 Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. This is the first Encompass Live of 2020, yay, first of the decade. Yes, I'm on that side of the argument, it is the first, it is the new decade. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission, and 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 every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. You can always go to our website and watch our archives afterwards in the recordings, and I'll show you at the end of today's show where to access all of those archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. The Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries, for any of you watching or joining us for a nap in Nebraska, and so that means we cover, we provide resources and services and training and education, et cetera, et cetera, to all types of libraries in the state, so you will find things on our show for all types of libraries, so academics, K-12, public, special, museums, corrections, anything that's got a library in it, we may have something on the show related to that, and we do a mixture of things here, book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products, cool things we think libraries are doing or could be doing. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes come on and present things that are specific to what we're doing here via the Library Commission, well, we sometimes bring in guest speakers. As you have this morning, you can see we have from three different locations across the country. With us today is Beth Nolanski. Good morning Beth. Good morning. And she is the executive director of United for Libraries, which we're going to talk about, that's what we're talking about today, as well as Peter Pearson, who is the current president of United for Libraries, I'm correct with that timing. Good morning. Yeah. And also, Laura England-Biggs, who is from here in Nebraska, our King Memorial Library in Fremont, she's going to talk about an award that the library got a little later in the show. So, I'm going to hand over straight to you, Beth, I believe, to get things started to tell us about United for Libraries. Right. Well, actually, I wanted to give, I'll say two quick sentences then let Peter do an intro as well. So hopefully, by now, you all have been using our resources on the website for years because Nebraska Library Commission, I'm always proud to say this was the first state library to purchase state-wide group membership in United for Libraries, so that's a great round of applause there for your state library, your state librarian, Rod Wagner, who actually was a prior president of United for Libraries, not at the time he started the state-wide group membership, but many years later and served on the board. And it's just such an honor to work with you guys. You do so many wonderful things, and in addition to this show, you just have so many great resources out there for your libraries in the state. So, give Peter a chance to talk a little bit about what he's interested in this year and his presidency and where he's going, and then we'll circle back and I'll tell you about some of the great new things happening and a brand new way to access all of the resources that I know you guys are all going to love. Thank you, Beth. Good morning, everybody. I'm Peter Pearson, and it's my honor to be the current board president of United for Libraries. For those of you that don't know United for Libraries, it's one of the divisions of the American Library Association, and specifically the division that provides programs and services to the non-librarians in the library world, trustees, friends of libraries, library foundations, and then those people that just would call themselves library advocates, and we love them all. So, I've had a library career for about 28 years now, and in that 28 years, I actually had the privilege of serving in every one of those positions that United serves. I've been a library trustee, I've been a friend of library, I've been executive director of a library foundation, and currently in my semi-retirement, I'm an advocate and continue to be a library advocate and hope I will fill the day I die. I think why United is so important to me is those of us that serve in those roles of trustee, friends, and foundation and advocates, we don't really have anybody at the local level who we can turn to for thoughts and advice on the kind of work we do. It's a little bit isolating. And so as a result of that, United becomes so critically important because it connects you to the entire world of people who do just what you do, people who are trustees, friends, and foundations. In addition to that, United has its own wonderful services besides you getting to talk to people who do what you do and getting their ideas. United also has a great professional staff, Beth Nowalinsky, our executive director, who you'll be hearing from is wonderful, as well as Jillian Wentworth, who's more behind the scenes, but absolutely a wonderful professional who can help you. So, one-on-one help with these individuals is extremely important when you're a member of United. In addition to that, we, of course, put on webinars like what we're doing today. At each of the conferences, we do a great deal of programming for those of you that are able to attend the national conferences and then all kinds of online and print resources that United has, just a wealth of information for everybody. So if you're not a member of United, I do encourage you to become one. And for those of you who are in states that are not state libraries for United, talk to your state library. And maybe we can hear from Kristen more about why she thinks it's so critically important for a state library to make sure that United's resources are available to every library in the state, because we all know there are so many smaller and rural libraries that just don't have the resources to buy their own. And that's where state memberships are so critically important. So again, kudos to Nebraska for being our first. We now have seven states that have purchased that statewide membership. And hopefully that number will grow this year. So during my presidential year, my focus actually is going to be on grassroots advocacy. And this is something that's near and dear to my heart. I probably have spent more of my time doing fundraising in the past, but advocacy, political advocacy is probably the thing that I feel most passionately about because as much as private fundraising is helpful to libraries, let's face it, the vast majority of the funding that operates our libraries comes from our local property tax dollars. And that's the area where we need to be very active in getting our local elected officials to listen to the needs for that local funding. So I've always been in situations where citizens who either are members of a friends group or members of a library foundation have been able to lead that effort on behalf of the library. And it's so much more convincing to our elected officials when they have citizens approaching them about the importance of libraries and funding. They expect the library director and library staff to need more money. So that's not going to be a message that's going to have much weight. But when local influential citizens who we have on our boards come forward and say, our library doesn't have enough to operate. It doesn't have the money it needs to really provide the services that our community needs. That's a message then that our local elected officials listen to. The other thing to remember is most library directors aren't even allowed to do lobbying at the local level. So since they're prohibited from doing that, this is the perfect place for citizens to step forward and say, we can make this happen. We can be the spokespeople for the library staff and directly. In places where I've seen it work, you have a committee, an advocacy committee of the