 Okay, we are ready for our final session for the day. Big talk from Small Libraries 2017. I'm Christa Porter, your host for today from the Nebraska Library Commission here in still snowy Lincoln. It has been snowing all day here. I can't wait to try and get home. On the line with us today, we have right now is Jane Somerville from Stanley, Idaho. Did you have any of the storm come through where you are? I've been asking everybody about the weather today. We did not actually have snow today, but you will see from my slides that we have had more than our fair share of the storm. I do know other librarians in the state and I've seen the reports of it, yes. So Jane has a presentation for us today, Gold Nuggets, mining your community for new and exciting programs. She's got a whole bunch of great ideas here for doing partnerships in your community to just get some more interesting events happening in your library. So I'm just going to hand it over to you, Jane, to take it away and tell us all about your ideas. All right, thanks for having me. Little bit about our community. This is our fancy new library that we opened in January of 2013. Just a little aside that we did build this library on with grants and donations and did not raise taxes, so we're quite proud of that. Stanley is located in the heart of Idaho, about an hour north of Sun Valley, if that helps you with your geography. We were founded in the 1860s, Captain John Stanley, a Civil War veteran, led a party of prospectors to the Stanley Basin, and so our history is mining and our community still reflects that heritage. Our population is 63, but that's very misleading because we are a resort area and in the summer we have up to 2 million visitors pass through our community as we're in the middle of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. As you can see from the photos, we do have our fair share of snow this year. This is our library in the top right and that is a full-size door on the right side and our community center and just a nice little picture of our neighborhood. That's the kind of pictures I saw earlier this winter. We normally have a lot of snow, but this year is like a 50-year, at least, winter. Our three major highways in and out of our community have been closed several times this year, so no one could go in and no one could go out. Do you have, that you mentioned tourism, are your visitors all year round or is it just seasonal then? We do have winter activities. Snowmobiling obviously is huge and cross-country skiing. We do not have downhill skiing, but the majority of our visitors come in the summer and the fall. So partnerships are integral to excellent programming and we partner with our little two-room school – oh, I'm sorry, I keep doing that – our little two-room school. Gracious sakes. This is touchy. That's really a horrible picture up in the right-hand corner there. Restaurants, our clinic, our Chamber of Commerce, the Forest Service, Fishing Game, clinics, service clubs, the fire department – anybody we can, we'll grab them to help us with programming. But the most important partners are the people in your community. We all have people in our communities with exceptional talents. We have collectors, just people who are knowledgeable about certain areas. So those are your most important partners. A big thing that I need to say is don't try and do this alone. We did have in the past programming parties – you can see the poster for this – but the same people kept showing up. So now I don't really advertise it in the community anymore, but we have a core group that meets twice or three times a year to set up programs. And we're always on the lookout for something unique. We all keep an eye on our local newspapers, of course, the Internet, and we keep a file of ideas and I'll give you a good example of how those can come in handy later on in the presentation. Now we'll actually get into some of the programs that we do in our little tiny town at 63. One thing that you could start doing is jazzing up an existing program. For years and years, our library participated in our state, let's talk about it, program. But we pretty much read through everything they had. We did ours a little differently than most people in the state. We first called ours bowls and books, and we would have potluck. Two people would bring soup, two people would bring bread, and two people would bring dessert. The scholars were always really happy to get a home-cooked meal, but the same people ended up cooking all the time. And after we went out on our own and chose our own books, we now call it books, burgers, and brews. And we go to a different restaurant. Each month to do our book club, we do not meet in the summer because everyone here gets extremely busy in the summer, and we do not meet in December. So during our off-seasons and shoulder seasons, we're supporting our local restaurants. We just met last night. We had 12 people discussing Freakonomics, which wasn't the most popular book, but we still had 12 people, so we're pleased with that. Read and Feed, this is the only kids program I'm going to talk about. This year we only have nine kids in our K through 8 school. Read and Feed, I came across the book by Katherine Kloster, Karen Sypes, and Vicki Thomas years and years ago, and that's how I started doing my programs. I used books in this book. All the kids read the same book. They come to the library, and we eat food that's mentioned in the book and do activities related to the story. The ones that are pictured is Homer Price. The kids had a great time with this one. I could honestly talk about Read and Feed for the whole hour. If you have any questions later on or afterwards and want to email me, I'd be happy to answer about Read and Feed. It's tons of fun. The kids absolutely love this program. The book is still in print, so if you wanted to purchase that and do your programs, it's still