 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We are an online show. The terminology is up for debate for this kind of thing. A lot of people use the term webinar. Some people don't like that word. But we are a webinar. We're an online show. We're whatever you want to call us, but we're here live every Wednesday morning online at 10 a.m. Central Time. If you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record the show every week as we are this morning. And then we do post that to our website where you can watch any of the shows you've missed. And I'll show you how to get to those and where those are at the end of this episode. We are, as I said, we are live here on Wednesdays. We record here on the recordings on our website. Everything is free and open to anyone to watch. So if you're, you know, someone else who may be interested in watching our show or watching one of our recordings, please do let them know. Send them off to our website and they can watch anything as well. We do a mixture of things on the show, book reviews, many training sessions, interviews, demos, sometimes of things, different services and products. Basically anything library related, we put it on the show. That's really our only criteria. Is it something that is done in a library or could be beneficial to libraries? We do have a mixture of people who present on the show as well. Sometimes we do have Nebraska Library Commission staff present on things that are specific to here in Nebraska. But we also do bring in guest speakers from all over the country. And this morning we have a mixture of that. This morning, as you can see from our startup slide here, I am presenting for you today, not just hosting. So I'm doing a double duty. Yeah. Today along with my colleague Louise Alcorn. Hi, Louise. Hello. Hello. Who is at the West Des Moines Public Library over in Iowa, just to the east of us. And your new title there? I always have to remember. A library technology coordinator. Right. Yeah, I know. We both have recently come into new titles in the last year. Which does not mean our jobs have changed. They're just new titles. No. Yeah. Yeah. Just moving things around a little. I am the library development consultant is my new title here at the Nebraska Library Commission, which doesn't really tell you much about what I do, which I guess is beneficial to them, that they just kind of put anything they want to onto me here. I do e-rate. I do strategic planning, consulting with libraries, grants, a whole bunch of things involved in our library development department, but I also host this income plus live show every week as well. What we have for you this morning on the show is our presentation called innovation on a shoestring free and cheap tools. This is a presentation that Louise and I put together. Oh, gosh, how long ago? Three years. Well, I know we did it in 2013. And I think that may have been the second time we were doing. Right. So somewhere on then we started doing this presentation and haven't done it for a couple of years. But then we revamped it and did it again last last month at the Library Technology Conference, which is held at McMallister College. Is that it? Macalester College, Calister College up in St. Paul, St. Paul, Minnesota. And we have a wonderful conference. Yes. Yes. If you're interested in libraries and technology in the Midwest, it's a perfect thing to go to. Louise drives up to it. I flew this time, but could be done to drive. If I wanted to. But the great conference, you have the Library Technology Conference and you'll find it. But what we have here is a collection of things, just some new things, some things you might have already heard about, to online resources, online services, things that you can use to really excuse me, improve what you're doing at your library, bring in some new interesting topic, a new interesting service. And we've updated it over the years, of course, so it is up to date as of last month with some new products and things, some new things that are out there. As the title says here, free and cheap, everything that is in this presentation does have a free version associated with it. So everything here, you could go ahead and try out at no cost to you, except for your own time to explore it. Many of them also do have extra options or features that are pay. So some sort of fee structure for doing something a little different with them or getting more features added, another different version of the free product. So you'll hear us talk about some of the things that there are charges for, just to let you know what is out there. But everything does have a free option that is one of our criteria for this as well, is that everybody should be able to use this without having to pay any sort of money at all. All right. So as everyone knows who's here on the line with us, whether you're in a public library, academic library, special, whatever, we're all trying to do new things in our libraries. We're all trying to learn something new, but it's not easy to do it. There's not enough money for any for a lot of these things. Our budgets are getting cut. Our budgets are just low to begin with. We can't really spend a lot of money on these services. That's why we've collected these ones that all have free options. So cost is a barrier that a lot of libraries are dealing with. Time, not having a lot of time to figure out what to do with these things, how to explore these things, what is out there, what can we do with them. That's why Louise and I have taken it upon ourselves to explore some of these for you and give you a little input on what they can do, what they can't do, and staff time. You don't have enough staff to learn all these things, to take over something else so that you can learn it. We want something that will help you do your job better and quicker, and even because you do have fewer staff. And some of these services will be able to do that as well for you. So there's going to be kind of a mixture of things here that will help you with the fact of your lack of money, lack of time and lack of staff that you may be experiencing in your libraries. Some of them will address some of these things and not all three, but this is our main criteria for trying to put this presentation together. Our first topic is off to you, Louise, your photo manipulation. OK, so I do work in a public library and I do work on the reference desk a lot. And obviously, just like every other public library, more and more of our time is being spent answering questions for patrons. And what I'm finding is that more and more they're wanting to do slightly more sophisticated things on our internet stations than they used to. It's not just a matter of just reading their email, reading Facebook or whatever. They may get an image, want to work with it, do something with it, put it up on a site, put it up on social media, whatever it might be. So I've been looking at we've been looking at different options out there that patrons can use that are preferably web based because we don't necessarily want to install software on our public machines. We want to be able to refer people to things that they can use either all web based or they can put them on their phones. Because, of course, at this point, so many people are coming in with phones. So we can at least say, hey, try this out on your phone. Next slide. So the first one I want to look at and talk to you about is Pixlr. So Pixlr is a fairly simple one. It's been around for a little while. It's an online photo editing tool. And again, I'm also looking for myself. I have some photo editing software, but every once in a while I need to do something on the fly. So I'm always looking for what's out there that I can use quick and easy and and cheap or free. You can fix photos, adjust photos, add some filters to them, just like with Instagram and other programs, which