Friends or Foundation. It meets all year long. It's not an 11th hour situation where you hear there's going to be a budget cut and everyone says, I'll be in and make a change here. This starts early on in the budget process. You meet with the library director and the library director's role is to educate the citizen. He or she provides all kinds of information that they'll need, tells where the funding is needed. And then from there, the committee can put forth a position paper, a platform. Here it is what we want our elected officials to support in the next budget cycle. And remember, you're starting early on, so you're not coming in after the budgets are pretty much set anyway. You're actually allowing the elected officials to have lots of time to look at ways they can fund the things that you're proposing to them. So these standing committees I've seen have incredible results. I've now lived in two different places in the United States where we've operated with one of these committees first and for most of my career in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the elected officials absolutely were responsive. And now, in my semi-retirement, I live in Sarasota, Florida, a place that actually is fiscally quite conservative. And in spite of the fact that it's so fiscally conservative, our advocacy committee of our library foundation has gotten our county commissioners to increase funding two times in the last two years. Just an amazing situation, especially given that they have refused to raise our levy in 20 years. So you can see we're up against some pretty tough odds here. But when you have this concerted effort of citizens, it works. So my focus this year is I would love to create a training program that we can roll this out to people all across the country to help them develop these grassroots political advocacy efforts. And we were very fortunate this year in that real close friend of United, then by the name of Jack Neal from Neal Human Publishers. The name is probably familiar to most of you. Jack passed away in February and left in his will money to United so that we could do some grassroots training in advocacy. So fortunately, it was a passion of Jack's as well as mine. So Jack's passion and mine this year have lined up nicely so that we'll be able to use Jack's bequest to help us roll out this type of a program for advocates all over the country. That's awesome. Glad to hear. Oh, thank you. Yes, we're very excited about it. So we'll have this hopefully out and ready to run by this summer. But all of you, please contact United if you want to hear where we are, you know, what our progress is on this. The other thing I want to just say about our effort here is this is totally separate and different than the kind of political advocacy that the American Library Association does. We love Al's advocacy efforts and they've been doing a lot of it for over 20 years. But the focus of Al tends to be either federal legislation for libraries or state level funding. And in both of those situations, library directors can make very effective spokesperson. It's a whole different situation than at the local level where the library director can't do that. So our program is not in conflict with ALA. In fact, we had a wonderful meeting with all of the staff at the ALA Washington office in September to lay this out and talk about how this could dovetail with what they do. And they're very excited that we're going to be doing this as United. So watch for more to come. We're excited. We're doing something that we think is going to be really critical to helping libraries with their operating budgets going forward. That's the bottom line. We want you to have more money to do the things that you know are so important at the local level. And now I will turn it over to Beth. All right. Great. Thank you so much, Peter. You're the you have also been involved with with us for a long time as well, back dating back to the Friends of Libraries USA days when Rod was also involved with us, too, and launched that statewide group membership. So well over 10 years, you guys have been with us in Nebraska and we're just so thrilled to continue to work with you. So as Peter mentioned, we're working on these trainings that will be focused on that community led advocacy. And there will be a component about of that an online component and we'll be doing some in person trainings as well. And those will roll out the summer. A couple of things related to that is Peter's president's program at the 2020 annual annual conference in Chicago will be a panel of speakers from St. Paul and Peter as well and some others talking about those efforts there. And that will be recorded and we'll be able to make that available as well to all of our statewide group members. So it's not live streamed during the conference, but you will be able to watch it afterwards as our president's program. So that'll be something we'll push out. And we have some other things that are happening between now and then as well. Our United for Libraries Institute for trustee friends and foundations at the LA midwinter meeting coming up in about two weeks here in Philadelphia, hoping for no snow, knock on wood, that that is a three hour program that we're doing in conjunction with the Free Library of Philadelphia. And we are recording that. And that will also be available to all of you in Nebraska and our statewide group members. We we are most likely live streaming it, but I can't promise that right this minute. We're working through the details on that. Of course, if it's live streamed, that'll all come out to everyone. And if it's if not, you'll you'll be able to access recording anyway. But I'm excited about that group. We have some great speakers and I'll show you on the website where you can find that now, including a panel from the Free Library, the Friends of the Free Library of Philadelphia, they're in a really unique situation in that the foundation in the city jointly fund of grassroots advocacy folks or community engagement coordinators in the various parts of the city, which is really unusual. I don't know that I know of any other city that actually helps to fund people to raise library awareness and increase library funding specifically. And the goal is eventually for all of those positions to be taken over into the city's budget, which is really a unique situation in how they do this. So we'll have a one hour panel with a group from the Friends that will be talking about that as part of this Institute. And then we're going to have a follow up later with the foundation as well to kind of go more into the nuts and bolts of how they've done that. So again, all those will be available to you guys in Nebraska. We also our keynote speaker is Gretchen Rubin, who has written multiple books. You might know her from The Happiness Project, The Four Tendencies. Her new one is Outer Order Inder Calm. And she'll be talking a little bit about what her focus from The Four Tendencies, which is about how you kind of receive in and act on information that's given to you or requests that are made of you. So it's a great time with advocacy because you're looking at how does someone process that request and therefore follow through on it. At the same time, we'll be having a speaker talk about our ease of libraries, not ease as an EASC, but ease as in education and entrepreneurship, employment, education. So we'll show that to you as well in a few minutes. So the two things kind of tie together. One is the language and the verbiage you use to connect with people and then the other sort of knowing your audience and how you phrase things and make requests of them. So all this ties in with what Peter's talking about as well as that community led and citizen led advocacy piece. So I'll show you on the website in a couple of minutes where that information is and where you'll find links to be able to access recording or if