available. Armchair Traveler Series. We've done this for a long time, but I actually got the new title for this from listening to a big talk last year or the year before. A lot of people in our community travel, and it's a little bit like come and see the slides from my vacation, but people are always interested in other parts of the world. We try and do about three a year. The ones pictured, Margaret went to Tibet. She was actually a doctor on an expedition to Mount Everest. She was a doctor in base camp, and Europe 65-16 was tons of fun. Julie is a former board member, and she and her mother reenacted the trip that Margie took. In 1965 with her best friend, that was a ton of fun. We've had kayakers, just all kinds of travel programs. Cooking, we're lucky enough to have a full kitchen in our library. If you don't, there are places available in most small towns where you could hold a cooking program. I know a lot of churches have kitchens and community centers. When we built our library, we were very adamant in wanting a full kitchen. We've done bread and pie, sea salt, caramels, another kind of, we did peanut brittle. These programs, we sometimes do have to charge a fee to cover the price of ingredients, but you get to take home either a loaf of bread to bake, or a pie to bake, or take home candy, and everyone in your community, I mean every community has cooks, good bakers. In all arrangements, we do not have a floral shop in Stanley, but one of our summer residents owned a floral shop on the other side of the hill on the Sun Valley Ketchum side of the pass, and she volunteered to bring up all the goodies we needed to make flower arrangements, and once again there was a fee for the materials, but you got to take home a beautiful flower arrangement. Laugh Lines is a fairly recent addition to our programs. This is dramatic readings of obviously comical sketches, short little plays. There is no memorization involved. You can see that the participants have their scripts in front of them. We do have auditions. The audition you show up and tell a joke, and then you get a part in the play. This is a ton of fun. The community loves this. We partner with a local restaurant. It's actually right in the same town square as the library is, and folks come in and order dinner, and then we entertain them. We get good turnouts for this, and it's a lot of fun. Author Luncheon, we partner with Redfish Lake Lodge for this. Redfish Lake Lodge is quite a famous resort on Redfish Lake. It's a beautiful, beautiful venue, and they allow us to use their restaurant at lunchtime, and there is a ticket for this event. This was originally a fundraiser, and it no longer is a fundraiser, but we still do have to charge admission because you order lunch. We're really lucky that we have some excellent local authors at the top left. It's Ridley Pearson signing for the kids. He actually did a program for the kids and for the adults. The guy in the striped shirt is Anthony Doar, who wrote All the Light We Cannot See when the poet surprised for that. He lives in Boise and was willing to travel to Stanley. Our other partner for this is Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch, which is kind of an exclusive dude ranch, and they offer the author and guest a night at the ranch, which is, I honestly don't know how much it's worth, but it's worth quite a lot. Our bottom author there is Chris Crutcher. These happen to be all Idaho authors. You're fortunate that people are willing to travel to Stanley to participate in this, and it does help to have that incentive of the night at Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch. Also if they're more than, well Boise is about three hours away, if they're more than three hours away the author, we will pay their gas money to get here. We've never purchased an airline ticket. We've never had to do that, but this is one of our signature events that always draws a good crowd. Lectures, this is a good example of tapping into your local fishing game, forest service, your state parks, or just someone in your community who is an expert in some field. Obviously, not everyone's going to have a Wolverine study in their backyard, but we did and we had a packed house for three different biologists, came in and talked about this ongoing Wolverine study that started in the early 90s and continues to this day. We had a local expert on Bay Horse Mining Community, which is downriver about 60 miles and then up to the top of the mountain, I'm not sure how far that is, but it's not one of the more well-known historical sites in our neighborhood, and he actually got a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council to study and compile history on this area, and he actually came to us and said, I have to give a program, can I do it at your library? Once you start doing innovative programming like this, programs do seem to fall from the sky, like this guy from the Humanities Council needed a venue to give his lecture. Also, Orville Hansen is a former U.S. Senator, and he's given several lectures. The one I'm showing here is ratification debate in the states and the making of a nation, which doesn't sound really thrilling, but once again we had a packed house for that. Just local people who are experts, we have a guy that likes to do lectures. He just comes up with these ideas. I'd like to talk about DNA and genetics next week or in two weeks and people show up. These are a great place to tap into. Everyone who collects is so proud of their collections, and some of them can be really eclectic. One of our local town councilmen collects Navajo rugs, and he had never done a presentation before, and we approached him and he said, well, I'll do it, but I don't think I have very much to say. He brought in all his books and he brought in a huge collection of rugs. This is in our old library and we had rugs upstairs and downstairs, and once Lem got going