 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event where we, I'll cover NLC activities and any sort of anything that may be of interest to Nebraska librarians as far as we're concerned. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. They are free and they are recorded for people who cannot attend live. We do a mixture of all sorts of things, presentations, interviews, book talks, anything we can come up with or that people want to talk about. Monthly, we have a new thing, just this year we started it, right? Yes. It's for the number four. We're starting December, actually. Oh, in December. Okay. This is the first one. Monthly Tech Talk with Michael Sowers, our technology innovation librarian here at the Library Commission where he talks about anything he's thought I think come up with in the past month. Technology related tech type things that people might be interested in and interview some interesting people as well in that same area. So what I'm going to do is just pass over to Michael to start his thing and we'll get going. And this is the fourth one. You're actually here this time. Sorry. She keeps coming up with really good excuses for not being in the room during my session. Excuses? No. Well. I want to be here. Okay. No. Some of them work with very good excuses. Yes. My name is still Michael Sowers. I am the technology innovation librarian here at the Commission and I want to welcome everybody back. We seem to be getting pretty good 10, 12 people each one of these. So have them fun and the recordings are being watched and listened to. In the last three, I've had somebody to interview and then I've kind of gone over news and errata sort of things and answered some Q&A. But this time I do have an interviewee but he will be joining us for the second half of the show due to some scheduling issues. He's got back to back meetings and was able to fit us in. He said, but I can only do it at 10.30. So in kind of a doing it backwards, I'm going to kind of go through some bookmarks, some things I found in the last three to four weeks that I thought people would be interested in and talk about. And then about 10.30, we should be pulling in David Lee King from the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library in Google Kansas. And I will explain why I called it Google Kansas when we get to David, I think. So with that, I would like to remind everybody that if you just have a general question about anything I'm covering or anything else, technology related, you think you want to try to get an answer on me while you got me cornered here on camera, feel free to just drop those into the questions area. We will be taking a look at those as we go through. And I have my bookmark list over here on the screen and I'm going to kind of scroll down to the bottom because these are in reverse chronological order here. I might skip some, might jump around a little bit, kind of depends on time and what sort of response we get. The first one is just a picture I found. And I have to show this, I just thought it was really interesting. This is a library that decided to scroll up there, feature their murder mystery section and so they taped a body outline to the floor. I would think that they got my attention. It says there, it's been drawing the public's attention to the library mystery section for several months. I really want to know if they got somebody to actually lay on the floor and put the tape on that way. I think they didn't have any pictures of anybody actually lying on the floor. Being made in the process. It's just a cute little marketing thing. I just thought that was great. I do keep track of and have a pool done on the right here. You'll see library signage. I started and run that on Flickr. I'm always looking at displays and signs and good, bad and otherwise in libraries. And I got them to add this when I thought it was just wonderful. And that's Steve Campion. I can't remember where, what library Steve is at. I really need to give him the appropriate credit and it doesn't say. Well, okay, we'll try bringing that up real quick. See, I should have, sometimes I bookmark this stuff and then I kind of forget about it until, uh, profile real quick. I know Steve, he is at, uh, hiking in, he's up in Washington state. So doesn't do, but I've, I've, I've done the Mount Rainier thing too. It's, uh, it's tall. There we go. Yes, I was hiking it in July and I was hiking over snow. It was fun. Yes, I was hiking on tundra. It was, it was kind of fun and very tiring. So, okay. So, uh, let's go back to my list. I just thought I'd share that with everybody. I, I should send a Steven note to say how wonderful that was. Um, okay. Here is an article from American libraries magazine that I found back and, uh, 10 technology ideas your library can implement in the next week. So in other words, you can, Hey, you know, what new can we do? What can we do, uh, what things can we do that isn't going to necessarily, uh, take up too much time and isn't necessarily going to involve a lot of technology and I don't want to spend, you know, a lot of times you can read the whole thing, um, for yourself, but just to run through some of the highlights here, create a library video tour and welcome to people 20 to your library 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So find yourself a camera, you know, you want to practice, find a phone that one of your staff has that takes video and practice and do a little tour of the library, put it up on YouTube, post it on the website, keep it under 10 minutes and, you know, uh, let people know what they can find in your library. If you have some ideas, I've seen lots of these on just on YouTube, you can go on YouTube and just do a search for like library tour and you'll find other libraries that have done this too. Yes. Yes. It's a very amusing ones. Um, look up zombies and libraries, you'll see some. Otherwise, um, use SMS to send patron alerts and notifications. In fact, I've got another little, uh, article kind of dealing with that SMS or simple messaging service, text messages, um, a lot of libraries are starting to do that. Um, and you don't need extra software for this. You can, um, all phones that get text messages. There is an email address that matches. So if you know their phone number, uh, you can send them an email to their phone as a text message automatically. So if your system offers, uh, notifications via email, if you can figure out, Hey, would you prefer to get it on your phone instead of on email, uh, you can kind of do that. That contact information. Um, and I'll just highlight the third one here and then let you read the rest of the article. Um, if you have a blog, uh, in your library and you're thinking about that whole Twitter thing, we've kind of talked about this one before, but you know, don't, you know, repurpose the content you can have. Your blog posts automatically go out to Twitter without any additional work beyond setting it up, which