we are able to get all the details in order live stream it, which we're really excited about. And you'll be able to break that up and watch it in parts and pieces later. Don't worry, you don't have to do three hours at one time. That's a good bit of time. So let's talk about some of the exciting things happening. I know that, Christy, you had on our amazing, amazing emerging leaders team in December talking about recruiting millennials for boards and foundations, right? So exciting for anyone who got to hear from them today. Actually, this afternoon at two o'clock Eastern, we have our monthly member forum, and we have two of the emerging leaders team will actually be speaking today. They'll be going in a little bit different than what they presented when they talked to you guys, but they'll be going into a little bit more detail there. And that is a precursor to a webinar on February 19th, which is an in-depth exploration of the topic. And as, of course, statewide group members, you have access to all of our monthly member forums, but you also get to attend that webinar in February for nothing. It's absolutely free, zero dollars, where the registration will actually be is sixty five dollars for individuals. So that's another great benefit you have of statewide group membership is you have free access to our fee based webinars. So we'll make sure that's in some follow up stuff as well to get that information with the links. And I'll pop that up in a few minutes. So yes, two o'clock this afternoon Eastern, if you're interested, that'll be live. It will be recorded and amazing interest as you can all imagine, I'm sure. And Laura, you can even touch a little bit on on and we get to talking about your award, you know, how you guys have engaged the community more broadly. So those monthly member forums are the second Wednesday of every month at two p.m. Eastern. You do register to participate in the live Zoom and you can access the recording later. Peter spoke for us in October about plan giving campaigns. We've also touched on intellectual freedom, future of libraries or we had the director of the Center for the Future of Library speak in February we'll be talking about National Library Legislative Day. Of course, we know some some folks from Nebraska always make it into DC for National Library Legislative Day. But there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of other advocates out there who can connect with their elected officials during that same time. So United for Libraries for many years has sponsored a virtual component to that and and we'll have Emily Wagner from the Public Policy and Advocacy, formerly known as Washington Office, come and talk. We'll be talking about National Library Week in in March and in April we will have our speaker talking about the ease of libraries. So we'll come back to that. So, Chris, I'm going to go ahead and bring up my screen. If you can just let me know that you see everything clearly. We should now be on the United for Libraries website. Yep, I see the main website right now. Yep, looks good. Right. Great. All right, excellent. So I'm currently at even though you don't actually see it up here in the URL because I logged in. I'm at the ala.org slash United slash States and that link is also highlighted just whenever you're here on the site, you can wherever you are, you can always see the statewide group members link and it'll just take you there. And now you see when I refreshed you get the full URL here. Now you'll know that you'll know you're logged in when you see the log out button up here. Basically, if this is logged in, you can click this to log in. You can also click any of these links here to log in as well. So we have and at anytime you that you need anyone needs a login, you may request that through our website as well. And you can also here in Nebraska. I'm not sure about the other states, but you can contact us here for myself or the person we have mainly in charge of all of our continuing education related things which this falls into for us is Holly Duggan, who's our continuing education coordinator. She's the for you Nebraska people, the contact reach out to locally for what our password is to get you in logged in and anything about using these services earning CE credits for participating in what and doing some of the webinars and trustee trainings and other things that that's going to talk about. Great. All right. Thank you so much, Krista. And yes, we do have that statewide log in for Nebraska as you've been with us for that more than that decade. We've of course moved from had some increases in technology resources to be able to change that. So you do still have anyone who's using that statewide login. Please continue if you'd like, you can get it there as Krista had mentioned and we are transitioning over to an opportunity for people to have their own a single login as well, where they can update their contact information and have their own username and password. And that is what you'll need to access a new platform, which I'll talk about in a few minutes. That's really exciting as we move to making this even more accessible, especially on the go for folks. So let's just go quickly through some of the things here because I want to leave time for questions. And of course, we want to talk about Keen Memorial Library as well. As Krista mentioned with the trustee training, you do have the the access here to the short takes. It's asking me to log in again. Let's see. I don't want to show the password. Hang on a second here. Sometimes this does happen. So let me see if I can do it this way. Now it's going to ask me. All right, I'm going to go this way just because I don't want to to put the password in or recording. There we go. The reason that that came up is because the links on the homepage are actually coded to bring up the login link. So if you click on it and you have it logged in, but this is one of those things with what they call single sign on with the ALA site that sometimes it asks you to put it in again, but I didn't want to put that up there. So you have the trustee academy courses, the short takes for trustees, which I know get a lot of use in Nebraska. I get actually copied on emails when someone registers for the various webinars. And the reason for that is not because I'm checking up on all of you, but because I can see if someone has logged in twice in a short period of time, then I anticipate that you might be experiencing something issue. And so I'm able to reach out and say, Hey, are you having a problem? How can I help you? And sometimes that is can be a browser. The all of the format of the webinars through zoom are better on the platform of Internet Explorer or Firefox Chrome can tend to give some issues with zoom at times. And I know a lot of libraries use Chrome. So that's where we'll we'll kind of pop in and help people with that. As I'm talking about that access, let me also be clear that we are well aware that many libraries in Nebraska are very rural and internet access can be an issue the speed of the internet access. And we want to be sure that no one is ever prevented from participating in trainings or viewing the recordings because of any internet issues. If that is ever a problem for your library, please absolutely reach out to us because we will work with you. We will send out the training on a CD. We will give you a download link where you can download it and run it from straight from your own computer. We'll work with you in whatever way possible that that rural location that that inconsistent internet should never prevent anyone in your community with your board, your friends or your foundation or your library staff from accessing the trainings. So the again, the short takes for trustees and then you'll see that you can register for webinars here. I'm just going to click on the monthly member forums because of course we were talking about