about his rugs and his passion for collecting them, he totally lost his nervousness and really got into it. Our program ended up being twice as long as we thought it would be. Like that gal who did the lightning round program on checking out the books as presents, one of our most well-attended programs is our annual Christmas reading. We do call it a Christmas reading. Lois Stanley is mostly either Christian or agnostic or non-religious, I guess you would say, and for this venue we partner with Beckwith's Lodge in Lois Stanley, which is a huge log lodge that is rented out. As soon as January 1st rolls around, we call up and we try and do this the first weekend in December so that it's like a kickoff for the holiday season. We have people bring hors d'oeuvres and Christmas spirits. We do have wine and beer there. Some years we read one book, a smaller book, some of our favorites, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a huge hit, The House Without a Christmas Tree. We did Skipping Christmas by John Grisham. We did have to edit that one down a little bit. We have read the illustrated classic version of A Christmas Carol because it was a little bit shorter. We try to keep the reading to about an hour. We gather at around six o'clock and we just mingle until about seven and eat and drink and then we do our stories. When we do an entire book, each person reads a chapter and then other years volunteers just choose a short reading poem, a short short story, something generally less than five minutes. It's by far one of our better attended programs. For all ages, although in Stanley we don't have a lot of kids, so it generally ends up being mostly adults. Adult coloring and Zentangles. If you're not doing adult coloring, I don't know why, it's the cheapest, easiest program and it's just so much fun and so relaxing. This could also be a passive program and the cost of course is minimal. This year we have added Zentangling, excuse me. We have a young gal in our community who is quite a fantastic artist and she's been showing us the art of Zentangling. She's not a certified Zentangle teacher, but we do have this book available for checkout as well. Talk to our music. During the summer season in Stanley, there is live music at one venue every day of the week, but it's usually, it's bluegrass country. The late night shows are rock and roll. We actually have a music festival one weekend. We try and get alternative music, something that they're not going to hear on a regular, at one of these other regular venues. The top left is two members of the San Diego Chamber Music Society. They have family in Stanley, so they come up, they bring their French horn and their marimba and this was one of those programs too that dropped out of the sky. They're like, oh the New Town Square, could we bring our instruments and play music there? And we're like, well of course. After they started doing this, one of the gals from the Wood River Orchestra, which is the Wood River is on the other side of Galena Pass in the Haley Ketchum Bellevue Sun Valley area, that's the Wood River Valley. She's like, well I can't get the whole orchestra, but I could get some of us to come up and play, so they're the ones in the lower right corner. Fortunately, we do have a venue in the library large enough that if weather did not cooperate they could. The orchestra might be a little crowded, but we do have a backup for that. None of these, I think we pay $250 for the Chamber Music and the Wood River Orchestra didn't charge us anything. Even your high school band could be a part of this and I know that almost every community has their local musicians that might be willing to play at your library, indoors or out. Therapy dogs, unfortunately the woman who did our therapy dog program is only a summer resident, so we don't have a therapy dog in the school, but Wendy did this program with her dog, Powder, and explained to us how to become a therapy dog, all the steps that they need to take, and Powder did come to the library for that. If she lived here a year round we would definitely have our kids reading to the therapy dogs. This is the second year we did home brewing. My assistant actually that helps me at the library on weekends has been home brewing for years and we did this program last year. We had eight participants last year and we did it again this year and we only had two as you can see, but we still considered this a huge success because these two young men are not library users, so whenever we can get someone into our library that normally doesn't use the library we consider that a win. The best part about the home brewing program is they actually do brew beer and then in six months or whenever I'm not even sure how long it takes they get together and sample their brew. All right, campfire stories for grown-ups. We do this in the town square, if you remember that first photo of the library and the partnership, we're in this town square with the Gerheim Gallery and this loose restaurant and a yoga studio and a mountain climbing guide shop, but in the square we bring in a portable fire pit and this one we try to keep just for grown-ups so that you know you can bring wine and beer and we tell stories around the campfire. We actually were rained out this year so we didn't have a chance to do that so I don't have a great picture of that, but we had such a blast with this. We left so hard and I wish I had the pictures from our inaugural event because everyone, everyone is just cracking up, but unfortunately they were on an old digital camera that they were on the camera's memory and the cord for that camera is long gone so basket-making or really you could do any handcraft, knitting, crochet, quilting, we just happen to have in our neighborhood a woman who makes willow baskets. This also is, people come back to do this each time we have had the program, we have had return participants just to help