is kind of fun. It's available as a download Facebook app, Chrome app, and of course also on the phone. And the place I actually originally used this was on my Apple iOS phone, my iPhone, which was cool. And it actually worked pretty well. I was impressed. There's two main functions. There's the editor function, where it's a little deeper, where you're you're working in layers, you can replace colors, you can do all that kind of thing, take out red eye, all those things that you expect to be able to do with a photo editing tool. But they also have a nice express function where you can apply just quick fixes and do some of their overlays are really fun. Some of their filters are really fun and borders. And so if somebody just wants to quickly make something a little prettier, make something a little funnier, add some words on it, that kind of thing. The express function is actually really nice. This next slide basically shows you an image of like this is the editor function. So this is all the different functions that you can do in the editor function, which I think is fantastic. There's a lot there for something that's basically you know, free or an app. I can't remember if the app I was going to go look and see. I can't remember if the app is pretty cheap, you know, as apps are. But there's also they also have a lot of filters, which are fun. And again, this is kind of the quick express option. So next slide is some of the it's the pixel or omatic, which is in this particular one is the vintage retro look. And I think it's actually kind of a cool set of options. And again, if people who are used to using Instagram but want something with a little more robust options, this is a way to add some of those different filters on there, so forth. Yeah, I like this romantic one with all these different. You can see here how very different from one picture. It's underneath of a bridge that just click on one and boom, it's done. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of adjust that you can do. It's the Brooklyn Bridge, I'm pretty sure it looks like it. Yeah, but but yeah. But again, it's it's very fast, very easy. They can play with it without having to necessarily commit to a whole lot. So next one I want to talk about is pit monkey, which first of all, I love the name. And second of all, it's again, an online image editor. You can do again, all the express stuff, crop, crop, touch up, add text, you know, basically everything I like the interface. I think it actually has a cleaner, slightly more sophisticated interface. So that might be something to think about when you're recommending it to people. It's also easy to use and to teach to people, which is again, if you're trying to show this to patrons or staff who need such a thing, all of the functions are pretty straightforward. You know, I basically learned all the major functions in about five minutes and then was able to go and play with them. I do. One of the things they have is these themes and they have a couple of things I've never seen anywhere else, like vampires, where you can add crazy like veins on the skin. And yeah, so I basically was able to take a picture of I think my boss and put like veins and evil eyes on it. He thought it was funny. Well, that's that's good. Well, yeah, you know, it's it's it's it's it. You've got to have fun with it. That's important. But again, I'm not going to show you a lot of screen chargers because it's your basic photo editor, but it's just really nice. Next one, this is my new particular passion, which is Canva. I don't know how many of you have used Canva. It's online graphic design, so it's a little bit different from photo editing per se. But you're basically able to make nice, web-ready and even high-def for poster-ready images for your library. So I'm thinking of this more on the staff side, although, of course, when patrons come in and go, my Girl Scout troop is selling, I don't know, widgets. And we need to make a nice image to put out on our Facebook site. This is a great place to send them. There's plenty of free options side of it, but they also have a huge, huge library of stock images. And they're just $1 each. It's a flat rate. So you can build a really nice image for pretty much. And you can use your own images for free, which I'm going to show you in just a second here. But they also have pre-made designs. And what's really cool is I am not a graphic designer, but I have to look like I am. I have to pretend I am on TV. So what I can do is I can make really nice signage. Because we have a bright board that we have downstairs, so we have to make stuff for that. I also need to make stuff for our social media. And I can make it look really good and make sure that the fonts match, for instance, which is something I'm terrible at, because they basically have a lot of pre-made designs that are like, this goes with this. So put this with this, which I really love. So let's go to the next thing. I want to show you one option that I did. First of all, here's, again, the interface. Very clean, very nice, very easy to use. They have lots of layouts that you can basically just grab. So this is one that I grabbed, which is this Autumn Reasons to Love the Season, whatever. It's a very pretty picture. It's all great. I decided to use a picture of my own. So in one minute, literally, I took this thing, uploaded my own image for the background, and changed the wording using the same fonts and moving it around. Boom, I just made that, and it cost me nothing. So I now have a lovely thing for spring. I did cut off the bunny's ears, because I did it in a minute, rather than two. And I didn't send it the thing right. But again, these are things that you learn as you're moving along. But I really love Canva. It's really easy to use. You can then basically download these, export these, and use them wherever you like. So that's it for Fallen, if you like. Yes. All right, next up is video creation and editing. Very popular in, to promote things for your library, to talk about a new services coming out, putting together some sort of little video for it, something a lot of people, a lot of libraries are doing. And it's very easy and very quick to do. And then people like to watch this literally like one minute video about here's our new service, here's what's coming up for the summer reading program, whatever. But how do you do that? How do you become like a movie editor? Well, you don't have to, luckily. There are some really easy, really cool tools out there online, same as we've talked about, that free that you can use. First one up here is GoAnimate. This is online animated videos that you'd make with this. So like a little cartoon, characters that you would pick, different scenes you can put together for this. There is a free version of it, but there's also pay accounts if you wanna have something a little more robust. And they also have specifically for schools. So if you're in a school library or associated with a school, GoAnimate for schools where they do discounted pricing for schools and for classroom use. So that could be something really good if you wanted to also use this in a classroom environment in teaching the kids how to do videos and how to create them yourself. There are characters and backgrounds and actions, everything, there are animated things you can have all your characters do. You can add your own library's information to it. If you have photographs from an event that you wanna have be part of it, if you have your library logo, you wanna put on it to brand it for your library. There is, it's got an increased text to speech options. You can write up a script so to speak and have it just do it for you or you can just record your own over it, just narrate it yourself. And then you can share it anywhere you want to. If you wanna put it like on the front page of your website where