most of our budget was not used on furniture. All this, the shelving, everything you see here, we went to other branches in our, in the system. And we pilfered because we had $22,000. And we wanted most of that to go to the collection so that, and to public computers. So in this 450 square feet, we had five public computers. We had a great collection. These, where those tables are, where the public computers are, if you'll see on this picture to the left, there's a, what it is, is an old book drop. We did not use it as a book drop, but that's where we put one of the public computers. We used every square inch of this 450 square feet. You can go to the next one, Mania. So grand opening day, we, there were two entrances or there were two doors to this clubhouse. One was for the Boys and Girls Club, one was for us. And it was pretty exciting. One of the things I would say when I mentioned know your audience, we really thought, and Trace, you'll talk about this in a few minutes, we really thought because transportation is problematic that the people that use this little library would come from the apartment complex and nowhere else. Maybe a block away, but when Tracy talks, we were quite surprised at where people came from for this little bitty 450 square foot library. And so it was pretty exciting. But March 21st, our grand opening day, and right there cutting the ribbon is council member Brian Verde, who truly was. Mania did a great job in him seeing the value of opening up a library. And to her point, it was extremely important that we place this library in an area that was important to Brian Verde. Next, and these are just pictures of what it looked like when we did the grand opening, public computers. The next slide shows the collection. Ed, when I say we use every square inch, we use every square inch. And Tracy can tell you about how she used everything. So now, without further ado, Ms. Tracy Lane. Hello, everyone. I wanna point out the little lady in the pink bathrobe because she's very important. I'm gonna introduce you to her shortly. But so this was Cambridge Court Library opening day. And as Marilyn said, pleasant surprise that we have, we were expecting a lot of people from the immediate community. There are over 40 apartment complexes within the square area. But there were a lot of people that came from all over the city that were just curious about, what is this Cambridge Court Library? Where did y'all come from? So we had a lot of people that were visiting just to find out what we were about. These wonderful people that were in the slide previously to that were Danny and Andrea. Danny is a long time forward public library user. He was formerly homeless, but in coming to the library, he was able to get in touch with a lot of people and get connected to resources. He now has an apartment. He actually lives right next door to the apartment complex of Cambridge Court. And this is his lovely wife Andrea and they have been long time for public library supporters. As soon as they found out I was next door, they've been hanging with me ever since. So they've been definitely one of our favorites and one of our well-loved library supporters. In the next slide we have here, the lady that is at the table signing up for a library card is the same lady from the pink, with the pink back row. That is Miss Manuela Perez. She is also a long time tenant of the Cambridge Court Apartments. I had a wonderful, developed a wonderful relationship with her. She has an awesome story. She's a cancer survivor. She also hosted Bible study in her apartment complex. And she was also looked at and referred to as like the grandmother of the complex. As was mentioned before, a lot of the tenants and people in the community are very young. There are a lot of hard situations that they go through. She's the go-to for the complex. They call her the Avonita of the complex. And she's really precious and wonderful. And we can go to the next slide. Right here, these statistics mark the first 100 days at Cambridge Court Library. We opened the average attendance is 32 people. Within that first 90 days, we had 3,053 people walk through those doors. I felt every bit of it. But it was a wonderful experience. We normally have, it's usually about, as you can see, 401 teens, 160, 401 youth, 160 teens. Most of those numbers are from working in conjunction with the Las Vegas Trail Boys and Girls Club as we were sharing the building. I worked very closely with them and we intertwined and worked on many programs to keep the kids busy and enriched and encouraged and educated. We have over 247 adults. I had quite a few adults. That was another surprise as well. We were expecting more children from the community because I also have a lot of schools that are in the surrounding area. But we had a lot of adults come and visit Cambridge Court. Many of them were coming to sign up for social services, look for jobs. I also had college students as well on the undergraduate and graduate level that will come daily to do their assignments and all of that. We also had over 49,916 items were checked out. I felt every bit of that too. But it was wonderful. But just to give you just a breakdown in the day-to-day of Cambridge Court, I would describe it as controlled chaos. I will have a couple of little's in one corner working