should take you maybe two or three minutes. So there are services out there that will do that. So, um, if you've, you know, you're already putting the content on one method, you can easily port it to another method without causing yourself a lot of work. So that's just the first three of 10 really great suggestions here. Um, I remember putting that up this time, I think on the, uh, commission blog or maybe it was my blog. I don't remember one of the, maybe it was the itard block. I run too many blocks. Anyways, uh, and I got several comments back saying, thanks, that's a great list, um, a lot of, a lot of really good ideas there to play with. Okay. So let's go back to my list. Um, so tied in with that, uh, Brian Herzog, who, uh, runs a blog called the Swiss Army Librarian, uh, he got an interesting question. And this is, this is one of those kind of food for thoughts sort of thing. And basically the situation was that, um, a patron said, well, okay, the library calls me when a book I've put on hold comes in and he said, uh, yes, uh, but it's, you know, it's computerized. It's not actually somebody dialing lots of people, which we used to do, but in his case, they've got an automated system to do that. Um, so the library, so the patient said, well, since it's a computer doing it, could you, um, set it up to be a wake up call for me? You know what he said? And his response, as you can see there is, um, no, but he goes on to think about it and he's, he's basically saying, well, okay, it's, you know, we've got this system, it's automated. We're using it for a service to say, Hey, your book has come in. Could we not theoretically use it as a wake up service? I could. Yeah. I mean, well, the chat library's job though, to be a wake up service. Okay. But it's the library's job to let kids play video games in the building. Yes. Okay. They're for entertainment and education and recreation. Okay. Teaching. I don't know about wake up. You don't know about wake up calls. I don't know. Um, you know, if you've got an opinion, I'm not really asking anybody to do this, but it's kind of that outside of the box sort of thinking. It's got me thinking, well, you know, why not? I mean, it's, it would, it would be marketing. It would get people to think about the library and the services that it offers promo for upcoming like program at the library, you know me. Yes. Maybe the wake up call is your wake up call at six a.m. And did you know that the book talk this to this week is I like this, see, you know, um, I don't believe any libraries actually doing this. I don't believe. But it's about thinking outside the box and you got, you know, your patrons are asking for something. Don't always dismiss it. Think, well, maybe. Yeah. So, um, you know, he even says there and when we could do something, I feel sad, bad saying no, but why not? So, you know, just something to think about. I, I, you know, this is, this is a lot of what I get on a blog is just, you know, things that make you go, you know, having a 90s flashback there. Okay. Um, to do, do, do, do, do, do. Okay. You're going to learn a little more techie here. Um, and this article from Gizmodo, which people don't know me, I read pretty faithfully, uh, is called the inside the excruciatingly slow death of internet explorer sex. Why, why is it still out there? Oh, I don't even want to get into that. I, I, I would. I would hope at this point that the computers in your library are, are no longer running internet explorer sex. Um, this tends to be a corporate environment situation where they don't want to update 30,000 computers and internet explorer sex works just fine, you know, with air quotes around it. Um, but I know we do have some larger institutions. I do know we have people that, that not in Nebraska that, that listen to this podcast and, and I want people to be aware that if you are running internet explorer sex, you've got some serious issues that you will potentially have to deal with. A lot of websites just won't work. And a lot of websites nowadays are actually starting to put warnings on it saying you are using internet explorer sex. If stuff works on our site, good for you, but we're not promising it anymore. There are security holes galore internet explorer sex. YouTube is, is starting to do that. They're starting to add some new features that will not work in internet explorer sex. It does not support a lot of features. And this is just something that, if you've got it and you're not in control of upgrading it, well, first of all, if you are in control of upgrading it, upgrade it yesterday. If you aren't, please start poking around online for other articles. This might not be exactly the best one, but I kind of like the illustration on what's wrong with internet explorer sex. It, it's been around for 10 or 12 years now. It is old software. So definitely something that you might want to, well, okay. They're, they're on internet explorer eight. A preview platform of internet explorer nine was released this week, and it's not even something that you actually like, as far as I can tell, download and install and use like a regular browser. It's, it's designed to kind of mock up the features and how it would work and, and this was announced again in about the last 48 hours. I haven't had a lot of chance to look into it, but yeah, internet explorer nine is coming out. And since that's been mentioned, I will mention that internet explorer nine will not work on Windows XP. They, they, they're cutting off Windows XP there. And I have another article about Windows XP and security holes, because I don't know who we might have in the audience still running Windows XP, but oh darn, there's been another security vulnerability found. And of course, this one applies pretty much only to Windows XP. And it involves the F1 key, the help key. Oh, nice. In most Windows programs, S1, F1 opens the help file. Okay. It turns out that in Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, which are all very old pieces of software at this point, if you get a message from a website that says, please press F1 for help, this can actually allow people into and infect your computer and take it over. That's simple. Help is, I know, like we now have to tell people to be scared of the help key. This, this is, this is why I can't stress enough, keep your computers up to date, and that may involve updating the operating system. Now, as far as I know, a security patch hasn't, you know, I don't know, when did I bookmark this? I bookmarked this about two weeks ago. There has been a set of security patches since then. If you are up to date on your security patches, you probably will be okay at this point, but that assumes that you updated last Tuesday. Right. If anything, if you, for whatever reason, can't go beyond XP or something, do your security patches, religiously, if you're going to have to still stick with an old, old system? Yes. Yes, definitely. I mean, I mean, security patches are