that. Right. So once you had logged in, then you would be able to come right here and you see that here is January 2020. And you click right on this and you'll be able to go. Here's my link to register. And here's the description. So we have Madeline Jarvis from Marion Iowa Public Library and Tess Wilson of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine here in Pennsylvania will be leading this webinar. And those of you who watched the prior session I mentioned in Nebraska know that this dynamic unbelievably dynamic group before up and coming library leaders have done incredible research and put together just amazing information on recruiting younger board members. They in fact have a book coming out with United for Libraries and ALA editions around the time of annual. And so we were really excited. It's a workbook format to kind of walk you through looking at your own boards when you have your meetings, how you what your succession planning is how you cultivate future leaders. So you can actually work through these processes yourself. And again, all of the past ones as well here. And this was Peter. So you can go right into these and access the link to register for the current ones and to the prior ones as well. Another popular place people are coming to find information is, of course, our newsletter, which you guys are all receiving at your libraries in the print copy. But you can come on here and get the digital copy. So these are PDFs that you can download. And that way when you share that login or you your trustees or friends or members foundation or members request their own login or use that statewide login, they can come in and view those those newsletters as well. We have increased that from a 24 page newsletter to 28 or 32 pages in some cases, depending on what additional content we want to put in. And it is now full color. So that's a big it's an amazing improvement. More content, of course, in the full color really brings to life the photos that we include in there, which I think are really great. I actually have one when I my desk that I was just looking at that happened. It's actually the October issue that actually has the article about King Memorial in here. Good, good, good. Excellent, excellent. So yes, I mean, just amazing, amazing to be able to have that and share it around. But of course, there is that PDF copy as well. And we have all of the archive newsletters you'll see here back to 2014. For those who remember the Felusa days, Friends of Libraries USA days that was news update and you can get the articles in there. You mentioned all types of libraries. We have a section in every issue that is focused on academic libraries that we call friends on campus. In addition to that being in each issue, we do pull out those. So it's easy for academic libraries to look specifically at those. And I wanted to say for the school libraries that we do have some resources on our site for school libraries, but it is a particular interest of our current president-elect, David Page, who will come into office after Peter's term. And so he is focusing on some school library things with Friends of School Libraries. And you'll see more resources coming in that area as well. Publications. This is where we've kind of got all of the digital downloads of our books. So 101 plus great ideas and even more great ideas for libraries and friends. We're actually published with Neil Schumann many years ago and you can download the PDFs of these books here. We're in the process. There are a couple underpages because you're getting the entire book. So we're actually in the process of dividing those up into individual PDFs based on the chapters and or on the topic and then having an index to them. So it's easier for everyone to find what they might be looking for. We often call these recipe books of sorts. It's why invent the wheel again, you know, take advantage of those that you can learn from. Like we're going to learn from Laura about Keem Memorial Library today. So it's just a great way to access some amazing resources. I'm sure many of you have used our fact sheets, our one pagers in our tip sheets for trustees. Those have been all newly redesigned and we've expanded. We have our library board practical guides, which are kind of toolkits focused for the like the trustees specifically. And then they fall under a little bit different of a category than our toolkits are here and then some are many toolkits for friends, groups and foundations. So if you'd like to say a fact sheet or tip sheets, a one one pager or front and back and then you go to the next step of toolkits probably in the order of seven to 10 pages, maybe 12 in some cases. And then the books are are more detailed as well up here. So just tons of information in this area. We talked a little bit about the webinars. And of course, if we click on other resources here, you'll see the Frenger Library, which I always love that Nebraska was you're just such an amazing leader in this area that when United for Libraries released some downloadable bookmark and poster templates through ALA graphics, we actually Nebraska called and said, oh, is state group members? Can we access this? And yes, indeed, we made it available for you all. So it's a value of forty eight dollars per library that you're able to download these templates and they are in PDF where it's a fillable PDF where you can actually put in information and then create bookmarks and posters using this Frenger Library. And then you can also use this logo itself on other materials. So a couple of years ago, I think maybe three years ago, two years ago at one of your conferences, you guys had a maker space and made buttons and oh, yes, that is that. Yes, yes, yes. And I when I saw Rod Wagner next, he showed me the luggage tags. They were really neat. So that logo there is perfect for to put on a button to wear. We have a lot of people that do use that. Yeah, we still go around and promoting the button maker and our maker spaces that we're putting into libraries. Yeah, wonderful. Yeah, they're great. It's perfect for that. And it really, you know, still in this age of Facebook works that that term works really well. So it's it's a fun one to use. And then also you all qualify for the 10 percent discount in the L.A. store. So that's there as well. Discussion forums. Peter talked about that rich you know, ability to share and talk to other people about what's happening around around the country and even internationally. We do have some international folks who participate as well. So our discussion forums, they used to be open to anyone, but they are now a member benefit. So we have one for trustees, one for friends groups, one for foundations, and you just come here and you fill out this little form and then we sign you up for whatever you pick. Once you actually pick your state here of Nebraska, you're actually going to see that the form changes and you don't have to tell us anything about your your library because we already know you're a statewide group member. So you'll just input your personal information on the next page and we get you signed up. So those discussion groups, friends and trustee discussion groups are around about a thousand people on them and the foundation has less. But that's a place where you can go and ask a question like, hey, we're revamping this policy. Does that if anyone have anyone wanted to share? And I know you have some discussion groups and listservs within Nebraska that you all are doing resource sharing already. This just takes it out across the U.S. and expands that into other other regions as well to gain information. So I know I did a quick overview of everything. And if you there's actually a chart, too, that shows everything that's included, we'll make sure you guys can access that also. But I wanted to tell you about this new platform that we're using. So this right here is our platform through what's