 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 10am central time. But if you're unable to join us Wednesdays that's fine. Would you record the show as we are doing today. And it is then posted to our website for you to watch later at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our show archives. Both the live show and the recording are free and open to anyone to watch. So please share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. So similar to your state library. And so we provide services and training and consulting and grants to all types of libraries in the state. So we have shows shows on Encompass Live from for all types of libraries, public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives. Anything and everything really our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. We book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on to do presentations for us. And yeah, and we also do have guest speakers that come on. And today we have guest speaker for us. For those of you who are regular viewers of the show, you know that the last Wednesday of the month is always pretty sweet tech day. Which is when our technology innovation librarian Amanda Sweet comes on the show to do presentations about something techie related. So if you're a tech person at your library, this is the day to always be here. As you can tell this is not Amanda here with us today. Amanda is actually attending the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington DC this week. So she is unable to join us in herself, but that's okay. We have got Eric Button from the St. Louis County Library to join us to do a presentation on the Grand Pads program that they have at their library. And this is a session that actually came from Amanda as well from the internet librarian conference that was held last fall in Monterey, California. And Amanda said she had seen your presentation Eric and said it would be thought it was great and wanted to have you on the show. So we are happy to have you here to tell us all about this awesome program you have going. Thank you Christa appreciate the invitation and thanks to Michelle also glad she enjoyed or found the presentation to be of interest presented back in California. I'm just going to share some background about our project. And I want to start by just giving you an idea of who we are as a library system to give you an idea of how we accomplish this. We are there we go. We are the largest library in Missouri. We serve about 860,000 people in our service population. We have 20 branch locations and we serve a community with five bookmobiles as well. We're primarily a suburban area. We're just outside the city of St. Louis kind of surrounds the city of St. Louis. And we have a generous budget. It's $58 million that we operate on last year was a very significant year for us and exciting one in many ways. It was our 75th anniversary year. And we also had a couple of great acknowledgments from our peers. One of them was we won the national medal from the IMLS. Yes, congratulations. And we are very excited about that. And that had a lot to do with our service responses during the COVID years, including the Grand Pad project. We also won the Missouri Library of the Year from the Missouri Library Association last year. So last year was a good year for us. So you realize that it surrounds St. Louis. So St. Louis, the city itself has its own library system? That's correct. That's correct. Yeah, we are separate systems. However, about this time last year, we merged our catalogs and our patron databases. So we share a catalog and share resources. So we are kind of in a quasi-consortial arrangement with them. And we share our ILS. Sounds like a good idea. Absolutely. Yeah. So our collections doubled in size and it's been a great benefit to our patrons since we made that change. But our story on the Grand Pads really began as a result of the pandemic. And during the pandemic, we all know that a lot of things change very quickly. And it was just about three years ago, right from now, that most of this came down. It's hard to believe that it's actually been three years. Years still, yeah. But we, businesses shut down, the library closed. We began providing some alternate services and people were encouraged to stay home and stay isolated. They were told to stay apart from one another. You couldn't visit your family. You couldn't visit people in nursing homes. Eventually, during that time, our work at libraries moved online or we found alternate ways to do that. We had our social meetings via Zoom, but there was a group of people that were particularly left behind in that time and that was seniors. Because seniors were not as apt to move over and begin using Zoom because they just didn't understand it. They weren't comfortable with it. They didn't have the technology they needed to do that. So we were all isolated, but they were particularly isolated during that time. We had a number of different responses to provide services to our community during the pandemic. During the pandemic, we distributed over 2 million meals to children and families. We also distributed thousands of diapers, flow kits, COVID test kits. We provided vaccines. We had eye clinics for children. A lot of our services focused specifically on services and responses to students and children. For example, we received some CARES Act money that provided for 10,000 hotspots to be distributed in our community along with 6,000 Chromebooks. We also distributed several hundred PBS playtime learning pads to preschool students. During those early months, we had some conversations. Our director had some conversations with the older adults commission in the St. Louis area. And that led to more discussion about the needs that seniors had because we felt like a lot of our services and responses were directed towards students, but we had not necessarily given the same attention to the needs of seniors. So with the next round of CARES Act funding, we were able to prepare a proposal to serve seniors and that was a $1 million grant that we received to do so. So we went out and started looking at what some of our options would be to provide a technology solution for seniors that would help them deal with isolation and