with the magnetals. I'll have students doing their homework. I have adults at the computers doing their homework, assigning up for social services. And it was all one big happy family. Of course, as you know, working with a lot of children at the time, the Boys and Girls Club had over 100 children registered. We had the little's between three to five and the teens from six to eight. So as you imagine, a lot of chaos, but we had a lot of support from the community and the adults didn't mind too much. They were just glad the kids had somewhere to come in a positive environment to be in. These lovely people right here are April and Dakota, Albert. They are a word, long time residents of Cambridge Court Library. Dakota has many health ailments, one of them being he has vision impairment. He lost his sight as he got older. Dakota is in his mid 20s at this time right now. His mother April is his caretaker. And growing up, she developed a love of reading for him. He was above picture books and board books. She would read Shakespeare to him until this very day, even though he has his sight is impaired, he can recite to you different standards and poetry and plays from Shakespeare, from memory. So they were very glad when we moved open Cambridge Court, they were also had issues with transportation, so they weren't able to get to the other libraries. This was their connection and they were just overcome with emotion when we opened up that they feel finally connected. They were great supporters of ours and continue to do so through working and coming to the library, they were able to get other resources together and April is now a first time homeowner. So they are doing well now. And our next slide. This is my little lady here. This is the lady in the pink cat row. This is Manuela Perez. I wanted to show you this picture because her daughter dyed her hair pink because they just realized, they just found out that once again, she has survived cancer. There was no evidence of it. So she dyed her hair pink to celebrate and commemorate Dick Aging. Beautiful pink hair, I love it. Yes, yes. So another thing is with Manuela Perez, she would also come to the library and use our database resources to study for her GED. I know a lot of seniors are kind of skittish sometimes about using technology in the computers. We eased that process and she became a pro at it. So, and she is continuing to work on that to this day. And the next slide. I think that is it, Tracy. I can take it from here. I just want to jump in and remind everyone, if you have any questions or comments, if you want to ask of Tracy or Monty or Marilyn, type it into your questions section. We'll ask that anytime. And we'll make sure we get through everybody's questions if you have them. We do, we're not anywhere near the end of the show. I'll tell you, I didn't want anyone to panic, but I think that we officially are 10 to 11 a.m. first time. If you have questions, comments, we're solving discussions. We'll keep going as long as everyone needs to until we have everyone's questions answered. So do type into the questions section or anything you want to know more about. Thank you, Krista. And thank you, Tracy. I hope what you all see is why we chose Tracy for this assignment. She is just the perfect person to work in that community. And it's, you know, we're not going to talk really about COVID today. I don't think it's particularly germane to this project. But I will mention that when we close all the libraries in mid-March, we of course close Cambridge Court as well. And we've never reopened it because it's just so small that Tracy would really only be able to have one person in there with her. And so we decided just to wait until we opened in the new location. So Tracy hasn't been with her peeps out there since March of 2020. But, and here is the new part of this presentation since PLA, which is to talk about why this matters. Again, obviously it matters because of the work that Tracy is doing and the need in the community. But for me, the long-term goal was always to have a permanent library in Las Vegas Trail that Brian Bird, Council Member Brian Bird asked for. So the entire time I was willing to permanently close Cambridge Court if we did not have the funding to continue. Or, and this is what I haven't mentioned before, LVT Rise, that nonprofit that Brian Bird is the Board Chair of purchased an old YNCA building. I can't remember what it was called. My apologies, I don't think it matters. But you can see how close it is. So Cambridge Court and the new LVT Rise Community Center are 0.1 miles away. And it had always been planned that LVT would renovate this old YNCA that you see here and stand up a community center. And the Boys and Girls Club, which they were with us at Cambridge Court, they were gonna move over to their new permanent location inside this new community center. Tracy, if it wasn't, if you didn't catch this from everything she was saying, she was the sole staff person at the Cambridge Court Library. She was all by herself. And so she- I did have someone asking about like who else worked there and how did that all? So she was alone, but don't worry, she wasn't actually alone. We matched the hours of the Boys and Girls Club. So she was only there with the door unlocked for the public when they were