called Teachable. It's a third party online school of sorts and everything is packaged in courses. So you're going to see the terminology eight course bundle where you'll see the terminology course throughout this. But so just keeping in mind that that's how it's set up. But what we've done is we've taken all of those resources that we have over here in all of these sort of categories that you see here and built them into courses within Teachable. So here's I'll bring up short takes for trustees, for example. So right here, this brings up the entire series and I can click on any of these links right here. Unfortunately, the the initial clip of the video that comes up is never a very beautiful clip of the person speaking, but sorry, Sally. But you play it directly right here in your browser and then the resource guide is downloadable from each screen as well. And as you go through and you complete watching these, you get an email indicating that you watched that video. And then when you complete the entire set, we actually issue a certificate for the entire short takes for trustees to you. So this would link into your CE credits, as as Krista mentioned there as well. So this is a very user friendly way to move through all of the resources that we have available. Let me bring up and I'll show you, for example, monthly member forums. You won't even have to go into Zoom to do anything to register because once you have a teachable login, you'll just come right here and access everything and the video is right here. OK, so so this is a very easy way to access all of the resources that we have. It is based on an individual login rather than a statewide login. But the really great thing is that we have been able to set this up so that once the registration form goes live for Nebraska, you will register and then you won't be waiting for a staff member to create any kind of login or anything for you. It's all seamless. So if you are up at 2 a.m. and you desperately want to find an answer to a question, you can register, go in there, immediately get access to everything without having to wait until a staff member is is available the next day to create an individual login for you. That's a really great feature that we have for everyone. This will also allow us to kind of look at, for example, if you're a library director and you want to be able to help us to encourage your trustees. Here you've created, you know, we build a seat. This person has finished five of the courses and we can send them a reminder, you know, to continue to work on the other courses. So it's going to allow a lot of engagement opportunities in addition to that ease of use. So is this individual login just for taking the courses? Or is it for everything that we have available as a state library? So everything that you have available, which means anything that we're putting through the main website will come up as a course in here. So I know that's where it gets a little confusing, but I think people are going to really find this to be an amazing resource. So this course, and I'm using air quotes here, even though you all can't see it, is called Toolkits and Digital Publications. But here are all of those Toolkits and practical guides that were over here. So I'm just here on the website. When this does become the full on thing, we switch from the one password for everyone in the state to individual. There won't even be the one, the general one anymore. We'll keep that going for a while. But I think the desire is to get everybody in there so that they can more easily manage what they have completed because they'll be able to see what they've completed. Once you've got the majority of the tracks, yeah. Yes, they'll be able to track their own personal training and what they've completed in a much different way, which I think is personalizes it a lot more. But so I was over in library board practical guides. So I'm just showing on the main website. See, you come in here and it's got the descriptions and then the download now buttons. And over here, when you go in, you just go right in there. It's got that description and you can download that PDF as well there. So, and again, you'll be able to see, you'll be marking something complete that you've read this or that you've done this. And even when you mark it complete, you can go back to it again at any point in time. This is, there's a couple of things that are really positive about this. One is that seamless registration and immediately you're in. We verified you're in Nebraska, you're immediately in 247365. And I say this every year to you all. And I'll say it again, you'll be amazed at the number of people who are accessing training and resources in the middle of the night on the weekends, on holidays. Even this year, I had there were probably about 20 registrations for various courses. Again, that sort of when you fill out that Zoom form currently through the main website, I get that ping. So on Christmas Day, you know, people watched videos, training videos and New Year's Day, people were watching things. So you're volunteers. We know that trustees, friends, foundations, you're volunteers. You're doing this after you've already done everything else in your lives, you know, and in trying to work it in when you can. And we want to make sure that we provide access when wherever we can as quickly as we can. So for this time period, you know, we'll be running both sites for a while as we kind of transition people over. But we really do want to move everyone over into the point where they have their own login so that they can get that personalized experience in here. In this course, when it launches, the one, the main one called Nebraska Library Commission, the North Nebraska Statewide Group Membership. That's where we'll also have more information when the library commission wants to get information to trustees and friends and foundations about other training opportunities they offer, other things. Krista, we'll add in this and update what you would like us to put in there for folks. So that'll be great. And also, we'll also link off to your State Library Association so it can become kind of this one-stop shopping for trustees, friends and foundations to kind of know about the resources that they have available. So everything that's here is going to be in here and teach a bunch. You can start to see that it's here. I want to show you that there is an app available for this. So I'm bringing up, Krista, can you see the pictures here? Yes. Okay, so this is a screenshot off of my iPhone that I took earlier this morning and you see these same courses. They're the same images that you saw in the main teachable site there. And you see they're all in there. They're all marked 0% complete because this is our test account here that we use. And when you click in, so this is in to short takes for trustees and you see all of these right here, they're right here where you just click in and you watch. And then let me show you when we go right in, the video's right there and embedded. So again, you're not going off to Zoom to put in additional information. Once you're registered through this, you are just going all the way through it. You don't ever have to give us your information again for those things. Unless you're registering for something live because that's a little different. But anything you're accessing onto me and is always just built right into the app. So this is a screenshot, so I can't actually play this, but you can see it's got the little intro, the resource guide download and then the video. You can through the teachable app download for offline viewing so that you do not have to use your data to stream videos or to download the PDF. So if you choose in your settings to do that for download for offline viewing that of course uses your memory on your device but it doesn't then use your data. The app is currently only available for iOS