the loneliness that they were experiencing. We looked at laptops as one option and Chromebooks and they obviously offer quite a few features and have great computing power, but they also have a fairly high learning curve for seniors who were either completely inexperienced with technology or perhaps intimidated by technology. Also, if you don't have a device with a built-in cell service, then you have to have some other means of accessing the internet, whether it's Wi-Fi, hotspot or some other option. We also looked at cell phones as a possibility and we like some things about cell phones. They were very easy to carry and easy to hold. They offer good functionality and cell service is generally affordable, but one of the things that we thought about in terms of seniors was that using a cell phone is visually challenging. It's small to begin with and I, for one, am still trying to figure out all of the features on my cell phone and I consider myself a pretty regular user. I don't use everything that's on here, no. Putting a cell phone into the hands of seniors is probably an intimidating thing for most of them. We also looked at tablets as another means of meeting this need and tablets blended the two solutions together. They still were portable and easier to hold, but they offered a little bit better visibility. However, most tablets still require quite a bit of computer knowledge or tech knowledge to be able to use them effectively. We started some conversations with people in our community about this issue. One of our partners said, have you heard about Grandpad? We said, no, we haven't heard about Grandpad. We went and did some research and began exploring their website and realized that this might be a really good solution for us for this grant. Grandpads are designed by and for older adults. They actually use a senior advisory council that's made up of people who are 75 and older to design and guide their designs on the tablet. They also are built to be very simple and intuitive as you can see from the image on the screen. It's not terribly complex and that was something that we were looking for. They also offer a great degree of accessibility. That includes screens that can be increased in size. They also have features on most screens that allow you to turn up or down the volume very easily. So if a person is hard of hearing, they can increase the volume quickly. The Grandpad functions as both a touch screen and it can be used with a stylus. So oftentimes seniors have dexterity issues with their hands and having a couple different ways for them to interact with the screen is beneficial. One of the things that they thought about too was this wireless charging stand that you see in the picture. All of us struggle at times to get our charging cord into that little slot. And that can be particularly challenging for people who struggle with the use of their fine motor skills with their fingers. The Grandpads also come with cellular service integrated into the device, which is something that was very appealing to us because we knew that there was a percentage of our user base that didn't have access to Wi-Fi in their homes. The devices are highly customizable. In the program, the way it's set up, you're assigned a family administrator and your family administrator has controls to allow you to add and remove things. And they can also have some power to help you utilize the device. So that's one of the benefits. It's also a safe, secure environment. And by this, I mean that they come with the ability to lock down the internet to keep seniors from going off into directions that would get them into trouble or get them caught up in a scam or a scheme. So there are some built-in safeguards with that. I also forgot to mention that these devices are managed devices. So the library can add content to them at any time, and we have done that quite frequently as I'll talk about some of those projects a little later on. And probably the greatest thing that we think is the benefit of Grandpads is their customer support, their user support. They offer live human support 24-7, 365. So no matter what time you call, you're always going to get a person. And all you have to do is click one of these buttons on the screen that says help and you'll immediately be connected to your assigned agent. This was very important because we did not have the capacity to take calls from people and answer their calls and spend hours of time on the phone with seniors who are learning technology. So having that present was important. The Grandpad is also a subscription-based model, which means that anything that happens to the Grandpad breakage or something just goes wrong and it needs to be replaced, it's covered, and the senior doesn't have to worry about having to replace that. The Grandpad has a lot of great content for seniors, and some very interesting features that I'll go through quickly here. One of the things that is very appealing about the Grandpad model is that when a senior gets the device, it comes with an email account loaded for them. Any of us who have worked in libraries have all experienced sometimes the painful process of trying to get people signed up for an email account who have never used one before and don't know how to do so. It can take a lot of time. The Grandpad comes and they already have an account set up, which is a huge benefit. The Grandpad offers both phone and video calling, and it's integrated in so a senior only has to hit one button to jump into a video call. It makes it very easy for them to do so. They also have Zoom calling integrated into their product, and that was one of the things that they enhanced during the pandemic because they realized that this was something that people were going to be expecting in the product. And so they developed that so it is neatly integrated and it's very, very easy for seniors to use Zoom to attend any meetings that they're invited to. The Grandpad also offers music and radio stations that are linked directly to it. The music is some of the music that you might expect older generations would be drawn to. And the radio stations come with some built in radio stations and you can also add stations that you want to the device. So we added several of our local stations. So