people go to see here's the new things coming up. If you have a YouTube channel as we do here that we use, your Facebook page, wherever you have out there, you can share it out to anywhere once you create one of these. And this is just to show how the interface works. There's all these different things on the left-hand side here, our different actions. You can see this guide behind the desk can do and you just click on them and they pop over into the right-hand side. It's really easy, click and drag to put whatever you want in there and see how it works before you actually publish it out there and create your final video. This is the GoAnimate for Schools that I was talking about. You can have educational, for a teacher you can have educational videos just for the teacher to use for just about $60 a year, 59 officially. But then you can also have a plan for your students depending on how many students you'll have using it. You can see here for up to five teachers and 200 students, $356 a year for unlimited use of this program. So that's pretty good to get 200 kids being able to use an online video program to create something in their schools. So definitely something to look into if you're doing that kind of work. The next one up here is Animoto. This is also a video creation tool. It has mobile apps for this one, which is really nice. So you can use, you know, you take video on your phone or with your tablet or whatever and then use that to put it into your video. It's got a free version of course and pay accounts. But they also have for educators and it's free in your classroom, free in this case. So you just apply and say that you are a school or an educator and then in this case you can have a completely free account that you can use to create presentations and things for your classroom. And this is an example of one that's been done. This is a library elementary school in Virginia and Vermont, sorry. And what this teacher did is she gave all of her students in the library video, little GoPro cameras, I believe it what it was, and had them go around and do a tour of the library. So I told them, go to where each of the sections are in the library and talk about yourself and describe what's going on here in the library and then put together here's a tour of our library. And I'm just gonna show you this and hopefully this will pop over to the site. There we go. So you can see what these kids came up with. There's the sound. Okay, we're not gonna show the whole video but just to give you an idea of this is what she did. She just, the kids took the cameras around it and then the teacher, the librarian took them and I'll put them together. All of this animation and changes and everything, it just came from the Animoto software. So she is just like what Louise was talking about being a graphics designer or a video designer. She didn't have to know this or learn how to do this. It was just pick different things and different animations and whatever she wanted to have go into the video and there it was, pretty slick. All right, next up we have another one, Pow Tune. This is also animated video. So little animated characters. There's a free account and premium education plans just like the previous ones. It just has a little different, has a lot more features and it's really fun with character backgrounds and little animated with the different characters can do. Same thing as the other ones, you can add your library's logo pictures. What it also has that specific to it is it has a automatic search within the Pow Tune software to do a search in Flickr for photos that are creative commons license. This means they have been licensed, people have said they are free and available for you to use in your video and that is something to be aware of when you're doing things like this and grabbing images and things off the internet that you might wanna use, make sure that they are licensed and legal for you to be able to use them. With Pow Tune, it does that for you. It limits the search just for things that people are saying, I've taken this picture, I've created this item, but I am, yes, anyone who wants to can go ahead and use it. And also it's the same thing for background music. The music tracks are also all licensed and available for people to use for free for this kind of educational thing. This is their interface for creating it. You can see there's a whole bunch of different little, different animations that characters can do, waving, running, laying down. There's different styles you can switch to, this is just one particular type of a character you can see across the bottom. They've got the timeline of the video so you can go back and forth and see where you wanna put in and drop in things. It's really slick. And this one I have also here, another video that I wanna show you that someone did describing the nonfiction section of their library using Pow Tune. I can find books of poetry and books about book tales. Which is an excellent question. Nonfiction section. There are a lot of books that are nonfiction. How is a penguin supposed to find easy? You just have to know the sections that this guy, Melville Dewey, created. Each section has a number. All the books. Okay, I'm not gonna teach you guys Dewey here. But, so that's just another example of someone that someone used. You can see there was the little animal. There was the silhouette character for her that she used. It does have the Pow Tune branding down there in the lower right hand side of it. That's part of the free version. But it's really fun, really easy. You can see there's just some very creative things in this one. Teach a little educational thing. How to use a library. The other one doing a tour of the library. The last thing of video related, which is just kind of is Skype. Skype is, I'm sure many people have used this or heard of it, online video calls that you can do with people. A lot of people use it just to keep in touch with their families. Many libraries are offering it though for people to reach out to be able to connect with their families either here or abroad. Skype has versions for both Mac and Windows, which is great no matter what you have. And they also now have for Linux as well. So whatever type of computer you have, you should be able to get the free Skype app on it. What libraries are doing in schools is Skyping with authors. So this is something that you can get arranged with a lot of authors to do this themselves. This is the Fayetteville Free Library, is in, I believe, New York. And this is something they do a regular Skype book club. They have their regular book group that they read a title, and then they meet together and discuss it, and then they bring in the author from wherever they are across the country for a Skype conversation with either the adults or the kids who have read the book. And this is another example of they put their videos up onto their YouTube account. This is one of the authors that was meeting with them. And you can see the upper right-hand corner. There's all the kids that were there in their view, so they were watching her and be able to talk to the author. There is a Skype and author network online that you can go and look and see which authors are involved in doing this, who would be available to do this for you. Sometimes you can just contact the author directly too if they're not in this particular group, and just ask them if they'd be willing to do that. This is really great to save a lot of money. You don't have to pay for them to come and travel to your library. They might not be available during the time you want to take that time out to actually make a trip, but you can just get them online with you for an hour to talk to whoever has read the books, whether it's kids, adults, this one of course is talking about school library journal with kids. Also, this is something that Penguin is