important no matter what operating system you're using, especially Windows. Well, okay, they come from Linux and Mac, too. But yeah, especially if you are a version or two old, it's imperative, because in some cases they've fixed the problem in a newer version of the operating system, but the bug still hangs around in the old version of the operating system. So definitely something you want to keep in mind. Remember patch Tuesday, second Tuesday of every month, the patches come out from Microsoft. So keep an eye on that and make sure that you are up to date. And speaking of up to date, this is going really smoothly. Thank you, Krista. This is a, I, I think, well, things keep leading into the next thing. And yes, actually, I have lent here to Microsoft's official what's the word I'm looking for, the press release, that's announcement that basically says don't do this. Okay, so this is a piece of software I've not sure I've mentioned before. Um, security at PSI, our personal software inspector. This is something I use religiously. Now, this is not something you're necessarily going to run around any public machines constantly. Um, find a machine you can test it on, see how it works, but it is a program that will go through all of the software on your computer and let you know if any of it's out of date. And if there are any patches available. And in most cases, it will say, if you need the patch, click here, it will download the patch for you. You won't have to go to the individual websites to find it. And this program is free for non-commercial users. I'm thinking libraries are going to be okay. There is a version you can pay for, which can install on your network and run across your network. Probably overkill for most of our libraries, although maybe like in Omaha or Lincoln might be addressed in something like this. I run this on my machines at home. I run it on my spare machine, the laptop I have here at the commission. And I take it as a sense of pride that I have zero out of date pieces of software on my computers. Now, that being said, it might take me an hour every couple of weeks to do that. So there's, there's time involved. Yeah, how often would you want to be running? Well, the software itself, you can run it in the background all the time. And if, as you add software and take software off your machine, it rechecks it. And as you update, and it will tell you if you have unpatched security threats, or you can run a full scan of your system. So I was running in the background, take up a lot of like power from the computer and speed or and you don't want to play with it. No, it's just, it's another little background program. Now, I would not suggest say installing it and running in the background on your public access machines so that like halfway through a patron session, they a little thing that says, your computer is in a cigarette, blah, blah, blah, click here to fix it. Yeah, that'll just freak them out. So, or you don't want them fixing a problem on your computer. So, but what you might want to consider doing is maybe, you know, installing this when you, when you're doing some maintenance on your machines, installing it, running it, see what can update for you beyond the normal Windows patches. I've noticed like, you know, Flash constantly needs updating, the Adobe packages need updating. Just lots of little, it'll let me know it's, I don't run Skype all the time, okay? Skype will usually, when you run it, say, there's an update available, would you like to get it? Well, this will check Skype for me. So even if I haven't run Skype in a month, if there's an update available, it'll tell me and I can download the update. So you update for the next time you do use it. Right, exactly. So, you know, maybe install it on the public machines, get all the updates, install all the updates, and then tell it to close. And so it's installed, but not necessarily running it all the time. Something you might want to take a look at, I find it's a wonderful program. I've been using it probably a little over a year at this point. And yes, we seem to have a question. The sound is coming out. Time to time. I don't know what to tell you on the sound. Susie, right? Yes, Susie. It seems like everybody else is coming through. If other people are having sound problems, let us know. But kind of once we start these things, there's not much we can really do about it, but we'll keep an eye on it. According to our end, the audience is going out. Yeah, we haven't gotten any pop-ups yet. Will this work for Apple computers? No, as far as this is Mac, or excuse me, Windows only. Yes, platform, Microsoft Windows. Is there a Mac? Is there a Mac? I am the wrong person to ask. That would be something that maybe he'll mention, look for something for next time. Yeah, I could poke around. I'm definitely not a Mac person. I have nothing against Macs. I will say that for the record. I just, yes, a lot of our schools use them. I just don't have access to one, really. I had one to play with. Now, a Mac user would probably say that they don't need this. Because their software is always up to date. But no, I don't want to go there. This isn't the platform or more. Most of our audience, however, I know is using Windows except for the schools. There's no equivalent for Mac I'm aware of. If anybody in the audience knows of one, please feel free to send that along, and we'll be happy to take a look at it. And we'll try and do some research on our own. Yeah, I can poke around. I will write a note here. It's going to be a format for some sort of. Right, something. Okay. Okay, still waiting on David. He should be probably showing up in about five minutes, so. So what else? Oh, we're going to do a shout out. We're going to do a shout out. Library Journal Movers and Shakers 2010 has come out. And I'm a hot public. Yay. Amy and. Mania. Thank you. I have not met Mania. I know Amy got Movers and Shakers award for Library Journal this year, the only two in Nebraska. So everybody keep your eyes out for next year. We need more than two for their work. They've been doing with teens basically at Omaha Public. So thought we'd give them a shout out. I need to give Amy a call and say congratulations. I haven't had a chance today yet, but that was announced just this week. So I want to say, hey, give a shout. Read the article. Tom, congratulations. I'm sure they'll appreciate it. Okay, back to my list. I'll throw this one in here quick. A back to security, just a little bit there. A security firm did a study and the typical Windows users needs to Windows user, great advertisement. Go away. Well, I'll just mention it. Typical Windows machine needs to be patched basically once every five days. I'll skip this out, there we go. Did it work? Or did I repress back? Okay, we are crashing our browser. Yay, there it is. Typical Windows user patches every five days. So yeah, there we go. So when I say you should be patching once a month, don't complain too much