our Grandpad users just have to click a button to get connected to the live stream of a variety of different radio stations in the St. Louis area. There's also news and weather offered, and that includes weather both where they live and they can track their weather wherever their loved ones live. My mom is kind of a weather nut and she's always following what's happening in our weather, even though she lives in Colorado. Mom always calls me when we have a blizzard or something she lives in New York and she's like, What'd you get? What'd you get? Our parents and grandparents have an interesting obsession with what's going on where we live. They can track the weather in a number of different places through this. There's also a number of games that are offered on the tablet. And the games include some very simple things like Solitaire and Bridge, but there are also some interactive games that they can play with one another. There's both a front and a rear camera on here. So on the rear camera they can, or the rear camera, they can take pictures and send pictures to their loved ones through the Grandpad. And they can obviously use the front facing camera for the video calls that they use in the zooms. And then another thing that's interesting about Grandpad is that the access to the Internet is scalable, as I kind of talked about a little bit before. You can lock it down as much as you want or you can open it up as much as you want. So if you have a grandparent that you're concerned is going to be drawn into some kind of trouble or some kind of a scam, you can limit where they can go as a family administrator. As a library we made a decision to open up the access to anything on the Internet because we didn't want people to run into any blocks with the devices that we were issuing. And then I mentioned the help. One of the things I didn't say about the help before is that, as you can see in this picture on the screen here, each person has, each Grandpad user has a specific support person that is assigned to their account. And so if they're calling while that person is on duty, they will always talk to that person. If they are calling when that person is not on duty, they'll talk to another live person who they will also see a picture of. And all of these people are specially trained to work with seniors and people who are not as familiar with technology. So they're very patient. They're all US based, which is something that's important for a lot of our senior users as well. And then there's a companion app that allows us, the loved ones of a Grandpad user to load an app onto our phone or our tablet and share content with them very easily and have video calls with them. So that's something that is offered through Grandpad as well. The Grandpad itself is not a powerhouse machine. This is not something that you're buying to do high speed gaming. This is a device that's very adequate for its purpose. And the specs are listed here on the screen. And we've never had anyone tell us that they were unable to do something because of any hardware limitations on the device. It is an Acer tablet. And if anything does go wrong with the tablet, it's insured and Grandpad would replace it for the user. So obviously we had a million dollars for this project and we had to determine who was going to get a Grandpad. We anticipated that the demand would be higher than the supply. And we had initially 1500 devices. Later we added another 1500, which I'll talk about in a bit. So we had a total of 3000 devices, but we set up an application process that included a Google form where we collected information about the applicants. And we were looking for things like your income and your age. And do you have internet access at home? Do you already own an internet device? Are you living by yourself? Are you living in a community living arrangement? And each of the answers to those questions generated a score. And that scoring matrix is how we determined which of our applicants received a Grandpad. The higher the score, the more likely you were to receive a Grandpad. We did have a couple of basic requirements based on the funding. One of them was that the applicant had to be a resident of St. Louis County. And we made a requirement that the person also had to be a card holder at the County Library. As a result of that, we actually issued 1300 new cards for people that implied who had never had a library card with us before. So that was a great secondary outcome of the project. Many of those people did indeed get a Grandpad, but some of them may not have gotten a Grandpad, but they still got a library card, which is beneficial for them. So the scoring matrix, how did that work? Was it like if they had the needier they were, the higher the points were? Or like if they didn't have internet, didn't have device access, would that bump them up higher? Is that how it was? For example, if you had the lowest income category, your score would have been a plus three on that rating. If you made $100,000, you would have been a minus two. So all of these factors were weighted differently, and they were incremental. So if you had internet access, but you didn't have a device, you got points against you for having internet access, but you gained points in your score for not having a device. So all of those things work together to give them an overall score. One of the most common questions we got from people when we talked about our project was if this was a Google form, an internet-based application, how did seniors fill it out if they didn't have internet access and they didn't have a device? The way we worked around that was that oftentimes people that were filling it out were a loved one of the Grand Pad user or applicant that might be a child or a relative or friend that did have access, or they could give us a call and we filled out the application on their behalf through our call center. So we took a number of applications over the phone as well. So regardless of a person's individual situation, we always had a means of them being able to apply. In addition to the requirements that I mentioned already, we also had a requirement that you had to be at least 65 years of age to be considered for the device. So anyone that was below age 65 was automatically