platforms. So that would be Apple platforms. However, the mobile site is extremely user friendly. So pretty much what you see here, you will see on the mobile site and it is mobile responsive. And for those who don't know what that means necessarily is that the, and I'm using my hands even though you guys can't see me, but that it resizes based on the size of your screen. So whether you're on a big tablet, medium size tablet or a smaller phone, it will resize and rearrange these icons. So for example, on my iPhone, these, you would see these in sort of a longer list of one across the screen down. More like you saw on this picture right here. So the mobile site's gonna come up and do it more like this than, oops, I didn't mean to start Firefox, then the three across where you're trying to scroll into something and see it in smaller detail. If you're on an Android platform, if you have a tablet that is not an Apple tablet, do not even worry. The mobile site is extremely user friendly. And I do know that they have an Android app in the works. The main difference really from a user experience between the app and the mobile site is that the app does allow you to download for offline use so that you're not streaming on your data, whereas the mobile site is a streaming piece. But it's a, none of them are using tons of data and certainly the information is in there. So you'll know you can choose to do that. But if you're accessing from your home computer or you're on Wi-Fi, it won't be an issue for anyone at all. But it certainly makes this a lot easier for everyone. So you know what, when you're at that board, you're at the board meeting and you're wondering, do we have a resource on succession planning? And you can go right into the mobile site, into your phone and the app, and you can see, yes. We've got a toolkit on it. We have a short takes course on it. We've got a tip sheet on it. So we can meet you where you are in your need at that moment. Probably the tip sheet, because that's gonna be your one pager when you're in the middle of a meeting and not more in depth there. So that's super exciting for everyone. In the works currently as well is, and you'll see this come up in the courses, maybe not when it launches at the end of the month, but definitely coming this spring, is you all know that we have in the newsletter, the good ideas from the network, that couple of pages of little short kind of pop outs of what's happening around the country and ideas of what other people have done. That will all be available through here in a searchable and indexed format. So you actually will be able to go in and search by keyword, or you'll be able to search by library. So King Memorial Library might wanna know all the times they were ever mentioned in the United for Libraries newsletter, and sure enough, you'll be able to find it and pull it up in there. So that's really exciting. We've done a lot of testing with it. Right now it's just a matter of getting the data from the last, we're starting with about five years worth of the newsletter in there. And I think people are gonna find that again, really user friendly. You're in a friends group meeting and you're thinking about trying out, let's say, a popular thing that's happening right now is like the no dinner dinner. If anyone remembers from tool time when Tim, the tool man's Taylor's wife, I can't remember her name, sorry, was hosting a no dinner dinner for the library. And of course they had such fun with it, but the idea that you buy the dinner but you actually don't go. So all the money goes to the library, but you stay at home. So these kinds of fundraisers are getting more and more popular and you'd be able to check in and see right through the app examples of what other people have done. For example, we have at annual conference summer in Chicago program on the stay at home and read storybook ball. And the idea is that you engage people through social media and your website to dress up and stay home and read together. But they register for this and there's the cost of that then as a fundraiser for the friends or the foundation to support the library. These are becoming more and more popular in the ecosystem for friends and for foundations as well. So that these will all be things you can find very easily on the go. And I'm just super, super excited about it. So I just wanted to go back and before I entered we talk about King Memorial Library to mention a couple of things here on the website. So the award that we're going to talk about with King is actually our Baker and Taylor Awards which are here on the site under awards and all of the information in here. And I also had mentioned to you all about the ALA Midwinter Meeting and our Institute that's under conferences and events. This is the Institute right here. And again, it is so super exciting the keynote speaker Gretchen Rubin, our ease of libraries. We have a session on fundraising with Libby Post. We're recruiting advocates of all ages, Lina and Tess again. I'm not sure who you, I can't recall who you all heard from in December but these young women are part of that group. And then that hour long panel I mentioned about the Friends of the Free Library of Philadelphia. So this is actually where we will have the information either to about if we're able to live stream we'll have all those details right here on this page. And of course we'll get that information out to the Nebraska Library Commission to send to you all. And if it's recorded, give us a week or so after the event to get that up on the site for everyone and then you'll be able to access that as well. If you are coming to Midwinter, shoot us an email at unitedatla.org. Anyone from Nebraska, you're coming to Midwinter I'd love to have the opportunity to meet with you. We love to have you involved in some of our things that we have going on. In addition to this Institute, we do have a Donuts and Dialogue mentioned right down here for trustees, friends and foundations on Sunday morning and we have some other things going on. So if you're gonna be there, I ain't gonna reach out and let us know. All right, so let's talk about Keene. I know you guys have been waiting to hear from your local stars there. So I will stop sharing my screen. Let's see, stop showing screen. Okay, we're back here. Yes, okay. So I'm gonna read the introduction from the press release and but I'm not gonna give it all away, Laura. Okay. Upon receipt of a property donation, the Friends of Keene Memorial Library were prompted to jumpstart funding for a library expansion project. The Friends community outreach to gain support for the project included reaching out to friends, relatives and neighbors about supporting the library through Friends funded activities and events. Their efforts paid off and I will of course let you talk about those efforts and how they paid off. So over to you, Laura. And I know everyone's gonna be excited to hear about all of your great efforts. Okay, thank you. It was back in 2016 when Tina Walker first started at the library that she learned about the house that had been donated by a foundation with the stipulation that library expansion must begin. We had a timeline that has since been removed. Yay. So we have a little more flexibility but she did start talking to the friends. They did the outreach. They hosted events. We went in for a $2 million bond vote. There were three votes being taken. One for the library, one for the splash station to get a lazy river and one to update and remodel the city auditorium. The splash station failed. The city auditorium passed by 65% and the library passed by 67%. So we have $2 million towards our $10 million project right there, thanks to the work the friends did to really raise support among the taxpayers. They've also done some one-on-one meet and greets with some of the higher dollar amount people in town. To try and raise awareness of what we're doing, why