doing. This is the, they have authors that they have, they have a group as well that you can go into their website and see who will do this kind of thing. Also, I'll mention right now while we're on, while I'm talking about this, we're seeing all of these things. All of these items that we are mentioning here, we are going to have all the links to all the websites are gonna be collected at the end. They already are, and to a delicious account that you'll be able to get all the URLs and see those videos that I posted. So you don't have to try and write all these down and figure out where they are. We'll have that all for you afterwards. This is the, this particular one is called Skype in the Classroom through Microsoft actually, and they have gotten together with book publishers to offer certain authors to come in and talk to your class. You can see there are all sorts of, they've got them arranged here by types, age group, country, language, anything you wanna narrow down to see who you might wanna come in have bring in to your classroom or your library to talk to people. So before we go on, I just wanna ask, anybody have any questions? You can type it into the question section of the GoToWebinar interface. You can just open that up and type in there and I can grab your questions. I don't see anything right now but I just wanna remind you to make sure to do that if you do. And while we're transitioning over, one of the nice things about these, the author things is it's a lot of children and young adult authors. So especially if you have a children's or middle school book club, they get really engaged when they can actually meet or talk to the person who wrote it. So that's kind of a cool thing too. Yeah, the kids get very excited about seeing. Sometimes they get a little, I've seen they get a little distracted by seeing themselves on TV, so to speak. Like this one where the kids were up there, they see themselves as well. But eventually they do settle down and get really into talking with the authors there. All right, next up, back to Louise. All of us, I'm sure most of your libraries if not all of your libraries have some social media presence. So you may probably have a website but you probably also have a Facebook page or a Twitter account or Twitter accounts. And I know for me the massive number of options out there. We have Pinterest, three Twitter accounts, a Facebook account, it just gets a little nuts. We're looking at an Instagram account for certain programs and so forth. And trying to manage all of that if you're like the social media person, which even at my library, we're a fairly large affluent suburb but we have a ridiculously tiny staff for the population that we're serving. So it really is just kind of me and a couple other people when they have time. So I'm always looking for options to manage this stuff more effectively and make sure that we are keeping our presence active because the worst thing you can do with social media is not use it at all. The second worst thing you can do is use it too much. But basically to make sure that we're sending out the same message all the different places or at least in a similar fashion. So one of the first products that I looked at, this is actually kind of a newish product. It's called Nuzzle and by the way, has the cutest logo ever. But it's kind of a news like interface of your social media. So basically, if you can imagine a news aggregator if you've used any of those through Yahoo or any of the others. I mean, you know what those look like. They've been around for a long time but they're basically taking your social media feeds, pulling stuff together and then roughly speaking, recognizing topics that are trending within your social media. So it's bringing stuff forward and grouping it together. So they group it by topic, by relevance. Why this can be handy is if something's coming up or for instance, if you just put something out you might have an idea of what kind of reaction you're getting. If there's something out there in the library world that you're following or that somebody has mentioned to you that'll pop into the top. So you can respond in a little bit more instantaneous fashion. Instantaneous for libraries being, we'll figure it out today. They do have iOS and Droid apps. You can also link it to Slack. And I haven't spent a lot of time with Slack but Slack has some really fascinating options that I want to explore. In fact, I bet the next time we do this presentation we might actually talk a little bit about what Slack does that I haven't really done good enough to be able to speak intelligently on it. But let me show you a little bit with the Nuzzle. So this is basically just my account. And literally I set this up and then I made sure that all of the stuff from the live tech conference that we were at that I was following that. And really it came up on its own because that was basically what was really relevant right at that moment amongst my group. Because this is mine as opposed to my library's feed because I wanted to kind of, I knew it would be in there. I knew it would be the live tech conference. But that was really nice because you could see what was going on. You could also see what was trending, what people were talking about. In this case they were talking about Sophia Noble's keynote which was amazing. So they were basically talking about it coming up and it was in fact amazing. And then while it was going on it was also trending in there. So it was nice. It clearly understood that the bulk of my Twitter connections were library related, were library tech related. It did seem to get it if you know what I mean. So in that way I really liked it. It's not, it wasn't necessarily the easiest interface to deal with but I felt like it did what it said it would do. Let's go to the next one. Sorry, I'm gonna, sorry I had a little cough. Okay, Hootsuite, many of you have probably heard of this. We've been talking about Hootsuite for a while on this presentation and I'm sure there's been other people talking about it. The only thing I like to point out is most of their useful options are really for fee, not for free. The free version really doesn't give you, it's good if you just have a few things. Like if you have a Twitter account and a Facebook account or maybe a couple Twitter accounts. But if you've got multiple account management you really wanna pay for it. And it's not super expensive but you would wanna pay for those options because you do have a lot more power. It does have a lovely interface. I'm sorry, go ahead. We did use it here at the Nebraska Library Commission briefly, actually for quite a while, maybe a year or so. And then we started getting, like you said, more complex with multiple accounts. We have multiple Twitter accounts. And then we wanted multiple people to be able to use them. Yeah. We don't have just a single social media person. We had like four or five different people that were gonna be able to do this and that is when it got into having to pay. So it is, which is actually, it was really cool that you could do that though. You could have one place where everything is and have multiple staff that can go in and post what they want to and what they need to and monitor it and keep up with it. But once you get to that level, you do, that is when you get into the cost. Yeah. And that is, I'm probably moving to that fairly soon. So I'm gonna look at this again for that. Right now I'm kinda doing it in a little more haphazard fashion just on my own. But I do eventually wanna have like two or three of us who are regularly monitoring our social media. So I'm gonna look at some of their pay options. It does have a lovely interface, as they say, and it has some nice analytics, which again, if you live and die on your statistics like all of our libraries do, that's always a good thing to know. So here again