disqualified and not even considered regardless of how their scoring would have worked out. Because this was a project that was intended for older adults. I don't know if there are any questions, but please feel free to jump in if you have questions and I'd be happy to answer them either now or at the end. There is one question that came in that you might talk about later, but I'll just ask it now since I want to make sure that, you know, well, another question that had come in that I hadn't gotten to yet, sorry. So I want to know, have you had senior schedule appointments with library staff to help use these? You said there's the help that comes with them, but or is that something you're going to be getting into in your presentation? Yeah, good question. We have not scheduled specific appointments. We do have a service that our lab trainers offer called Book of Trainer. And that is something where we offer one on one individualized attention for tech questions and needs. But for the Grand Pad users, they occasionally would call our customer, connect our call center and ask some questions. But most of the time, they just turn to the Grand Pad representatives and they got great assistance from their Grand Pad. Builds in help on the device. Okay. Yeah. So this was all done during the pandemic, of course. So we had some interesting obstacles to work around because we weren't fully open at that time for library services. And we were also trying to be aware of the just the health concerns that people had. So when we did our first distribution, we decided that we would, well, before I get to distribution, I should probably talk about the data entry and collection because one of the challenges we had was that, especially in our first round of applications, our data was very messy. We realized that we needed to do more locking down of the form, more data validation, breaking out the address field into multiple different questions instead of making it one. So we had a lot of cleanup that we had to do with the data in order to begin working with it initially. We also knew that one of the challenges was going to be that we were working with an audience, a target audience here that was either unfamiliar with technology or in some cases, right out just adverse to technology, scared of technology. And so we had to often work through the family administrator or the other person that applied on behalf of the Grand Pad applicant to get through this work. And because all of our communication at this scale had to be done through email, many of our Grand Pad applicants did not have an email address until after they got their Grand Pad. So in order to communicate, we had to go through the family administrator that put their name down on the application and gave us their email address. And we found out that in some cases, the family administrator had applied on behalf of an applicant, but they didn't tell the applicant that they had applied. Or just the opposite where the prospective user applied and put someone down as a family administrator and didn't tell that person. So when we sent emails, sometimes we get confusion back because people would have no idea what we were talking about. They didn't know that someone had listed them on their application as a family administrator. So those were some of the things we didn't anticipate. We learned some lessons. And oops, sorry. Learned some lessons and would do it differently in the second phase. The distribution was interesting to say the least. The picture here on the left, you see we had a massive line of cars at our headquarters location. And in our garage in the upper right picture, you see 1500 Grand Pads lined up on tables in the garage. We had a four hour window on a Sunday when we were closed. And we anticipated we'd have 1000 people come and pick up and we thought we could handle that. Well, it turns out we were wrong. I think every Grand Pad user came that day and or tried to come that day and we created such a traffic hazard that the police had to show up and basically shut down the operation because we had traffic back up on every road and highway within about half mile of the library and it was quite a scene. Lesson learned, don't do it that way with mass distribution. But we were trying to do drive through so that people could pick up without having to go inside or without having to have any exposure to a lot of people. We did end up distributing 700 devices that day through our drive through. But we had 800, then that we had to distribute later on. And we decided to do that through surveying our Grand Pad recipients and asking them which branch they'd like to pick up the Grand Pad at. And then we sent Grand Pads out to any of our 20 locations for pickup. And then they picked up the Grand Pads from those locations a couple weeks later. We also had a second phase of Grand Pads. We were fortunate enough to receive some ARPA funds through our county to not only fund a second year of the first phase, but also to expand it to include another 1500 users. So we had a total of 3000 Grand Pad users that were issued Grand Pads in phase two. And so we did another application process. We, of course, applied all of the lessons learned from the first time. And we also did a tremendous amount of work in marketing the program this time because we heard from some of our elected officials that some of their constituents did not know about the program the first time, despite our best efforts. And we went ahead and just lasted the opportunity everywhere we could think of. We worked through our partners. Our partners shared the message. And we ended up with more than 2200 applications for the 1500 devices that we were going to be issuing. So we felt like we did a good job of reaching people this time. And because of the lessons learned with drive-thru pickup, we this time had all of the Grand Pads sent directly to our branches for pickup. And part of the application that they filled out was indicating which branch they wanted to pick the device up at. So we streamlined our workflow considerably after our initial experiences. One of the things that's great about Grand Pads is that there's a lot of good data that you can collect through the Grand Pad reporting system that they have