we're doing it, what the benefits are for the community. And we are now sitting at just shy of $4 million with that $2 million bond and some family gifts and donations from the community. And really we couldn't have done it without them. And even while they've been doing that they've been organizing the annual book sale. And in the past year, they started a new partnership with Dave's Drive-in Liquor which is kind of an interesting partnership. We have a perpetual book nook at Dave's. He's lined the shelves of his drive-through or the walls of his drive-through with bookshelves and we have gently used books available there for a free will donation. The friends board meeting was Monday and I believe their total take since that opened is over $7,000. It averages about $500 or more every month. And that's pure profit. He doesn't keep anything. He takes care of stocking it. He takes care of sorting it so that people can find children's books or mysteries or whatever. And so it's really amazing everything that they've done for us. We actually did, I just want to mention, since you're talking about that right now, Laura, we did do an Encompass Live that Tina did come on the show talking about growing partnerships were least expected and then that drive-in has been hugely popular in the news and everything. Yes, we had front page news coverage. It just, it's incredible. And Jeff Rise, who is the owner of the store actually received the Friends Faith Perry Service Award, which is named after one of our book sorters who's been a huge supporter of the library for years. And it's really an honor for him to receive that this year. I guess it was last year, 2019. Yeah, that is really amazing. And I think it definitely ties in exactly with what Pierre you were talking about with that community-led advocacy. There will always be a place for the Friends book sales. There will always be a place for those friend-raising activities, but the power of the voices of the community members goes so much further with elected officials because they aren't advocating for their own salaries because they truly are the interested and engaged community members. So hats off to you all for all you've done and the truly unique partnerships. So what's in the works for the timeline and anything on tap for the remaining $6 million? We are currently designing a case study to be able to be handed out to those major fund donors, major donors. We expect to really roll out a lot more of those meetings, meet and greets, some after hours events at the library starting in February, so that we can really take it to the people. If we can reach the $5 to $6 million mark, we've got some grants we can apply for that have matching components. And we've got several of those lined up that we're looking at and we've already begun the negotiations with, hey, when should we come talk to you? What do you wanna see? That kind of thing. Great, great. Because I find on our list service often comes up. Can you tell us the size of your library? What is your service population? Your annual operating budget for the library. And then what is the size of your friend's group? Oh, okay. Our service population is about 26,000. The library itself is a 20-some-thousand-square-foot building. We're hoping to build up to 32,000-square-foot. The operating budget is a little over a million. I don't know the exact number. It kind of varies. Our friend's group, we've got a board of six. And I think the friends themselves, they have at least one or 200 people. I don't know for sure. They just started their new year and they only have one paid member so far. But everybody waits for the book sale to join, which is in March this year. So we'll see you in a couple of applications. Beth, I'm glad you asked that question because so many places say, oh, so-and-so has raised a couple of million dollars. We could never do that because we're a community of 25,000 people. And you're showing us, Laura, that a community of 26,000 people indeed has raised $4 million. Absolutely. Congratulations, you're an inspiration to every small library out there. Thank you. That is amazing. And we're gonna continue to talk about all the great things you guys are doing and put the drive in. That's fantastic. That really, truly is fantastic. So congratulations to everyone there. Please let your friends know again how amazing they are and all that they do. And we can't wait to hear that you've reached that 10 million mark and to see the library. So, fantastic. Thank you. All right, all right. So I don't know, Krista, if anyone had any questions that came up, if you had any questions that you wanted to ask of us. Yeah, if anybody does have any questions or comments, anything you wanna share, please do. There we go, on the website, on the go-to-webinar interface under the questions section. I'm just getting that up here, yep. Nobody said anything during the show, but that's okay. I'm glad we were able to get this and get you guys all back again. As some of you may know, we had a little technical difficulties when we tried to run this in November, halfway through the show, our internet went out, yeah, no show. But we are, as you said, we've been doing United for Libraries and in all its incarnations as a statewide offering here in Nebraska for a long time. And we try to have every year, at least once a year, remind you how you guys come on and talk about anything new that's going on. I'm very excited about the new interface coming for people to access the resources. I know having their own personal account will make a huge difference to people. People are always asking me about our encompassed lives and other things. How do I get a certificate? How do I know what I did? Where's the tracking from my CE and having a place for those things that you can do that for is gonna be huge. Our libraries, they do have, we do have a place where they can track their own CE on their own that they do with us, so this is gonna be something that definitely Holly, I mentioned, our CE coordinator, so I'm very excited to start pushing and promoting. Right, yeah, absolutely. There's another component, really, which is helpful for both for Holly and for the library directors in the reporting piece in that it'll be very easy for directors to gauge how folks are doing with completing those courses. And there's a lot of neat opportunities in there to have like a leaderboard out there to say that these libraries have completed 100% of short takes for trustees. All trustees have completed them. That sort of thing, which, as you're mentioning, I think that CE is really an important part of the experience for everyone. What are the lifelong learning, the self-improvement, learning how to be a better board and reflecting in all cases. So getting it really to be user-friendly as a great opportunity and we'll be connecting with Holly. So we love to hear from you guys. You have ideas, you have issues, you have questions, concerns, anything at all. Reach out united at ala.org. Quick, easy email to remember at any time, of course, give us a call, but we do check emails those evenings, weekends and holidays because we know that's when you guys are out there as volunteers looking up that information. So please do know we're here. We want to hear from you because it actually helps us determine what we wanna cover, our monthly member forums, the other fee-based webinars, which will always be free there as part of your statewide group membership. We had the equity, diversity and inclusion for trustees in the spring last year. We had a three-part webinar series on fundraising and capacity building for libraries that focused on foundations and friends groups as well in there and that although it was fee-based and it was about $100 for members, it's free. It was free live for you all and the recordings are free in that, in the statewide group membership area at the website. So let us know because