because according to the study, you're probably supposed to be patching every five days. But they don't come out with stuff. Well, not from Windows. I mean, from all of the software that you may have on your machine. Oh, everything, not just from Windows. Everything, it kind of averages out. Something you have to patch. Yes, it averages out that there is something that you should probably be patching. Like updating Adobe, updating Java. Yep, exactly, every five days. Yes. It doesn't seem like that. Well, sometimes it's so easy because it just pops up and saying, he's updating, okay, fine click, boom, I'm done. I mean, it's not really. Run Secunia and you'll see all the stuff that you're missing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay, I do see, we do have David on, but there are two more things that I really quick want to mention. One is in case you haven't seen them, we are doing a short survey about how libraries in Nebraska are using social web or if you are at all. So basically we're just asking things such as, do you have a website? What's your URL? Do you have a blog? What's the URL? Do you have a Facebook page? What's the URL? Do you have my space page, et cetera. We're just trying to collect that data, see what people are doing out there. We're gonna create some lists out of it, things like that. We have a webpage that we've had for, I'm not sure how long, but that lists any libraries that we did know of that had things. But we realized not a lot of them, we didn't know. We have incomplete information. And we hear anecdotally, are we fine? Oh, so-and-so's got a Twitter, so-and-so finally set up a Facebook page. We decided, let's just do a more organized thing and just ask, let us know. This is not a requirement, just if you have one of these, let us know. And then we will, at a link to the page, we keep track of it, you'll be able to see what all the other libraries in Nebraska are doing and check out theirs if you're interested in Twitter or Facebook, whatever other people are doing to get your own ideas. Yep. Okay. I am going to attempt here, we have David Lee King. I am unmuting your mic. David, can you hear us? I can, can you hear me? All right, we can hear you just fine. In fact, though, I think we need to turn up our own speakers. But that's, oh there we go, yay. Yay. Okay, so I'm gonna switch over here to the homepage of the Google County Public Library. Well, I think we'll ask it about that in a minute. But so, David, you're a little pressed for time, I understand, so I really appreciate you for being on the show today. Can you tell us a little bit? Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about you, your library, and what you do there? Sure, today I'm going crazy. Yeah, David King, I am the digital branch and services manager at Topique and Shawnee County Public Library. If you translate that, that means IT manager, project planner, and in charge of all of our web services. So I've got staff under me that build and code and stuff like that, and I'm more the long range planner, the vision guy, this is where we wanna go, make it happen type of person. That's what I do in a nutshell. Okay, great, so there's several reasons I wanna talk to you, and full disclosure, Chris and I both know David quite well. We meet up at conferences and everything. And so some of these are loaded questions. We already have the answers, but we probably share. Oh, you know, I'm gonna throw this out here. I didn't ask you this one ahead of time, but what's with the Google logo over Topique and Shawnee County? Yeah, sure. Some of you might have heard of the Google Fiber Contest that Google is doing right now. I guess you could call it a contest. Basically, Google has said we wanna install extremely fast internet access, like if Japan, which has about the fastest internet access in the world is a 10, what they wanna install is a size 25 Google Fiber thing. And they are asking cities to tell them why they should do it in their city. And so Topeka has sort of taken that and run with it like crazy. Our mayor has unofficially renamed Topeka Kansas and Google Kansas for the month of March, so we thought we'd follow suit and remove Topeka from our logo and put Google over it just for kicks. Actually, yesterday we have a big four year grand entrance hall, we renamed it the Google Dome yesterday. Just for kicks, we have a sign up there that says that. And Topeka has actually taken this up and they're having a whole lot of fun with it. This Saturday we've got a planned event to have 500 or 1,000 people in white shirts. I think the spell Google with people in a park, they have a Facebook page that probably has about 20,000 people that have fanned it now. So lots and lots of activity, whether we get it or not, whatever, that'd be cool if we did because everybody would have faster internet access supposedly, but it's really shown how social networking, social media tools can really draw people together in a community and have us focus on one purpose and get it done. And we've gotten international exposure through this, so we're doing something right. Yeah, I think I saw a video online where another town in response to renaming Topeka Google said that all first born children coming up were gonna be named Google or something. Yeah, that's hilarious. And for the record, I do believe Omaha is trying to get this also. Omaha is also in competition with you. They've got a Facebook page. Yeah, I don't know if we're allowed to root for you. Yeah, well, we'll see what happens. Midwest rivalry. Yes, well, if you get it, I'm coming to visit. So, so with that, we do know that at your library, especially with you in charge of it, are doing a lot with social media on the library website and through the library. What sort of things are you doing with social media too, to get people to come to the library, promote the library, that sort of thing? Sure, well, on our website, we obviously, we have comments pretty much everywhere. A good chunk of our website is blog based so staff can write an article about something and then people can comment on that, which we do get comments, yay. We have instant messaging and text based ask a reference type services like many libraries do. And that's on the website. Oh, we also post videos off of the website. We have social media tools like a Facebook page that's a few Facebook pages actually that are very active. We are actively using a Twitter account. Our videos, we always post, pretty much we always post them into YouTube and then embed them on our site so we're in both places. We have a very vibrant Flickr account. We're getting a lot of people seeing, we have an art gallery as part of our library that's pretty well known regionally and we post our art in there or whatever we're showing in the gallery and we have people commenting on that saying, that's cool, can I do this? We've actually gotten people to donate stuff from photos in Flickr that we wanted actually. So lots