also there in case something happened. And that was for security reasons. So she was alone, but she wasn't, she wasn't alone in case of an emergency, but she was the sole library staff person at Cambridge Court. So when the Boys and Girls Club moved out and into their permanent home here at the Y, Tracy would actually be all alone and we were prepared to close the Cambridge Court Library permanently. However, my hope was always that we would prove success and that there would be a clamor for us to also move into this community center. I did not think it would happen in the first phase because the Boys and Girls Club was scheduled to go in what they're calling construction phase two. However, one day, and this must have been at the end of 2019, I inserted myself, I do this a lot. There were these Las Vegas Trail meetings at City Hall that I was not invited to but found out were happening and I just started going to them. And they were with the council member and I would sit on the outside and I talked to my assistant city manager and I said, I'm gonna start going to these. And he said, okay, but don't make any promises and don't talk because you're not part of this project and we don't have any funding for you to be a part of it. And so one day I was at one of these meetings sitting on the outside, not at the table. And one, they were talking about the phasing and the construction and what they were gonna put in this community center. And all of a sudden it happened. The chief of staff for council member Brian Byrd said, why aren't we having a library in there? And just like that, everything changed and Brian council member Byrd turned and looked at me and he said, yeah, why don't we have a library in there? And then everyone started talking about having a library in there. And that's when I said, oh, we'd love to be a part of this project. And it snowed bald from there. So now I'll turn it over to Marilyn to talk about our transition into this new community center with our permanent branch library. Yay. So it is extremely exciting. Again, partnering has been fantastic for us and that Brian Byrd has now come to realize how fantastic libraries are. And what Manu said was originally we thought, so there's a building behind the building you see on the slide. We thought we were gonna be part of phase two which would be in the building that you can't see. And as this transpired, we became part of phase one. And so now we are inside this building and we've doubled in size. Tracy's so excited. Instead of 450 square feet, we're 900 square feet. It is two rooms. 450 square feet, still the library portion but now we have a computer room. And so if you wanna go to the next slide, Mania. Well, that is what it's gonna look like. That's a conceptual drawing of after they get all the construction done and the front entrance. This is also a conceptual drawing. So the library and you'll see it here in just a second but is there in the middle? You'll see the shelving there on the right. And I think the next slide is actual and that's our library. So that's before the furniture arrived. Again, partnerships are so fantastic. So the Fort Worth Public Library Foundation graciously again, bought all of our furniture. And so when you see it's, we are ready to go. Next slide, Mania. There's all of our furniture. What's super exciting is that we've also stood this up pretty quickly as well. I mean, the construction part took a while but when it was time for us to start moving in, we have really stood things up pretty quickly. We are this week, which Mania doesn't have pictures of this, but this week, the City of Fort Worth Network is will be live today, actually this afternoon. We're moving all the computers, the hardware that were at Cambridge Court. They've been sitting there since March are moving on tomorrow. So, and I know that part of the collection showed up yesterday, I believe, and we will be ready to open our new permanent location, which is still in the same area as Cambridge Court. So our residents don't have to walk any further. Well, maybe a little further, but not very far. Tracy will still get to see everyone. Our hope is, not our hope, but we plan on opening the 21st of this month. Super exciting to have a permanent location for the residents of Las Vegas Trail. I think there's a, is there another slide, Mania? Oh, that, we have our barn door. That's the entrance into the computer room from the actual library location, and that is our little computer room. We will have laptops, those are not there yet, but we'll have laptops for the public to use during the training. And Tracy will have another staff member. She will not be by herself. Yay. So it's very exciting. And this is a community space that's inside the community center that we're gonna be able to use for programming. So not only is our library bigger, but we'll have space to program in if Tracy wants to do some large scale programming. So we're not confined to just the 450 square feet. I think that's, I think that's the last one. So I'll take it back from here. I was gonna to let everyone know that Tracy has support. So she's not gonna be all alone. We're gonna be going from 30 hours to 40 hours. I will tell you that I was unsuccessful in getting more funding for additional staff so that we could mirror the hour, our