built into the system. And I'm going to show you some examples of some of the data that we can get through our Grand Pad engagement reports that they provide for us. This particular slide includes data just from our phase one users because at the time we ran this report, our phase two users had not had their devices long enough to give a good representative sample of what this would look like. So for our first 1500 users, their average use per week was five hours per week, which I think is pretty good. Now, probably most of us spend maybe five hours per day on our phones or on some kind of computer or technology device. But for seniors who may not have ever picked up any kind of tablet, phone, computer, five hours a week was a pretty good result, we felt. And they had lots of clicks every week, almost 2500 clicks per user per week, which means they were moving around on their Grand Pad frequently and doing a lot of different things on it. And they had 5.9 companions per user. So that meant that each Grand Pad user had that many people in their trusted list of contacts that could send them emails and receive emails. I may have skipped that over, but one of the great security features of the Grand Pad is that you can only receive an email from someone who is in your trusted list of contacts. So you will not get spam, you will not get junk mail, you won't get mail from anyone else that you don't want to hear from. Only people that you put into your contacts list can send you emails. So that's another way that the security features are present on the device and protect seniors. So this is the look at the overall patron engagement. And you can see some of the figures here, I mean they've participated in 4500 Zoom calls, over 3000 outgoing video chats, those are calls that they made to someone else with a video chat. They've compiled over 300,000 hours of use and again this is just for those phase one users. So it's been very successful in terms of its usage and its impact. And then this slide has some of the data about the time that they spend that Grand Pad spends working with the users. So they spent 456 hours of time working directly with the Grand Pad users. Now that's 456 hours of time that library staff doesn't have to spend working with these users. So that's significant to us and all of these calls and other work that Grand Pad's performing as part of the service that we are paying for. Now outcomes, stories, we've got a lot of great stories and there's a few comments here on this particular slide that you can see. It's not uncommon at all to receive these kind of life changing stories where people just felt like their world became whole again because they could interact with their family once again and share pictures and experiences. And that's something that they desperately missed during the pandemic. And there are just so many, so many cool stories that we've received that this one is just one testimony that someone sent to us, and I'll give you just a moment to read that over. I'm going to think about that when you mentioned the games that were on there, what he said there, I believe it helped him keep his mind sharp. That is something that, you know, studies are shown playing this kind of games. It does keep your hand, your brain and and your dexterity to without if you're tapping certain things on the screen. Absolutely. Yeah, that is most certainly true. So we receive these kinds of comments, stories, testimonials, all the time. In fact, we have received some people who have left us voicemails calling from their grandpad, where they've left us a seeing telegram essentially. And this one lady made up her own song and called us and it was like, thank you, thank you so much. It was really sweet and it's just kind of fun when we get those reports back from people. So kind of wrapping up what we've learned from this. Some of these I've talked about already but obviously working with older adults who aren't tech savvy can be a challenge. One of the things that we experienced because of the scale of our project was just the amount of work and time that required to manage 3000 devices. If you were doing this on a much smaller scale, like if you had 25 or 50 devices, it would be a much, much simpler project than trying to manage it at the 3000. This can be scaled down to any, I mean, the company that does this grandpad, they will do any size of library. Yes, yes, they would work with whatever scale project you have. And they work with individual consumers. That's one of their primary audiences is they sell directly to individuals both on their website and through Amazon. We learned that single site distribution didn't work because the volume was too great. We learned to reduce our steps wherever possible. And to be prepared for messy data, even when we tightened up our forms and did a lot of data validation. We still had some things that required a little extra time and attention. We also learned that there will be some devices that are returned early. That happens for a variety of reasons. In some cases, unfortunately, the individuals have passed away. And so we get those devices back from their loved ones. In other cases, which is a much happier story. People get comfortable enough with technology that they want to step up, and they want to move to the iPad or another device that gives them more features because they've gained that much confidence from using the grandpad that they're not as intimidated by technology any longer. We also expect that some devices will not be returned. So that is something that we're planning for. And we have learned to that managing the data is an important step and something that we have to be really attentive to. And so we're looking at, we're currently setting up air table, which is a product that some of you might have heard of or actually be using. It is, it's going to replace all of our various Google sheets that we've been maintaining since we started the project. Now, what's next? We're still, we're still using the grandpad as an outreach tool. We've done a number of things with the grandpad through that, including sharing vaccine and COVID information from our county health department through the device. We've also promoted library content on the grandpad that