of, basically we have a lot of conversations going on in many different places. I'm not so much interested in drawing people into the building necessarily because I'm a digital branch manager if they're hitting my Facebook page and doing stuff there and asking questions there, they are in my library. That's how I view it. Yeah, that's a great idea. The library isn't just a building anymore. It's more than that. So how, you said, staff can write an article. What sort of rules, policies, guidelines, cross your fingers and hope nobody does something wrong, sort of, sit down, wait, how do you run that? Yeah, well, first of all, I sort of treat that part of my job as I'm the executive editor so I can jump in and edit, delete, remove, whatever, anybody's stuff at any time. I've never had to do that, of course, but I could. Basically, we're set up with a lot of what we call subject guides. A lot of them will match our physical collection. We're moving our crew hood. We stuck all of our travel books from the various call numbers into that one section, put signage up, put a globe over there. It's our travel neighborhood, right? And so mirroring that on our digital branch is a travel blog or a travel subject guide. The person who's sort of in charge of babysitting the travel neighborhood is in charge of the subject guide or the blog. And so they have two or three people that help them. They post articles that are related to travel and related to our collection or something at our library. So they could post something, hey, we just got a new travel video in or whatever, and link to it, talk about it. Or they could say, I just went to see this salt mine in Kansas. And it was cool. Here's some photos. And here's a book that we have in our, same with our art gallery. They might say, hey, we've got a new gallery exhibit coming, here's a sampling of it. Here's the time and place, come see it. So it's that kind of stuff, so it's not just willy-nilly anybody posting about whatever they want. They tend to have a focus myself and a few other people are one of our web developers and a person in marketing. We'll teach classes on how to write for the web and how to write in order to get people to participate in that discussion that we're hoping to get. So we do have some pointers like that. And that's sort of what we're doing in that way. That's a, yeah, I'm glad you haven't had problems. Yeah. Well, as you generally, everyone, if you have working at your library, it's their job. They should, you know, they know what they're talking about in their area generally. So hopefully if you'd hire the right people, you know that they can do what they need to do. Well, yeah, that's it. Yeah, so let me ask you about a particular situation I know that's happened. I think it was in the last year, but maybe a little longer because I do know some other folks who live in Topeka. You guys didn't used to have fines, is that correct? Right. Yes. We haven't had them for 40 years. And you recently, last year or so, implemented fines. Yep. How did you, I'm assuming that not everybody was happy with this decision. How did the digital branch, how did the social media handle that, help hinder, make it easier, explain it? How did the social media work into that situation? Sure. Well, we used it in a number of ways. I think we posted a video explaining what we were doing. We also posted a handful of blog posts or articles discussing what we were doing, why we were doing it. And you can actually, somewhere on our website, you can find a blog posting with about 120 comments on there. Not all of them kind. In fact, in one of them, they called me a sarcastic library Nazi. It was sort of fun. And they called Gina, or Milsap, our library director names too. And actually, that's a very good example of what happens when comments go bad on our website. Yeah, I don't know if I can help you find it at the moment, but I could send you a link later, maybe. So we had some nasty comments and they were getting a bit personal. So another part of my job is stepping into that conversation and putting it back on track. I, in essence, had to tell the person through a private email and through another comment post, I had to say, hey, let's keep the focus on the topic at hand. You're getting too personal. If you continue this, I will delete your comment and block you from our website. So I told them that both in an email, because they actually had sent me their email address as part of our comment, just like most blog posting comments work. And also, I did a post, a public post, just to let everybody know what's going on. And they didn't have to block anybody, but this is an example where it's getting personal. I had to step in as executive editor or digital branch manager and say, hey, let's remember to play kind with each other. Be nice. And I had to do that a few times. It was pretty interesting. So you're not, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Well, okay. You go. You go ahead. Okay, I'm just gonna go. So you're not moderating comments in advance. You're basically letting anybody post whatever they want and then dealing with the issues as they arise. Yes, definitely. If we moderated comments, I'd love my staff, but some of them probably wouldn't get around to answering that comment until a week later. And because whoever posts the original blog posting, they are the ones that get the comment and can do stuff with it. So right now, if you commented on my post, I would get an email saying, hey, there's a comment here. If it was moderated, I would have to turn that comment on or do something with it. And if you waited a day or two to do that, you've killed the conversation. So yeah, we have a little bat word blocker that changes into little squigglies. And then other than that, we let it go and deal with it after the fact. And honestly, it was great in that particular posting and a few others because we could just say, hey, this person said this, they're incorrect, here's the right information. And I love it when people say something bad or wrong on our website because I am in complete control of that. I can take time, I can meet with our library director and say, what do we wanna say here and give the correct information once and not worry about a newspaper editing what I said down or something like that. So it's wonderful, I think. Instead of wrong or bad because sometimes you might not even have realized that people were thinking the wrong information until they said something at you through the blog or through something. So bad comments? Yeah, definitely. And what technical question for a moment, what software is running your website? What are you using on the back end of the blog? Yeah, right now it's Expression Engine to CMS. It's at ExpressionEngine.com. It's similar to Drupal. So another area I wanted to talk about because this is what actually prompted me to ask you to be in on this call was a blog post you wrote on your blog, DavidLeakking.com. And