is that some of the pricing, there's a little more complicated, but basically there are some options. There's even an enterprise option, which I think would be if you're in a larger system, you might want that. I don't think necessarily that's as cost effective. Yeah. You can see the pro is already just for up to 500 employees. So that's covered many of our libraries. They're very large community college or at a university. I don't think it's really gonna study. So again, the pro is not bad, 10 bucks a month, that's not bad at all. So here's basically what it might look like. So this is actually just one Twitter account. So my we's at we's 42 Twitter account. But basically you can do, it shows my things that I've been retreated, places where I've been mentioned. And then also you can schedule treats and I love this. So you can usually schedule treats to go out just through this interface. And again, if you have multiple, to be able to schedule it on multiple. So like let's, we have a regular, a teen and a children's Twitter account. And there's stuff I want to go out on two of the three of them, but not all of them. And at the moment, I would have to retweet it. Whereas I would prefer to send it out directly from them because people pay more attention to direct tweets than to retweet. So that's just something that I like to have as an option. And this just shows Twitter, but you can add as you can see or says add other social networks to it as well. So with who sweet, you'd be able to be doing a lot of your different networks, yeah, Facebook and everything all in one service. One interesting. And I think you can add Pinterest on there. I mean, there's just, there's some nice options. Again, the more you get into the more complicated it gets and we're going to show you with the next product a slightly more complex setup. So tweet deck is the next one. And it's very similar. It actually is now owned by Twitter. It had been its own product, but it's now owned by Twitter, which also means it works very, well with Twitter, but it also means that you're not necessarily pulling in other accounts. So it's a great way to manage Twitter accounts, but if you want more than that, look at some of these other options and I've got another one coming up as well. Again, it's free, it's web based. It is, I actually find this a very easy way to do it right now. This is actually what I'm using right now to deal with our three accounts plus my one personal account and just kind of deal with them. I have to be careful about how I'm signed in, whether myself or as the library, but it's fairly easy to manage all of those. Feeds, hashtags, retweets, again, scheduled things. You can also post reply or like to and from any account, which is actually really cool. So you can actually do your interactions there on tweet deck fairly easily. Let me show you some versions. This is actually Krista's, how she's got her tweet set up at one point. Because again, you can move it around, you can change it, you can see so obviously she's got not only her own feed, but she's also got the Nebraska Library Commission feed and also then again, mentions and schedules and so forth. And I think the next screen shows like, so she had these four across, but then she had an additional four. So here's the next. So again, within one screen as it were, you can do this. And she had the hashtag for the conference we were at, which was LTC 2016 up just for that couple of days. And then she can take it back down against. But that way, if you wanna follow things while you're out and about or doing something special or if you're running, say you're running a little unconference or something, you can have it right in front of you so you can really keep track of it. And you can reply retweet like right from in there, which is really nice. So you're not having to then go back out and try to do stuff. Right, you can see that on the bottom of this one in the LTC column. There's the reply, retweet, like and then the three dots will open up even other options of what you can do. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So, all right. Next thing is Alternate. Now, this is brand new. I actually... The week before I was at the Live Tech Conference, I'd been at the Computers and Libraries Conference and the gal there had been talking about this and I was playing around with it. It's new, it's a brand new beta version. It does purport to manage all the feeds. And by all the feeds, I mean, and I'm gonna show you the list here and it's at least part of the list. It literally, you can pull every social media option out there, including blogs and crazy things I've never heard of that are mostly foreign, you know, non-U.S., in and supposedly manage them all at once. It has some really cool options. I'm not quite sure it's fully there yet because like I tried to add... Well, go to the next screen. But I tried to add like Goodreads, which is a lovely idea except that Goodreads has changed the way that they have your URL. And so I couldn't actually add myself because the way they had me adding wasn't with my username and password. It was with my display URL and they had it wrong. It's a dumb thing, but it was one of those little things where I'm like, well, yeah, they're clearly not paying enough attention. I actually sent them a message so they may have fixed it by now. Most of these sites, when they're in beta, they really are very responsive. And so if you have questions, you can send them. And that's actually really appreciated. The thing to keep in mind is that they are beta and it does mean beta in that, you know, you said that Goodreads has changed how the URLs work, but they hadn't noticed that yet. But as you can see from this list, no wonder. And this is by the way like a third of the page. So literally, now they have the top ones up there which you'd expect, LinkedIn and so forth. Yeah, whatever, LinkedIn. And StumbleUpon and things like that and Reddit, of course, or that kind of thing. But there's also some stuff I've never heard of in there. Helena Bookmark, I was like, okay, that's interesting. And obviously stuff we have heard of like Reddit. There's also like news2.ru is actually Russian. So again, they're really dealing with an international clientele, which is actually good because that means you are gonna potentially see stuff you might not otherwise see. I like the fact that they had slide share in here because I do like to see, you know, when my colleagues put up interesting presentations. So they'll be kind of fun to see that through there. And I also put up stuff in slide share. In fact, at the very end of this, this presentation is on my slide share. So again, it's interesting. I think I had a screenshot from... Yeah, you, well you have a... Oh yeah, okay. Well, the reason I put this up, and I realize you can all read. The reason I put this up is this is what they are, again, purporting to do. This is what they're trying to do. So again, all your favorite social networks and you're able to actually not only just view them, because there's several places where you can do that where it'll just feed in and you can at least view them, but you can also comment and share and upload things to the various networks, which is different and new and powerful. Right, being able to actually interact with them is the difference, yeah. Yeah, in one place. That's where they're really trying to be different and interesting. So that's why I wanted to bring this up because I would love to see some people try it out and give them feedback. So basically, you could take your entire online identity, either you or you as the library. So, and here's one of the ways that they show the feed. You can have it in this sort of tile way, which I actually think is very visual and very interesting. And up at the top, you'll see the only thing lit up is my Twitter