includes programs, virtual programs, which have been attended by quite a few of our grandpad recipients and ebooks and other types of library content that people can access. We also overdrive became very interested in this project and began development of their own products to integrate more easily with with the grandpad tablet. So those are some of the things that are happening as next steps. Something even simpler than what we have to use right now for we have a way of an overdrive group in Nebraska. And I know previous incarnation of it was a little difficult everyone loves Libby, the next one but so this would be even more simplified than that, I suppose. Yeah, I think they were trying to make it very, very easy for for seniors to use. We also are looking at potential funding sources because as a subscription, you mentioned the grants that you got to get this started but what about for continuing. Yes, we did that. Right now, in order to continue the project with all of the tablets staying in the field. We'd have to have a $2 million a year, and we don't anticipate getting $2 million a year for this project so we're looking at other funding sources that would allow us to keep some portion of the devices deployed and keep those subscriptions active. So one of the partners that we're working with currently is the health communication research laboratory which is associated with Washington University, which is in St. Louis. And they approached us because they have a project called I heard, and I heard is meant to it actually came out of the COVID era and it's meant to address the incorrect health information that people have heard things, maybe about COVID or the monkey box or whatever the latest health concern is, and they find out what people are hearing and then they send out correct information through trusted sources like the library. So they were interested in partnering with us as a trusted partner for getting that message out. And then that led to another conversation about using the grandpads to survey seniors to find out what their interests are. So we're currently working through a project right now with them where we're sending them a weekly survey to find out what interests they have and then we're sending them something that's called Discover. And Discover is a list of opportunities in the community that exist that they might be interested in attending based on the interest that they indicated on the survey, and all of that is being distributed to our users through the grandpad. Part of that survey was asking them some questions about their grandpad and I've included those stats here on the, on this slide. And I think these stats are very telling, particularly the fact that 97% of our current users would recommend the grandpad to others. I think that's a pretty telling staff. And there's a possibility that this, this unit of Washington University will be able to secure grant funding for us to keep some of the grandpads in the field and allow them to continue doing this survey work with our seniors. We are also looking at another possible funding source through our area agency on aging. Some of you may have triple A's in your communities. Ours has been renamed Aging Ahead. And we've been partnering with Aging Ahead for programming for some time now. We have a program called Choice that is presented both in person and virtually. And we are going to be piloting a concept that's a virtual senior center. And Aging Ahead has come to us and said, people aren't coming to our brick and mortar senior centers any longer. The attendance has dropped off quite a bit because I think people that are in their 60s, 70s think that senior centers are for old people and I'm not an old person. I don't go to the senior center. And so they're struggling to get people to come and use their services. And so we're working with them on a pilot that will use the grandpad to present programming and have a meal delivered to their home. And the programming will be done virtually, but it will be live programming so they can interact with people directly through these programs and they'll be offered at least once per week and perhaps twice per week. And the funding that they write into that program will help us pay part of the expense of the grandpad subscription. So we're very interested in seeing where this will go. And we're hopeful that it might become a model for the area agencies on aging throughout the country to utilize in the future. So that's an exciting possibility. We have a few other things out there floating about, but we are pretty realistic that we don't expect to have $2 million a year to throw toward this project. But we're hopeful that we'll have some amount of money that will allow us to keep some subset of those devices still out there for our seniors to use. And then the final option that people have is that if they have used their grandpad over the last year or two and they fall in love with it so much that they don't want to lose it, they do have an option of taking it over themselves. And they wouldn't have to surrender their grandpad. They could just start paying the bill themselves and grandpad will transfer over the ownership of that bill over to that individual user. So that is an option that we will be presenting to our grandpad users. So that's what the future looks like. And I'm happy to answer any questions that you all may have. Yes, great. We do have some questions that have come in. I'll just remind everyone if you do have any questions, just go ahead and type into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface. I'm monitoring that here. That's where I've been pulling all these questions from. We have plenty of time. We have, it's 10 minutes before the top of the hour, but we started a little late so we'll go as long as it takes for everyone to get their questions answered and for Eric to share everything he wants to do with this. I think this is an awesome program, definitely. And you're right, you know, some of these seniors were already possibly isolated before even the pandemic, just like everything. Things we all knew at libraries that were going on with people don't have the devices they don't have everybody doesn't have the internet connection. We knew it and now everybody