normal hours at the rest of our locations, which is predominantly six days a week and about 12 hours a day. We're not at that right now with COVID, of course, but we will get back there. I don't have the staff with the funding. And I think it's really, I'm just gonna continue to work on getting that. Some things that have happened in the last week is that our mayor says she's not gonna run again. So council member Brian Bird is running for mayor and his chief of staff, the one who turned to me and said, why don't we have a library? He's now running for the council seat that Brian is vacating. So I have all of these lessons learned from here, but really what I wanna say, two main things to everyone is that one is, I think it's really important that we as library staff, that when we have those initial encounters with decision makers and stakeholders that seem negative, that we don't let that get to us. I see that happen so often that people get really upset. Why doesn't he understand? Why don't we have enough money? Why don't we have all the political clout? Well, the reality is that we don't. And I don't know how to say that any differently, but with some people, we just don't have the cachet that we need or that we should have. And getting upset and getting defensive doesn't really get you anywhere. And I think that, yes, this took almost three years to get to this point, but I'm playing the long game here. And if Brian Bird wins mayor, that's only good for all of the work that we've been doing. The three of us and everyone else in the library has been doing around making sure that he understands how important the library is in this community. And then the other thing is, we're hearing a lot around COVID, don't waste a good crisis. I think this is really true. The reason we didn't really have to talk about COVID with this project is because it didn't stop moving forward. I mean, yeah, we all took a little pause in March and April, but we've been moving forward on this project this entire time. And that's the only reason that we're able to open this month. And you can be sure, I just remember that I was being recorded on a public webinar. Did you see me augment my language? You can be sure that when we open the doors to this new library, there is going to be a ribbon cutting and mayoral candidate Brian Bird is gonna be there. And we're gonna walk him through it. And because he's running for mayor, there's probably going to be press there that wouldn't have been there normally. And so it's all because of sitting at the table, forcing yourself to the table, not getting upset. And then of course, putting the right person, like Tracy, in the space to do such incredible work with the community that we're as successful as we are. And so that is our project and we're so proud of it. And thank you all so much for coming today. Yeah, you should be that. That was awesome. Yeah, I mean, the new location is gonna be amazing, but even the old, the first one was just a miracle and awesome that you did that. I do have some questions coming in. So anybody does have questions, we still have officially like five-ish minutes till 11 o'clock, but we'll go, as I said, as long as it takes, we do not get cut off right at 11 a.m. Although as long as people are discussing, asking questions, answering questions for you guys, and however. So thank you so much, Mania and Marilyn and Tracy. This was awesome. Great to hear about this tiny library in a big city. And this is the kind of thing that I think people need to, it's thinking outside the box and doing that advocacy for the library's advocacy and persistence and networking. It's something that we all just gotta keep doing for our libraries. So you're opening, doing a grand opening, grand opening on January 21st is our, you guys opening for actual business, there's still restrictions due to COVID for everything across the city is that, so that's gonna be kind of open, but. Well, so we're different than a lot of places and around the country. We have had half of our locations with doors open to the public since June. So we have currently eight locations that are open to the public. Tracy, I believe is sitting in one of them right now. She's at the Ridgely Branch, I think. And so we're in limited hours. We're Tuesday through Saturday, when normally we'd be six days a week and we have limited occupancy. And of course, we're doing temperature checks and screening questions and masks required. But I'll tell you, I'm so proud that we've been open. We're the only large library system in Texas that has doors open to the public. And we have about approximately 20,000 people a month walking into our eight locations, which is of course a tiny fraction of our normal gate count for a month. But it's still, and we have curbside everywhere. So the curbside's an option and people are still choosing to come in our doors. So when we say open, we mean open. I don't know, Tracy, I assume we've talked to occupancy limits for this space, but I don't know what they are, do you? So the occupancy limits for Rise will be three patrons for now. And that's just starting out. And so we officially opened the computer room portion and get that going, but just starting out, it's gonna be three patrons at a time. Sounds good, all right. We have a couple of questions that