I will just point out that the tie in here is that, notice he runs the blog for the library, but he also has his own personal blog, which is a scenario I find myself in daily. And you had some opinions on personal accounts and work accounts. And I've heard many a discussion as to, well, you should definitely keep those two completely separate. Some people say it's totally impossible. Where do you draw the line? Maybe you could kind of tell us what you were getting at in this blog post with that concept. Yeah, sure. First of all, I'll just say up front, I draw the line at always just being DavidLeakking because I can't be anybody else. Really, that's just how I personally work. And I don't wanna keep track of that many passwords and usernames and be like, oh, this is my personal one. This is my work one. It just gets confusing. I hate having two email accounts. I'd rather just have one. But whatever, I have to deal with that. But a lot of people, when I do presentations or stuff, they ask me that type of question. Shouldn't we have personal and private and keep them separate? And I don't do this here and I do this here and people contact me when I'm at work or at home and they're all confused about it. So I thought, well, I'll write a blog post about that. And it's been sort of brewing for a while, but when I finally sat down to actually write it, I was like, well, is this really a problem? Because as I started working through it, I realized, well, okay. So people, friends call me at work. The problem there is it's perfectly fine to take a phone call, but it's not if I'm on the phone for five hours a day with that person. And that's not really anything to do with Facebook or whatever I'm on on the computer. The problem is more of a personnel issue, right? So that one's pretty easy to deal with. And then the other part of that, as I started looking at, well, like Facebook pages and Facebook, first of all, Facebook's rule is that you can only be one David Lee King in Facebook and they'll kill your account if they find out that you have two or three different accounts there. So that's one strike against personal and work, having separate things there. But it makes more sense to me just to be me there. It gets a little tricky when you have an organizational Facebook page because then you have to, somebody has to own that page. It's great until say I move on to another library or whatever and then I still own to peek his Facebook page. You can't transfer that as of now. I'm sure they'll change. I think we lost David's audio. Can you hear me? Okay, you're back. All right, all right. So that's sort of where I fall on that. Kind of a question I had, somebody posed to me though is, and maybe it's not even a question, but a point though is that if you do have that kind of personal website, but you do work somewhere else, you do definitely need to keep in mind that even though it might be your personal website and your opinions are your own, if you are a known entity at that other organization, people will, you gotta watch what you maybe post on your personal website because people might read it and realize where you were. Right. Is that a bad thing? Well, I think- It is if you're saying bad things. Well, that's maybe the point. I think it goes on with what David said about how your friends call, there's always been a crossover of work and personal. You go to the grocery store and if you work at a public library, someone's gonna come up to you and say, hey, I have a book at the library or do you guys have this? They're gonna do that. You as a person are gonna go to a store and shop and buy something and someone's gonna see you. You're gonna go to a concert for possibly a musical group that they don't like, but you do and they're gonna see you there. It's just always been there. The fact that now it's online, I don't personally see the difference. I've always tried to control what I do out in public in general because anyone can see you doing things. You know, same thing online. Take the same idea of, yes, I like so-and-so band and I'm gonna say I'm a fan of them on Facebook. People who work with me will see that too, but you know what? Yeah. Yeah, so. I'm a person, I'm a fan of them. Facebook does have an okay set of privacy filters, so you could say these are my work friends. They only get to hear these things. These are my real friends. They get to hear more stuff. You can set it up that way and you can set up Twitter to be private or public. Both of those do have issues, I would say, because I'm friends with Michael and Facebook and Twitter and if you set up your stuff to be private, I can still comment on that and say, ooh, Michael, so you really hate your job or whatever. And people would still see my thing and, you know, so anything you say on the web, even if you think it's private, probably not so much anymore. So I always tell people, well, if you wouldn't say that to my face, don't say it anonymously, don't say it quote unquote privately because it'll get back to me anyway. I think that's a very good rule of thumb, actually. It's if you say it to my face, why are you saying it online? That's a good way to put it. So I realize we have just a couple more minutes with you here and I wanted to kind of bring this back around just a little bit. To us, you're at a very large library. Kansas has a lot of rural libraries too. I've been to many of them in past work of mine, but what would you say to say a smaller library that basically, you know, it's great, okay, you have you and you have a staff and you're dedicated to it and you've got the time, but you know, it's like me and two other people and yeah, I think this might be a good idea, but you know what, we just don't have the time to do any of this. What would you say to that person? I would say start slow, do one or two things. Find out what people in your community are using, not people who regularly come into your library because they might hate, say, Facebook, but 80% of the people who live in your community that don't come into the library might actually be Facebook users. So find out what your community is using. You can, you know, search Facebook for Topeka and find out, oh, there are at least 3000 people here using Facebook, cool. And then do what they're doing. So let's say it's Facebook and I'll probably just guess that most people in most communities in the United States are using Facebook. Right now, it seems to be a pretty big thing. Just overtook Google, most popular site in the world. Use that, just go in there, post the status update once a day, once every few days. It takes, you know, 10 minutes tops. That's not a lot of time. So you're not really gonna be crunched for time just doing that. And then see what happens. Basically, that's what I would say. And great, in fact, I pretty much said that to somebody yesterday who called, or two days ago, but I must admit, I miss the part of asking the people who aren't in the library. I totally