knows it. And so now we're finally getting these, you know, issues taken care of. So, in the previous slide you were talking, I think a couple slides ago about how they were using their grandpads so much, the statistics, how many, you know, using it every day or and definitely recommend it to somebody. And I think that's an interesting thing too is, well, you know, we talked at the beginning and people always say and assume seniors do not know how to use these devices, they do not come from with them. Getting it in their hands makes a huge difference. My mother, she's 74. And before the pandemic she started using an iPad, she got one, I think it was a get one free with your cell phone renewal type deal. And she is, she's like lives on it now. Yeah, she once she got used to it, it was it is like her she has used it way more than those five hours a week now. She has a book club and they switched it to a zoom book club so that during the pandemic, and they sometimes still do that she lives in upstate New York so they get winter weather. If it's just bad weather, we don't have to skip doing our thing we can zoom right into each other and still have this connection this book club that we do so. I was very surprised and impressed with what she did. She's just jumped right on to this but I think they're afraid but it's because they get in their hands. It's an initial hurdle of just getting over the fear. Yeah, crippling for many of our older adults. So, so this this was that you were talking about they can take over the subscription themselves. So this is free to everyone to the seniors, right this is there's no cost to them when it came to the library. Correct, it was fully funded through the grant funds that we received from the cares act and ARPA cares like first year and then our second year yep. And just to clarify to for people who are like a here in Nebraska so much smaller library systems than yours or elsewhere to $2 million a year is for 3000 subscriptions right you have 3000 now. Right so you haven't got above that 3000 devices. All right, so. Yeah, so that's about $650 per device per year. Okay, that was a question to okay. And I was also looking you said about them taking over yeah I was looking at the grand pad website that if they do an annual, you do an individual annual subscription like you said the person taking over themselves. Yeah, they can do an annual subscription and get a discount on it and as all sorts of deals and stuff so yeah take a look at the website we have a link off of the session page and I'll show it when you get back to that. So who is this the company that is doing this is grand pad, you said it's by and for done. They have an advisory team so this is just grand. I just looked up it's just grand pad net and where do, where do they come from, you know, like their history. I do. And they, they are. They are a family. I think it's a family owned business. It is not owned by any holding enterprise or anything like that at this point. It started because the CEO of Scotland. Had a grandmother who was feeling disconnected and having trouble staying up with people and things. And so they were looking for a solution. And they came up with this plan and then the company grew from a very small company into a company. I think he said they have 200 people working there now. But it is still a private company. It's not part of any other tech companies. So grand pad is the company. Yeah, and here's the I just switched to sharing my screen to show you all the, and we have this linked up the event session page to and yeah they have here they're interesting when you go to about us the first thing that comes up is their advisors he said they had their seniors that are the advisors. And that comes up first, really showing this is who we are all about. And after that is the actual company people so I like that. All right, so. So you were talking about having the issues with people who I loved one or caregiver signed up for the senior using it or the senior didn't didn't tell the person. And so I want to know. So is there only one email address per device or could there be more than one associated with it. So like the scene, the users, an email address and then whoever might be helping them with it. All right, there's only one email address that's actually this is this sorry show this early. There's only one email address that's on this device. Okay. And that is the users email. However, we collected email addresses for the family administrator and have, have that information in our contacts, and grand pad has that information as well. And they have the ability to reach out to either the user, the tablet user or the family administrators email, but you wouldn't have to email addresses tied to one device because this device is particular to a single user. That makes sense. But like behind the scenes there's more than one person that can be said here make sure so and so also gets all the info and keeps up with things yeah. One last kind of set of questions we have here. But if anybody has anything that you want to ask definitely get into the question section as I said we'll go as long as it takes to get all your questions answered. So how did the checkout process for this work I know you talked about them coming and picking them up and all that, but more specifically asking about. So this was like just like a permanent checkout device to one person with no like, a return date it's not like checking out a book or something else you have to return to the library then someone else gets it is it is, is that true is it just permanently assigned to that one particular person for the life of the device or the, however that person wants it. Not for the life. It's not permanent. It's, it was checked out to them for initially the 12 month period. Okay. And when they were issued the device, the recipient understood that this was a 12 month checkout and that at that time we didn't know that we were going to get an extension to go into a second year. Right. You can only pay for it for what the first the first CARES Act grant covered. Right. So the initial expectation was that they could keep it for 12 months and then they return it because that was the setup of the program. It's the way grandpads work is you