feed, right, whereas, there's also my Facebook and whatever, but I had sort of turned those off. So it's just showing the Twitter things, but you can then add and subtract as you go along. It's neat. I feel like it has some nice options. Like I said, I don't think it's quite there yet, but I would really, I'm sorry, this is actually my Flickr feed, but there's also this format, so you can actually go more by person. So again, they're kind of flipping it around, giving you different views, which I like. I give that as a definite bonus for this particular thing. So I am excited to see what they come up with. Basically, everybody there who was talking about it was like, we don't really know where it's going, but we're gonna be interested to watch. They're getting very creative and trying, like you said, trying to do all the things, which may or may not work out in the end, but they're trying. Yeah, and of course, we're also trying to do all the things. So anybody helps do all the things, we appreciate. So that's- We're all for that, yes. Yeah, so that's really why I wanted to bring this up. So back to you. Yep, more exploration should be done with it. Yeah, yeah. All right, next up we have office productivity, which sounds really boring, which yeah, it can be. But what we're talking about here is things like your basic creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, like what we have here. The things that you do have to do on a day-to-day basis, maybe not necessarily for the public, but something for yourself, maybe a little both, depending on what you're doing. Everyone knows about Microsoft Word, all the Microsoft products, Words, Excel, PowerPoint, but not everybody necessarily can pay for those kind of services. It does cost a chunk of money to keep up to date on those, and it's not always cost efficient for people. And some people sometimes just don't want to give in to the big guy there necessarily. So we've got some other alternatives for you here. Google is one, which also is, I know one of the big guys, but Google is free, just sign up for your Google account if you have Gmail already, you have this. They have Google Drive is where they now keep all these things. They have things that moved around over the years in Google for all the different services and products they offer, but at the moment they're all in this Google Drive where you could have documents, docs, sheets for your spreadsheet, slides to do a presentation. They also have form, so if you wanna do a form for people to sign up for something at your library, for an event, or anything you can do there. Maps, you can see here also, Pixlr that Louise mentioned earlier is also integrated into this. So you can use any, if you have pictures and things that are in your Google pictures account, you can automatically link it to Pixlr and then you can do all that editing of those photos within Google. Everything is all linked together. So Google is a really good option for that and everything you have together, you can have folders that have collections of things in here, you can see behind the screens, you have a little e-rate training one because that's something I do. So Google is definitely a good option for that. Also, OpenOffice is out there. This is Apache OpenOffice, free and open for anything. This is just open source right here is what we're talking. Word processor, spreadsheets, drawing, even databases. If you have something you wanna create a database of some service or something. OpenOffice I would say is more advanced because people are more above more than doing just the Google Docs type simpler stuff. So if you're doing something you need something much more robust and advanced OpenOffice, it would definitely be something to look at. Another free option online that's out there is Zoho. Zoho is something that I've used for, they've got lots of different services. It's actually a suite of services that they offer and I only mentioned a few here. I've definitely mentioned, I definitely suggest taking a look what they have out there because they're doing things that are just little things like this where as you can see on the right hand side I've got this chat. If you wanna embed a chat reference into your website you can do it with them. They are all web based, there's no software to install or download so you're not doing anything like that as same thing as with Google and OpenOffice, it's all online somewhere for you. So there's nothing to update and keep maintained, it's just all kept up to the on their side. So everything is saved in their system. You can share with other people in Zoho as you can with the other services as well, Google Docs. You can have multiple people being collaborating and working on documents, anything on there, spreadsheets, whatever and then it's saved into their system as it says here so you can access it on any device wherever you are. They have as I said this chat so you can just embed some code into your library website to have a free chat reference for people come to your site. They do more documents, very similar to all the other ones. There's really not a lot of difference in how these services look once you get in there because pretty much the features and functions that you need to create a document are the same no matter what but just being offered by different services. So here's what it would be like in Zoho, their document. They have spreadsheets that you can do, simple spreadsheet. I didn't put anything in this one as an example but it looks like any other spreadsheet you do. You can also for this and for Google you can import other services. So if you already created something in Excel that's what you used to use, now you wanna switch to one of these open source things, bring it into there and then it translates into their version and you can continue working on it which is nice. I'm gonna interject something. The way that this is useful to me is that Google Docs, even Zoho, whatever, I have patrons who are like, I have this document but I need to share it with these people, how can I do this besides just sending me email? We need to work on it together. So talking to them about cloud based things like Google or Zoho or whatever where they can share and change and make edits as they go, that makes that conversation a lot easier. There's more options there. Yeah and that's something that Google has done very well I think in the whole just bring it, send it to anyone and people who don't even have to, because I've done this with my family, don't even have to have their own Google account necessarily, sometimes you can invite them to come in and see and edit with a link and then they can just use it that way. I help run two or three different nonprofit like volunteer organizations and stuff. We use it constantly and often it's people who just, I send them the link, they just edit in the link, they put in their volunteer times or whatever and that's all they do with it and that's fine but then it's centralized and I can grab it when I need it. And they even have here, they call it Zoho Show is their presentation software and this is when I was doing this for the library technology conference we were just at, I just took the PowerPoint, we had already created and imported it into Zoho and there I could work on it in there and do anything I wanted to and it looks pretty much the same. All the same features as what we could use in PowerPoint but online shareable if it wanted to, at least I could both be working on it at the same time. And I really liked that it kept the theme that we had grabbed, we grabbed one of PowerPoint's themes and I was just sure that Zoho wouldn't be able to reproduce it. But man, don't need to pick something else but no, it kept what we were doing, yeah. So if you're looking for something that's not Microsoft that is free online, share all that open source sharing, look