agree with you. Yeah, I've thought about that a lot because I've had reference staff saying, I know who our customers are and they never use this or that. I'm like, so is that Joe who comes in every Thursday and reads sci-fi novels? Yeah, isn't he 85 years old? Yeah. Okay, well how about all the 25-year-olds that were at the bar last night that don't come in, that we want to come into the library? Oh, yeah, how about those people? You know, it's sometimes, my digital branch customers aren't necessarily the people visiting the library physically. But they're still using the library. So, gotta thank them too. Yeah, that's an excellent way to put it. I just wanna throw out there where we've only got another minute or so with David. If anybody has a question, you can always type it into the Q and A area or give a hand raise. If you've got a microphone, we'll turn your mic on. But in the meantime, David, I wanna thank you very much for taking some time out of what sounds like a very busy day for you. We got lucky. Meetings and meetings and, oh, by the way, eating. To give us a little bit of your time and a little bit of your insight, what's going on and as much as I think we have to root for Omaha, we'll say good luck. You're close enough for a visit. You get fiber to your house, I'm stopping over. Just to try it. Definitely. All right, well, I'm not seeing any questions. So, David, thanks a lot and don't get too burned out on meetings the rest of the day. All right, thanks, you guys, ladies. Thanks, David. Yeah, bye. So, everybody else is still here. We've got a few more minutes to go on. I wanna thank David again one more time for participating. He's wonderful. He spoke at Lincoln City Libraries in Service Day last year and had him over for dinner at the house and it was fun to do. So, not seeing any questions. I've got, I believe, just one or two other things I wanted to mention off of my list as the time allows. This is, let me throw in a couple of fun things and then Crystal, I'll wrap it up with the FCC. This one I heard about at NPR the other day. What? I didn't tell Crystal about this one. I've gotten questions about, well, okay, we've got these public access computers and we've got these keyboards and they get grungy and how to keep them clean and disinfected and whatever. Disgusting. Okay, it can be, and I've seen some keyboards of people who work here who eat over their keyboards. So, there's all sorts of reasons the keyboard could be disgusting. I'm not implying anybody in this room. Anyways, but if you've ever done the, turn the keyboard over and shake it out, you know who you are. Oops. Oops. Anyways, here might be another reason if you are kind of one of these super paranoid privacy people to keep your keyboards clean. They have been able to swab keyboards and identify who the user of the keyboard is. DNA? Basically, well, it's not DNA, it's microbial because most of the bacteria you get near in your hands and then you get onto a keyboard. Now, public machines might be a little different because you have lots of different people, but they didn't test in an office situation and they were able to take keyboards from a bunch of offices and match them to the people. Wow. So, I just, a little bit of science thought that it was an interesting thing to do. We do have a question that came through from Karen. Has anyone prepared a class on Facebook, Twitter, et cetera to teach adults what these social media sites are all about? We've done classes to teach librarians. I am pretty darn sure some libraries across the state have done classes for the public if that's what you're asking about, but I can't name any off the top of my head. I think Omaha has, I think Lincoln has, I know I've heard of them, but I haven't kept a list. Definitely, I'm sure it's out there. Like Michael said, off the top of our heads, not sure. If you are at a library that's doing that, let us know. Yes. We can get, that's something good to share amongst yourselves that, hey, we've been doing this, can you help me do one at my library kind of thing? Maybe an idea for a future encompassed lives, let me think of that. That could be a possibility, yeah. Of sharing what public libraries are doing as far as courses and things like this, but I'm sure it's out there, just gotta do a little something. Sorry, we don't know if that's working. Yeah, great question though, thank you. Michael has done it for staff, for library staff, so if you're looking for some information resources and how you might teach it, you might be able to give her some tips if you want to. Yeah, give me a shout. Also, if you're, as we're always looking for encompassed live sessions, we have a blog and if you've done something, we've taken guest posts. I mean, so if you wanna write something up that you've done that you wanna share with the rest of the state, feel free to send it over to us and you are looking for classes for the public, so we will maybe poke around on that. Like I said, anybody listening to this, if you've done it, let us know. And if you're willing to share your materials, all the best. Okay, so that was, let's see, micros on the keyboards just because I thought that was fun. Switch back, Google's doing that project and when I first heard about it, I immediately went, ooh, here in Lincoln, I couldn't figure out who I would talk to about this, but Krista pointed this out to me just yesterday. Fall City here in Nebraska is actually doing this on their own. They're doing it with, is it Verizon? It's, but Fall City is basically wiring all 4,671 residents, fiber right to the house. Is that a local company, I think? Is it a local company? Southeast Nebraska Communications. Okay, there we go. So fiber to the home, if you've heard of like Verizon Fios, which is in New York City and a few other things like this. This is similar, this is what Google's looking to do. Right now over DSL in my house, I get six megabits per second. They're going to be offering a gigabyte a second to the house. So, well over a thousand times. Laura says, you're doing it in Stanton too. Wow, y'all are making me want to move to your town. I want faster speeds. I want to download movies in five seconds instead of five hours. So yeah, cool. So this is happening, yeah, this is this article that popped up in the Journal Star about, I don't know why, because Fall City's not near here, but anyway, yeah. Because they're doing it. Yeah, that's great that multiple towns are doing it in this state, especially related to. Yes, related to, this came out Monday. So I have not read a lot about this myself, but the FCC, and this is an article, not the actual report. I'll go back to the, actually, you know what, I have a better website to this. It's just called something different. The FCC has released to Congress their national broadband plan. The idea to do kind of like what Google is doing. Not necessarily fiber per se. I think they're going for a hundred megabits a second to everybody's