improve their craft or just because they enjoyed it so much. This one makes a mess, this in the floral arranging. You'll be finding bits for days, sometimes weeks. There's more pine needles. We're also very fortunate that we have a retired professor from College of Idaho who is a writing teacher and also a published author and he volunteers his time every winter. We've had essay writing, science writing, a memoir and current events writing. John volunteers his time. He does ask that participants make a donation to the library so the only thing we're really out there is just the time in our meeting room which is nothing. I realize that not every community has a retired writing professor and published author but there's probably a retired English teacher and honestly I don't think you would really need a teacher or a writing professional to do these. There are all kinds of prompts that you could meet at your library like once a month and just write from a prompt or share what you've written from a prompt. Photography, everyone in your every community has somebody who is an expert in digital photography, maybe printed photography. You saw in the town square we have the Gerheim gallery. Well this is Mr. Thad Gerheim who does large format photography which is quite a different process than 35 millimeter or digital and he has given us excellent demonstrations on how the camera works and he and his partner hike into the wilderness and so he actually brought in his their backpacks and showed us how they packed everything to get to where they could take these photographs. So and people these days are very interested in photography and even if you have a digital or especially if you have a digital professional you will you'll get people there. Deepsea Illustrator now this one I know very few people are going to have a Deepsea Illustrator in their community but this isn't a good example that I have of cutting out articles from from newspapers that seem interesting. This was in the Wood River paper and one of the people on the the programming committee said this is just so amazing let's let's call her and ask her and she she actually does live in the Wood River Valley when she's not out at sea in a submersible drawing Deepsea creatures but every community does have some person who's done something really unique. Make a Valentine this is such a simple program Karen in the upper left hand corner is is an artist by trade mostly she works with stained glass and oil painting but she said sure I'll I'll do a class I'm making a Valentine and we made really fancy Valentine's that year but this has now evolved into a passive program and so every year about a week before Valentine's Day we just get out all the materials and leave them in the community room and people can come and go and as they please to make their Valentine's and I have a couple of gentlemen that they rely on this for you have to do Valentine's and it's such a simple and low-cost program. Wildflower and birding walks these are fairly new for our library we like I said we are pretty fortunate that we live in an amazing natural area with plentiful wildflowers and and birds but this could also be local garden tours also related master gardeners are required to hold to do some kind of teaching experience to maintain their their status as a master gardener so you could I'm sorry I'm getting a little tired today you could you could make this program fit to your community there are often in every community someone with a fabulous vegetable and or flower garden and that these and there's also someone who knows a lot about birds I can guarantee you that this was a new program for us this fall apple tasting I actually missed this one because I was at the air a cell conference in Fargo it was a great fall program I just heard of a fabulous program at a library in North Liberty Iowa where their local brewery came in and did beer and food pairings so I know that some libraries frown on alcohol in the building possibly you could hold that kind of a program at a maybe at a local pub or even in someone's home this one if we ever did this one again I would not limit it to women I would just have basic car maintenance for anyone but I have these two guys one who actually had just joined my board offered to do this program and that's what they came up with so yeah I said sure you guys can do this and it was it was very successful they they learned really basic things like how to check your tire pressure how to fill your windshield wiper reservoir how to check your oil it's been a while since we did this I don't think they actually did do an oil change but and this one was held at the firehouse they emptied and we do have a volunteer fire department and they emptied two of the bays and brought in their personal cars and did some car maintenance one thing that we're really looking forward to this year is programming for the eclipse it's pretty exciting experience and we do happen to be like right there on the total on the path of totality so fortunately there are many astronomers coming to our our town for this event and have graciously agreed to partner with us for a lecture on eclipses and we have an astronomer coming to show people how to use a telescope and then we'll also do a program on safe viewing and probably have actually a library event the day of this eclipse and many of your libraries will be on this path to totality and even if you're not I'm sure there will be many live streaming events going on NASA and star net libraries star net libraries are offering all kinds of webinars and offers for free viewing glasses so check out star net libraries and see what they have to offer you I've lost my cursor here we go and one thing that I highly recommend doing anyone who presents for a program at your library please send them a handwritten thank you note it's a small thing to do but it's also a very big thing to do people