we have an amazing board. Peter, you know, we've got such an amazing board with people with just a wealth of knowledge and expertise that they want to share with you all. So we wanna hear from you about what you're looking for so we can deliver those services and resources. Yeah, and I know here in Nebraska, we will always, as we are dedicated to continuing our statewide subscription to United for Libraries, I've just shown here's the information on our page about it, people in Nebraska to find out, links to all the different things. I've got previous sessions here from Encompass Live, we'll be updating with today's training, we'll be on here, today's workshop. But yeah, we do try, like you're mentioning, having a very rural state. It is hard for libraries, library staff to get their professional development, get their training, keep their skills up to speed. And things like this that are available online are a huge benefit to them that they can't travel, they don't have the distances are very long. And then the time to take off and the money, the budget to be able to leave their libraries. So we push a lot of these online resources to them. And it's in all of our trustee and library board information for them to go here, get your CE. And you guys are doing it. I'm gonna tell you, because I do get those emails and I do see those registering. Yeah, we get the statistics, we know that we guys are using that. Indeed, so that's just fantastic. Peter, did you have anything you wanted to share in closing? No final words, I think we've said it all. Absolutely, all right, so connect with us and reach out and again, Laura Kudos to you guys, just amazing. Congratulations, we keep an eye on you in free month and what's going on there. Yeah, and also, I mean, it was a drop in the bucket compared to the 10 million you have to raise, but the $1,000 for the Baker and Taylor Award, I hope, help. That's awesome, yeah, thank you. Thank you to Baker and Taylor for the sponsoring that award annually to really recognize what friends groups out there are doing because they have amazing ability to really change the trajectory for the library and where they're going with the funding. We've had, we promote that every year too when it's out. We've had a previous library or event, a public library, also one a couple of years ago as well. So, yeah, do as nominated. All right, all right. Well, it doesn't look like we have any disparate questions right now, that's fine. I think we will then officially wrap it up for today. Thank you very much, Beth and Peter for speaking with us again this morning. Thank you, Laura, for coming and sharing about what's going on at Keemawara Library. So, as we're talking about, this is the page on our website for United for Libraries information that you get from about the Library Commission. Holly Duggan, our CPE coordinator, contact about more information there. And let's see here, I wanted to show, this is the session I talked about that Tina did earlier this year about that mentioned the different things they were doing there. Also, let's see, this is today's page. And as I mentioned, we are recording the show. So I'm gonna go back here. This is our Encompass Live main website. So far on the internet, if you just Google use your search engine of choice and type in Encompass Live, nothing else is called that yet on the internet. Yay, nobody else is allowed to use that name. So we can keep it that way. And you will come up with our main page. These are upcoming shows, but right underneath there, we have a link to our archives. And you can see, here's our most recent one from last week. Today's show, we posted on there by the end of the day today. Everyone who attended and registered were gonna email from me and they push it out to our social media. Our mailing list is best mentioned our Facebook page, Twitter. We post the link to the show. If there were any handouts, but we don't have handouts or presentations for today. As you saw, there are links in the session information to all different websites that were mentioned that you need for libraries webpage. So that we posted up on here. While I'm here, I'll show you, we do have a search feature here in our archives. We can search the entire archive for just the most recent 12 months. This is because we are over 10 years into Encompass Live. Our first show was in January, 2009. And all of our archives are here on the page. You can see there's a huge scroll. I'm not gonna go all the way down, but you'll find everything all the way back to the very beginning archived here. So you can do a search and just search everything or you can just do the most recent one if you got really up to date information. But we'll always keep things up here. We are libraries, we save and archive and offer them out there for historical reasons. Just pay attention when you are looking at any particular session. Everything has a date of when it was originally broadcast. So keep that in mind. Some things will be still useful and helpful to you in the test of time. Some things will be expired, old things, resources don't exist anymore, links might be broken, things like that, services or things may have changed. Just pay attention to that date there. And I'll show you here since we were just mentioning it. Here's the one from December about advocates of all ages that you mentioned who, and David Page, the incoming president, right? Was with us that time. And we had, we had four people on. You had all four of that dynamic. Everybody joined us from the group there. So that was a great session. Yes. So definitely if you're interested in trying to get, this is where you're talking about those millennials and Gen Z, the terms we use to label them. Anybody under 40 basically who are not typically on your boards, all your trustees, although they are very much library supporters, we know this. And there's tons of statistics and data information there that can help you with that. So I definitely recommend watching that. And as you said, watching the one this afternoon and the one, it said February one in February. Yeah. So the book, each one of their sessions, they have tweaked a little and customized. I know they had done this one earlier too. Last year at the ARSL conferences, we're at first about it. Association for Rural and Small Libraries. So there's gonna be slightly different info and updates and things of each one. So don't look at all of those. Okay. So that will be for today's show. I hope you join us next week where our topic is best new children's books of 2019. Discovering new books for the young and young heart. This is actually a two sessions. I'll show you here that our Sally Snyder who is our coordinator of children and youth young adult services does a best of children's books. And you'll see just here in February, best of teen reads for the youth. So new books that have come out that she does. Next week she will have also from Fremont High School. Dana Fontaine joins her to do the children's one next week. So if you're interested in coming up with new titles that you can purchase for your library for children's books, you can please join us for next week's show. And then she's got her companion piece, best of teen reads on February 5th. So please do register for that and any of our other upcoming shows. We are also on Facebook. I had mentioned that here, our Facebook page here. We post and promote things here. Here's a reminder to log into today's show. So when our recordings are available, when new shows are available or coming up, we'll post on here and two or three times a week, nothing too overwhelming. So if you do like to use Facebook, give us a like over there and keep an eye on what's going on with Ntumpas Live. So that does wrap it up then for everything. Thank you everybody for being here today. Thank you Laura and Meg Peter. And we'll see you another time on Ntumpas Live. All right, thanks. Bye.