came in earlier that had to do with how the working at the library staff areas, like managing the library worked for the previous location, which I think though we'll feed into now your new one. So I think the questions are just fine. So are there any, I didn't see anything in the pictures, but are there any staff work areas there for like managing incoming materials and things like that at the location or is that done elsewhere? And then how's that all handled? I mean, there's a shared kitchen, I believe at the new community center that Tracy can use, there are shared bathrooms. So those kinds of opportunities, but no, Tracy's gonna process right in the library. You wanna- Yeah, y'all pretty much saw where the magic is gonna happen. The location you had to just work in the area at work in the space. Yes, yes. But they are going, they do have a community office. If I do need to use it for meetings or anything with a staff or the community, that will be available to me. But y'all pretty much saw where all the magic is gonna happen. This is, I mean, for us in Nebraska and Mania would know that or anyone has been in a rural state, that's like some of our individual independent public libraries. There is, it's a one big building or maybe one building, one room, and that's it, there isn't a staff area behind the scenes through a door. It is what it is, yeah. So to me, that's very reminiscent and common, but I know people in other larger cities might think, no, there's gotta be a staff area. You go back here to do your technical processing in your catalog. No, no. Yeah, well, Tracey doesn't do any catalog. When someone needs help, you stop what you're doing and you help them and then yeah, a lot of multitasking. Yeah, and you know, we're, because we're a large library system, Tracey's not gonna do any cataloging or technical processing. I mean, what we're talking about with what Tracey is gonna do is check in, check out. Sure. Shell, I mean, it's, you know, that's what happens in all of our branches. We don't do, all that stuff is centralized for us. Sure, sure. And another question came in, did you do it the previous location and will you at this one do any sort of interlibrary loan of sharing materials because, or did the immediate collection in the building meet everyone's needs, which they never really do, but. We did offer and have access to interlibrary loan and I had quite a few patients that actually took advantage of that. Also, in addition to our forward public libraries, we had what we call our MetroPAC libraries, which we exchange materials with as well. So whatever I didn't have onsite, I was able to order and get materials for the patrons that way. From another branches in the city? Yes, yes. We have a, she's talking about a consort, we have a consortial agreement with I think four or five other cities that touch borders with Fort Worth. But, you know, we have 14 other locations and we have a healthy enough budget that I would think for the most part, folks could just place holds and pick them up at the Cambridge Court Library and wouldn't need to do interlibrary loan quite as much? Mm-hmm, sure. Because you've got so many, so many resources, yeah, absolutely. And I might have missed this. Is the name of this one gonna be the same name coming over or you got a new name for the location? Yeah, I don't know the answer to that, but now that we know we're opening very soon, we should probably figure that out. Um, we, I like to say that we, everyone knows who works at the Fort Worth Public Library knows that my mantra is we do things slow and right and not fast and wrong. That's really important to me. However, sometimes things happen quickly and we have to adjust. And I mean, I think it's probably RISE, RISE Community Library, a RISE Library, Tracey's nodding. Did we already pick it and I've forgotten? Yeah, I believe it's RISE. RISE. Because of the location that it's at, okay, cool. RISE Library? Is that what it's called? You should probably know that. Yes. Yes, RISE Library. And it's not an acronym for anything, it's just RISE. Right, because it's the area, yeah. All right. Any other cool, desperate questions anybody wants to ask? That's everything that we had. I just asked there, we're a little after 11 o'clock so we can wrap up who want to. But if anybody has anything desperate you want to ask of them, get it now. I'm sure you can always reach out to Tracey, Mani, and Marilyn if you do have the future questions. As I said, we are recording the slides here. Mani, if you email those to me, I can include them in the record in the archive page as well. So we'll have a link to the slides. We'll have a link to that video too that I had shared earlier so you'll be able to watch that if you didn't come through clearly through our recording. Sometimes you had to do these things online. You just, it is what it is, but we'll have a link to it for you. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having us, Chris Ben and the Nebraska Library Commission and thank you to everyone. We're really proud of this project. If you ever come to Fort Worth, let us know we'd love to give you a tour. Yeah, definitely. When I can travel again, absolutely. Yeah, it was great to see you again Mani. You know, like I said, like you said, this is a session from the PLA conference. A lot of, oftentimes when Compass Live, I look out and looking to see what conferences have happened in person and help to spread the word about anything going on. And this one, of course here, like I said, we've got a lot of rule when I see tiny in the title of something I'm like, ooh, and it catches my attention. And then I saw Mani's name and I'm like, oh, well, for worse, I have to reach out to these guys. Yeah, so this was great. Thank you so much. Someone's saying, thank you so much. So a wonderful presentation. Really enjoyed it. Lots of great, useful information, I think, for everybody who may need to do something similar in their community, large or small. This is the kind of thing anyone can use, absolutely. All right, I am going to bring presenter control back to my screen. There we go, get the right one up there. There we go, all right. So yes, as I said, we are recording and I'm going to pop back to our main Encompass Live page. If you do use your search engine of choice and just Google the name of our show Encompass Live so far, we're the only thing on the internet called that, so it'll just come up with our pages. No one else is ever allowed to use this name. And we've got our upcoming shows here, but right underneath is a link to our archives. This is where the today's show will be. It should be there by the end of the week with all the processing that needs to be done. It'll be at the top here, most recent ones at the top. We'll have a link to the recording on our YouTube channel, the slides and the video that was there. So everyone who attended this morning and registered for today's show, get an email from me letting you know when it is available. While we're here, I'll also show you, I talked earlier about how we have lots of topics and lots of shows in our archives are here. You can search our archives here for any topic you might be interested in and see if we've done a show about it. You can search the full archives or the most recent 12 months if you just want something really current. And that is because this is the full archives of Encompass Live, but I'm not going to scroll all the way to the bottom because that would be too far. This is our archives going back to the beginning of the show, Encompass Live premiered in January, 2009. So we're over 10 years and we've got all of our archives here going back to the very first show. We are librarians, we archive things, keep them for historical purposes, so we'll always have them out here. But just pay attention if you aren't watching any of our archives to the original broadcast dates. You'll see that's on here. Some of our shows, many of our shows will stand the test of time but some might not. Program services, websites might no longer exist, may have changed completely since when we first broadcast them. So just pay attention when you are watching them. But as I said, we are librarians, we're going to keep them up there as long as we have the technical capabilities to do it, we'll always keep our full archives available there. We do also have a Facebook page if you'd like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. We do reminders about upcoming shows, who our presenters are, when our recordings are available. So if you want to give us a like on Facebook, you can. We also use the en-comp live, little abbreviated hashtag when we post on Instagram, Twitter, whatever other social medias we use. So that was our today's show. Next week, we are off next week, we're taking it off. We did have a show originally scheduled for January 20th. We have chosen to push that off to a later date. Our one book, one Nebraska for 2021, a book called Prairie Forge is being rescheduled to a date in probably February. Just take my email, we don't know yet, we're getting in with our speakers. So that will be in January at some point. So look here for an update to that. But next week, we're taking the week off and we'll be back on the last Wednesday of the month with our pretty sweet tech, how to make tutorials in the screen recorder in webcam. So please do sign up for any of those upcoming shows. One last little reminder I wanna give is we also here at the Nebraska Library Commission we do our weekly webinar series. We also host an annual online conference, Big Talk from Small Libraries. This is, as I mentioned, rural and small libraries doing presentations, talking about what they're doing. And our call for speakers was extended through this Friday. So if you are a small or a rural library, FTE population served or FTE of 10,000 or less, put in a proposal and you'll maybe present on our Big Talk Small Libraries the actual conference is at the end of February. It's always the last Friday in February. So I just wanna remind everyone to get your presentations in there. Otherwise that will wrap it up for today's show. Thank you guys all for being here, all of you being with us this morning. This was great. I was glad to hear all about what you're doing and good luck. And I'm gonna keep an eye on your website where you're doing to see how your grand opening does. Maybe later on we can do an update on how things went in a year or so to see how, you know, check in with you all. All right. So thank you everybody for being here this morning. I hope you'll see you on a future episode of In Compass Live. Bye-bye.