at any of these services, your Google Docs, OpenOffice or Zoho. All right, polls and surveys. Okay, so every once in a while, they keep telling us all the time, like I keep going to these library events and they're like, you need to talk to your customers, you need to talk to your patrons, you need to find out from them what's going on and it can be easy but it also, you wanna make sure that you're using tools that aren't gonna cost you a bunch that aren't gonna be too hard and more and more the research shows the casual surveys as you go and I'm gonna talk about some options as we go through here. The casual surveys is really the way to go and I'm gonna do this quick because I know we're getting low on time. Yeah, it's about, what time is it saying my clock here? About 10, 10 minutes. This is our last topic, I believe. Polls and surveys, yeah. So yep, no problem. If we go over, just wanna let people know, we'll keep going until we're done with all we're talking about and if you do have any questions, type them into the questions section, anything you wanna know more about any of these services, if you have any ideas for any services you've used, let us know, we wanna hear what you're doing. So. Yeah, and I, literally my pressure is that I'm technically supposed to be on the reference desk of the clock. All right. But they know I'm gonna be late. But I figured you all could get a laugh out of that because I'm sure, you know, you all have places to be at 11 o'clock. Of course we do. Okay, so the first one we're gonna talk about is the monkey. You all know the monkey, surveymonkey.com. It's a wonderful service. Yeah, the free account is up to 100 responses where you're like, well, I have more than 100 patrons. Well, yeah, but maybe you just wanna do a quick two or three question survey. And by the way, they often recommend, just keep it real short. And you just wanna get the responses of say the first 100 people through the door or the first 100 people who get onto your website and find it or the first 100 people who respond to it via Twitter and then close it out. That's okay. That actually has worth. You can pay like $300 a year for the unlimited. And it's very powerful and gives you a wonderful analytics. I mean, they've been at this for a long time. They know what they're doing. So that's one option. We all know the monkey. We've probably used the monkey. We did in fact prove that cats are the best pet for a variety of reasons. So that's exciting. I think the four responses are good. Scientific and official. Yeah, scientific. Yes. But there are some other poll options that I'd like to point out. Survey any place is kind of a neat one. You can create surveys and polls and it's mobile friendly and it's responsive design. Responsive design of course being that whether it's showing on a website or showing on a mobile device, it's gonna look right. Which is, that's very exciting because sometimes you can make up a beautiful one and then find out that on somebody's phone it looks like crap. Excuse my language, but you know. So you can create surveys that they can answer on their own devices on your mobile app so you can embed it. Like if you have a Boopsy app or your own mobile app you might be able to embed it there or at any point of service. So for instance, you could for instance put some older iPads. And I laugh when I say older iPads because it just makes me feel old. But you can put them on stands and just put them randomly through the library. So they'll stop and see this little bright thing and everybody touches the screens because you can't help yourself. And then they take your little survey and you can lock it down to just that survey. And great, then you've got some more responses and you can export that data. You can also, including graphicals. You can make graphs out of it. You can make pie charts. You know, everybody loves a pie chart. Little bar graph. There are some free options, but there's others that are fee based. So you can pay either a month later annually. So you can do like if you want more responses than the base number of responses and so forth. The next screen, it shows you a little bit of what it can look like. Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot I had to do it. Anyways, it's pretty straightforward. It's, you know, it looks like a survey. And in fact, it looks like Doodle. It looks like Survey Monkey. It has some nice options. Doodle is another one. I'm sure you've all used that. I'm sure at some point or another, some nonprofit you're working with has sent you a Doodle poll to figure out when you can go and sell tickets or, you know, when you can go and, you know, stand at the thing at the fair. It's a great way to schedule people for, you know, one time or multiple events. It does have some reasonably good free options, but it also has some upgrade options for a fairly small fee that again are robust, give you good analytics and background. You can either email somebody, send them a link. It also has a decent mobile app that I've been playing around with. It's a little tricky, but it actually is pretty good. And you'll see there a screenshot from the mobile app. It actually works pretty well. Excuse me. So in fact, we did a terribly scientific Doodle poll. What's the best pet? We asked our, and we asked our friends all, and this is actually not just what is the best pet, but what is the best pet among librarians? Because everyone here you see here are, well, obviously, Louise and I, but everyone is librarian friends. So according to librarians in the U.S. On that day, in that five minutes that we gave them to answer the question, yes. Cats went out, because, yeah. Yeah, because cats. And fish and birds got no love at all. But fish and birds are not librarian pets. Dogs and sloths, interestingly, tied for second. And then you've got your husbands in Beard and Dragons, of course, and ferrets, I'm sorry, and third ones. Yes. So the husband's tied with the ferret, so we thought that was pretty good. Awesome. Anyways, but again, you can use it for any number of things. That was really what I was trying to show you there. Next thing is easy polls, and this is actually really nice. These are, again, free online polls. It's very, very free, web-based, and they also have apps. They do have some premium features, which is kind of cool. You can customize the color and the text and the buttons. You can make it look pretty, or really ugly. There's a few really ugly options. And then you just log into account to view the results and close the poll. And so, again, very easy, like-doodle, very easy. Here's one example that just kind of gives you a nice little overview of what it looks like, what the results were, and also some of the location tracking, I believe, is a premium feature. It is, yes, yeah. So this is what it would look like when you were in your account looking at what were your poll, what the results were, and then they, of course, tease you saying, if you paid, you could do this. Right, right, and so I was talking a little bit about where you could embed these in the library. Obviously, you can put them on your website, you can put them on your social media, but you could also do them in your library. So you get a little stand, and this is a fairly fancy one, but there are ways to get sort of cheap stands or cheap ways to mount them on the walls or whatever. And UX, of course, is user experience. That's the short gun for user experience. And user experience is really important. We need to know how and why people are using our library so that we can make sure that we're responding to them. But do keep it short. People tend to respond to one to three questions, and then they walk away. And your data gets a little corrupted if they won't finish the survey. So put it on an old iPad on a stand, or three or four around your library in areas where you