wouldn't, you wouldn't use a grandpad and check it out for two weeks to a person as an example, because you have to take the device and wipe the data off of it and set up the new user account each time you give it to a different person. You can do that, but there's a lot of work involved in doing that. And so the short term usage isn't really a model that applies with this. You know, we all, many of us probably check out Chromebooks or maybe laptops or something like that to our communities. Those are easier to manage to check out for a couple of weeks at a time. The grandpad, because it is so closely tied to an individual user and an email account and contacts. You, you wouldn't use that service model. You would, you would at least have it checked out for a period of probably a few months as a minimum, I would say. So it's a personal thing for it's personal. Yeah, to that person. Yeah. And we do actually have it checked out on their library card. And when these devices are ending their subscription will be having the devices do about a month and a half after the subscription ends so that people can keep it for the full time that the subscription is active and then have more than a month to get it back to us. They're not worried about being late or anything like that. They can, they can keep it the full time and then bring it back afterwards. Cool. All right. I don't see any other new questions that came in that's that's fine. I wrote down about that the health communication research laboratory that's very interesting to I'm going to look more into that just to see what kind of things they are doing that I heard program. That is a definitely an issue. And just for everybody that there's lots of false information floating around there and sometimes people just don't know to research something more deeply. Let's just see something on their computer on their tablet on their grandpad and say, Oh, that must be it. So I'm glad that that might be something that would get matched up with this program. All right, I don't see any other yes I said any other last minute desperate questions coming in so I think we will wrap things up this morning. Thank you so much Eric this is this is great. Great program I hope more libraries do participate in this or at least maybe share this if the library themselves can't do it share this as something for your seniors in your community that is something they can get themselves. If they are struggling or need a device or internet that they can use this program as well. We got some thank yous coming in on the chat to so thank you so much so and thank you everybody for being here today. As I said this is the link. This is the website for the grand pads program. If you want to know more and reach out to them. We do have it linked off of the session page for today's show I've got that right in there. If you go to our website and look up this you'll find that link there as well. And it will be there when we do the archive recording of this as well so that will wrap it up today show as I just said the show is being recorded and if you go to our main encompass live page. If you use your search engine of choice and type in encompass live. It's the only thing that will come up so nobody else is allowed to use that name. And you'll get to our upcoming shows but then over here on the bottom underneath there is archived shows. This is the most recent one will be at the top here today's recording will be available by the end of the day tomorrow. As long as our go to webinar and YouTube we post all of our recordings to the Nebraska library commissions YouTube channel. And then Eric if you're willing to share your slides. We'll include those yeah we'll include a link to those as well. Everyone who attended today's show and registered today show get an email from me letting you know the recordings ready. We also push it out onto our various social media may notice I have links to our encompass live Facebook page. What we do here's your minor to watch today's show. We do a little meet the speaker, and then we do. There's the announcement for last week when the recordings are available. So if you do like use Facebook. Also on Twitter we use the end comp live hashtag. So you can keep track of things there as well. If you'd like to watch any of other other shows here you can see there is a search feature on our archives page so you can search for anything to see if we've been shown a topic you're looking for information about. You can limit it you can do the entire show archives or just the most recent 12 months if you just want something very current. And that is because this is the full show archives for encompass live and I'm not gonna scroll all the way down because it's a huge page. Going back to when the show first premiered which was January 2009. So we are in our 15th year of the show and we do have our full show archives here. So, obviously some things will become old outdated information mean a lot of good some things will stand the test of time and be perfectly fine to watch. But just pay attention to the original broadcast date of anything there's always the date on there that tells you when this show went was done live, and keep that in mind. As I said, some information become old outdated incorrect resources and services may have changed links might not work anymore. It might not work at the same library anymore who presented for us. So, just pay attention to that if you are watching any of our archive shows. So that wrap it today. Thank you everybody for being here. Thank you so much Eric this is great. And I hope you'll, some of you will join us next week when our here's our upcoming shows but next week's topic is tweens programming partnership and burnout. So if you're coming in from the Connecticut State Library Kimberly Powell will be joining us to talk about how to deal with doing programming for the tweens in your library. So if you are a team tween librarian that's a show for you. And check out any rather coming shows some of these dates here you'll see I'm probably filling in the May dates so keep an eye on the calendar here. So thank you everyone thank you Eric this is great. Have a great day. Yeah, you too and we'll see you all on a future episode of and compass live. Bye bye.