are very appreciative to get an actual handwritten note I make ours note every note cards and so they're they're inexpensive and when you do that you'll find that people are willing to come back and do a program again this is my little handout that I usually give when I do this in in person this will be of course archived and recorded if you would like me to email one I would be happy to do that as well and here's my email address and fireworks to end this program with a bang thanks everybody for attending you know it's been a long day so yes thank you for those fireworks great thank you very much Jane those were some great ideas I like the fact that a lot of them are things specific to people that is specific to people you have in your community or that you know about and I think the general idea is just look to your community see who's out there doing something interesting you know somebody a board member knows somebody a volunteer knows somebody or is somebody who has just got some interesting some special interest or something they know about and that that can be a presentation there's there's the ideas you know are endless it's true in every community has those unique individuals and with usually very little it doesn't take them it doesn't take much to talk them into sharing their expertise and particularly impressed he said you have live music somewhere in town every day during the summer oh yes it is actually yeah but it's a big draw and when you have a lot of people coming to your community you need to keep them entertained all right we do have a couple of questions that have come in if anybody does have any questions please do type them into the questions section of your go-to-webinar interface the campfire stories for adults that you had does the question is does anybody who's there just tell stories or do you have people and stories lined up ahead of time usually I try to make sure that we have some people showing up that have a story to share I think it's best that you have at least a few but generally everyone who shows up has some kind of anecdote that they will end up sharing okay someone how about these sessions that you hold held elsewhere mm-hmm not at the library are those then promoted as sponsored by the library how do you connect that back to being something a library program yes they are all Stanley community library presents okay yeah yeah so the car maintenance at the firehouse that people would understand well this is this was happened because of the library yeah I think on the poster there yeah it shows oh yep there's your logo down the bottom yeah yeah we try and put the logo on on every poster and we also do an article in our local paper our county paper that is actually the other question I had was how do you publicize all of these different events okay well and Stanley it's a lot of times word of mouth we do we we place posters at the library the post office the clinic we have two small little grocery stores we post there year-round and during the summer there's a lot of other shops and restaurants open and whoever will put our flyer up we will put it up there we do have a Facebook page and we also have a local events email list that we send reminders of programs coming up okay so a lot of the traditional ones but then look for things like that that are specific to your area that you have all right that was last question we had anybody have any last minute questions I just really want to ask of Jane right now if you don't there is her email address there you can ask her for tips about any of the events that they've done at their library and if anyone has a really great program that they've done that they would like to share with me I would I would love to hear it yes definitely always everyone is looking for for new ideas I'm sure I mean you did a whole presentation on them but that yeah anything else new I'm sure you're looking for other ones to do well we had at our book discussion last night actually we had a young mother telling about her her eight-year-old son who is totally into these junior ranger programs and he and his family have been traveling to national parks and monuments for him to complete all of these programs and we're gonna ask Grady eight-year-old Grady if he would give a presentation about his trips to fulfill his junior ranger badge great turn out for it for that yeah does he know how brave he is to do that we do have one last question we'll ask of you oh here oh someone given it has an idea for one you're asking for ideas great slow cooking in the fast lane is the program they do people make a crock pot dish and bring it and then there and the written recipe to share and then the library then they make photocopies of all the recipes for people to take home and then it's like a potluck event dinner but then everybody shares their recipes as well oh that's a great idea that's a good one food is always a good a good attraction oh it yeah yep I like to show you the recipes so many times I've been to events or that we have here parties and you always say you know though that's a great one I wish I could have that recipe and having a nice organized thing to do that and share the actual recipe afterwards that's a good idea all right we have one last question I'll throw out there that someone did ask what do you like best about your your small library your small rural library oh man I would have to say look at well I would have to say that I really know my patrons I love doing readers advisory even more than I love programming and getting it I I pretty much know everyone in town and I'm also very lucky that during the summer I get to meet so many interesting people passing through it's a pretty unique situation okay well thank you very much I think it's a perfect wrap up for today well thank you for asking me yeah thank you so much for your ideas and that is our final session for big talk from small libraries 2017