house. Basically, the little background in this is if you ask what broadband is in the United States, they say like somewhere between five and 10 megabits a second. If you ask what broadband is anywhere else in the world, 20 and 30 is considered slow. So the FCC here is looking to kind of maybe change that some things. I know, Krista, you've been reading some of the articles about this, some of the issues being raised. It's definitely, it's an interesting thing that I just released it, like Michael said this month. So lots of websites and news sites are just getting to take a look at it and decide and comment and discuss it. But the website, broadband.gov is a good place to go for information about it. They do have specific goals listed there, which are very interesting as Michael's describing some of the speeds. It's very lofty plan, I think, it's cool. It's a great idea. We'll see how it actually goes into practice. Who's gonna pay for it? Some interesting things in there that have been mentioned is stuff about education. They specifically want people to be able to have good, quick, fast access to education related things, resources, classes, whatever. And also something that caught my eye was the Digital Literacy Core, is it believed what it's called, where they want you similar to AmeriCorps, where people do volunteer work across the country, like the Peace Corps and the whole world. People specifically volunteering to teach their friends and neighbors and whoever about digital stuff. How to get on the internet, how to use it. And as they describe it in some articles somewhere, I read neighbors teaching neighbors. Cool idea, I think it's neat that, you know, having that kind of an organized thing where people can volunteer to specifically do that. One of the first things that popped into my mind was libraries are doing that already. I mean, yes, it does cost money for a library to be run and everything, it's not volunteers, we are employees, but people can- But we get paid like volunteers. Yeah. Sorry. People can already for free go to their public library and learn this. Find out how to get on the internet. You guys teach classes on how to use, well, Facebook and things and how to be digital and everything. So it's nice that the FCC sees this as a need, but it is already out there too. Well, maybe libraries need to say, hey, FCC, we wanna help with this. Well, there is also mention of libraries in the proposal as well that anchor institutions type of thing and having them be able to provide, money is being available to libraries to provide training and information as well. So they do mention libraries in there. But yeah, I just kind of, I saw it and it just kind of made me go, but we are. Yep. But some people, everyone learns differently. I'm kind of open-minded about this. If you're more comfortable having your neighbor come over rather than you going into a library and saying, can you help me? That works too, but yeah. Maybe more, a little bit more promotion from libraries in conjunction of this saying, hey, if you wanna know more, come to us. Yep. And I will point out right over here on the right-hand side of this page is the consumer bribe ad test. This is something I encourage everybody who hears about this can, should do. Even if you don't wanna read about the whole plan and do these other things, go to broadband.gov. Go over here to the consumer broadband test. And if you have broadband in your home right now, cable DSL satellite, or if you have no broadband available, now if it's available and you don't have it, then you're in a third category that doesn't count. But if you have it, you can run this speed test. There's lots of speed tests out there, but in this case what the FCC is actually doing is collecting the data to see, is your ISP giving you what they say they're giving you? So I actually ran it at home and I'm supposed to be getting six megabits and according to the test, I'm getting six megabits. Good, that's a good thing. But if they notice that certain ISPs are not providing what they say they're supposed to, something might happen about that. Also, if you live in an area which I'm sure somebody in Nebraska does where broadband is not available, you could report a broadband dead zone. They need this information to help work at this plant so they know exactly where they need to go. So you can say, I, county X, there is no broadband available to me, please do that, do you have it yes or no? Is it available? What's your address? That sort of thing. So provide this data, it's like a digital census almost, a census for connectivity, I would say. So something I would re-encourage everybody to take a look at. It will help them get more broadband to your area so they can focus on the most needy areas. Yep, all right, that's an hour, we're out of time. Anybody have any final questions or comments before we hang up for the day, for the morning? For the morning. We get to go home? No. Oh, okay. As you know, you can always call or email Michael and myself with any other questions you might have about anything that we talked about today. As I said at the beginning, these tech talks with Michael are on the average monthly. We do juggle around the day sometimes, about one month. Come to a session with a question you wanna ask him and ask him just live here on the fly or send him a question or something you're interested in ahead of time and he can research it and talk about it at the next month's session. So definitely he's brought up a lot of things that he thought was important and interesting but we wanna know what you wanna know about. What is going on in your libraries, technology related that you need more information about? Or is there something you discovered that you wanna share? Some of the interviews that Michael did like last month, this last month with George? Yes. I have been with libraries in Nebraska doing cool things. So if there's something that you wanna share with your colleagues, contact Michael and we'll get you on a show. Yeah, that's good. Or if it's bigger than just a part of this show, I can do a whole encompassing with you. Oh, sure, yeah. A whole hour on whatever. Good enough question, you might get a whole hour. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, it looks like we don't have anybody asking anything right now, raising their hands. So we will wrap it up. Thank you very much for attending this week. Next week, speaking of this, Karen, you might wanna pay attention to this. Next week's topic for Encompass Live is Adventures in Facebook, Getting Your Library on Board. Karen Brockmeyer from here at the Library Commission will be talking about what the commission does with our fan page and just how you can get involved in the things you can do with Facebook for your library. So definitely show up for next Wednesdays or listen to the recording if you need to. So thank you very much and we'll see you next time. See you all today, thanks a lot. Bye-bye.