think people are gonna, you're gonna get some traffic. So that way you're doing the survey at the point of service and engaging them. That's, I think you get much better data that way. At that point, you might wanna pay for 500 plus responses depending on what your, like one day's walkthrough count is. Figure a third to a half of the people might respond. So kind of figure out from your gate count what that might be like. We're actually gonna have you now take a quick poll for us. This is the audience participation part of the session. Yes, so if you have a browser window open, you're gonna go to this link, and I will read it off to you. So it's bit.ly, so it's bit.ly.ly slash the number one capital W, small F is in Frank, K, capital Q, small C, S is in Sam. And I think Christo's got it up. So what's fun is your responses will actually show up in real time. Let's hear. All right, so I'm just gonna give people some time to go there and see, I'm gonna give people time to get that link down and do it. And what I do have over here is, here is the poll. Did you learn something from us this morning? Yes? No. Or, I was surfing the webs. Which is a perfectly reasonable response because we know what webinars are like, so yeah. Can you go ahead and read off the, actually I'll put it up here as well. Yep. You must know. Once again. I'm gonna show you the results in a second too. Here's the URL for it, but you can go ahead and read it off again. Bit.ly, so bit.ly slash the number one, capital W, small f is in Frank, small k, capital Q, small c, small s is in Sam. All right, now you can see here, this is a poll online and I'm actually not even logged into the EasyPool account at all. I just put in the URL to get to this to see it. But right here underneath, there is a C results. And I can see here, whoop, gotta refresh it. There we go. Wow, everybody learned something? Awesome. Last time we did, a few people were just, they admitted they were just surfing the web and not paying attention. Way better than those attendees at the library technology conference. Clearly we're better at the webinar. And you can see here, it even says that we got 19 of you have voted so far. So, and then I can keep refreshing this and cause I know there's more than 90 of you on here at the moment, but and you'd see new ones here. Let's see if anyone knew. Yep. So, that was just a quick and easy example showing what you can do with it, what can do with this. All right, so those were some poll options. Okay, so, and that was our last topic, surveys and polls. We have an awesome picture of kittens here. These services that we have mentioned to you are, as I said, they all have pay options. They all have free options, but they are free as in kittens. So not just free as in free, free as in kittens, meaning you do have to put some time into them. Maybe some money. When you get a kitten, you might get a free kitten and that's great, but then you need to buy the cat litter and the food and the dishes and you do have to take care of them and play with them. So there are some maintenance along with having a pet cat and there is with these services as well. So it is going to take some time to, we've introduced you to them, hopefully in a useful way here so you can see what they can do basically, but you will have to put some time into it and see of your own time, to learn about it and how you can best use it for your library or in your personal situation. It's not going to be the same for everyone. Some of these may work for you great, some you're going to look at them and they'll say, that's nothing I can do anything with. And that's fine, but just explore them and see what works for you. Are there any more questions? Yeah, if anybody have any questions, comments, thoughts, let us know in the questions section. Anything you want to know more about any of these services? We do have here is our contact information and this is where all the links are that we mentioned today and anything like those videos I showed, anything extra. This is on my delicious account where I put them into a group collection for the library technology conference we were just at last month, so that's where you'll find it under. And this presentation will be on Louise's slide share account. When I do the recording as I do every week for Encompass Live, I will also add links to these as well and everyone will be sent that information when this is processed later this afternoon. I'll be optimistic. I'm at the mercy of YouTube and how long it takes them in slide share. We use slide share as Louise mentioned earlier to put our slides up and everything, so. Yeah. It doesn't look like any questions are coming in. Well, that's because they learn so much. That's it. Well, some of them just have some questions, but it's not about them. Someone wants to know if they'll have a participation certificate. What we do is actually what happens is if you are, anytime you participate live in one of our GoToWebinar sessions here at Encompass Live, the system will automatically email you within the next hour and email that says, this is your proof of participating in our webinar and you can use that to then apply for if you do continue education credits in your state or in your library. So you will have that sent out to you within, as I said, I believe it got it set for within an hour after the end of this session. Cool. We need that in Iowa, so. Yeah. All right. All right, well then, I think we'll wrap it up. Nobody has any questions. Just a lot of thanks for the great info. Thank you very much everyone for attending. Thank you very much, Louise, for joining me this morning to present our session again. As I said, it has been and is being recorded. So it will be available here is our Encompass Live website. All of our archives go right down here. What's great about our website is if you just Google Encompass Live, the title of our show, apparently nobody else in the world has used that for anything so far, yay. You'll come up with our website right away. All of our archives are here. Here's our upcoming shows, but beneath there is we have our Archived Encompass Live sessions. Everything here is from all the way going back to when we first started the show in January, 2009. So you can find all of our archives here. And what I will have linked here, like this previous one, a recording to our YouTube channel, the slides on Louise's slideshare account and the URL on the links that I have in mind will all be linked when I have these all processed and ready to go. I hope you join us next week when our next topic is Collaborative Community Outreach for Local History and Genealogy. Here in Nebraska, our Lincoln Lancaster County Genealogical Society is working with one of our colleges here in town in Lincoln Union College to do programs and things related to genealogical research, which is very big in lots of libraries, in lots of public libraries. But this is an interesting one between our local society and college. So Sabrina Riley from the college and Judy Cook from the Genealogical Society can be with us next week to talk about that. So definitely do go ahead and register for that. Also, Encompass Live is on Facebook. So if you are a Facebook user, please do pop over there. And there we go, that's kinda slow. And like us on Facebook, and you'll be notified of when things are coming up. Here this morning, I put a little reminder for people to come in on the fly if they hadn't preregistered. When our recordings are available, I post on here as well. So if you are a big Facebook user, please go over there and give us a like. Ooh, we're almost up to 300. Ooh, that would be nice if we broke that 300 barrier. So like us on Facebook, if you want to. Other than that, that wraps up for today's show. Thank you very much for attending and we will see you next time you're here on Encompass Live. Bye-bye. Bye.