 Good morning and welcome to the 13th annual Big Talk from Small Libraries online conference. We reached our teens. Yay. Happy birthday to us. I am Krista Porter. I am the Library Development Director at the Nebraska Library Commission. And along with the Association for Rural and Small Libraries, we host this annual online conference, Big Talk from Small Libraries. Over the years, before we started doing the conference in 2012, we've heard a lot from small rural libraries that the conferences are great, conferences they attend are great, but they would love something really, really focused for them and from them. And so we decided to create this conference where all of our presenters are from libraries who have either a population served or an FTE of 10,000 less is our goal. Every now and then, there's a few that break that, but that's what we try to keep to. So welcome everybody to today's conference. We have a full day of sessions coming up. If you have any questions, comments, thoughts throughout the show, you can type into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface. It is showing slides earlier about that and in between sessions, I will be re-showing those slides as well. We are recording almost the entire day today as well, so if you do miss any of the sessions, you can pop in and out as you like with the same login link that you used, and it's also posted here on our conference page. Come and go as you like. We will watch recordings later. If you are interested in earning continuing education credits for attending today's conference, for libraries here in Nebraska, we have a special CE reporting form that was sent out and it's available on the website. Anyone else, you will receive an email after the conference is over that it confirms that you attended today, and you can use that and print that to whoever it grants your CE credits in your area. All right, so as I said, Association for Real and Small Libraries is our co-sponsor for this, and with us today, we have their current president, Patrick. Good morning, Patrick. Morning, everyone. Yes, of joining us very early from Oregon. Thank you so much for being here. I am going to hand over presenter control to you so you can get your slides up. You should see that little pop up. I think I got it. There we go. Looks good. Perfect. I'm going to actually get the start button then. There you go. Yes. Loading, loading. Welcome. Perfect. Hello. Welcome. Awesome. So I'm happy to be here. This is my first time not just as an attendee. I actually get to say something, and that's a little nerve wracking, but big talk from small libraries has been super fun attended over the past few years. As Krista said, my name is Patrick Bodley. I am currently the president of the Association for Real and Small Libraries, and I am the library director in Independence, Oregon, which is just across the Willamette River from Salem. Our legal service area is so rural. We just crossed 10,000 at the last census, and we have a staff of 3.7 so that means me and I have 3 other people that I work with. But yeah, so that's a little bit about me, and I'm excited to be here and kick us all off. I was hoping or planning on giving just a brief spill about what ARSL is, and for those that don't know, I know we have members that are presenting today of ARSL. I know that we have members that are attending, but that's part of the deal is we get the ARSL spill since we're co-sponsoring. ARSL was first founded in 1984, which means that yes, this is our 40th anniversary this year. We currently have members in every state in the union as well as we've started expanding into provinces in Canada, which is really exciting, and we like the big talk from smart libraries continue to grow. Our conference in 2023 was in Wichita. That was our largest in-person gathering yet. I didn't know that, that's amazing, awesome. Yeah, part of that is because as we were starting out, the venues that we found had cap attendance, we could only go to so many people in one location, and so we've made a commitment as a board and as an organization to no longer use places where we have to cap attendance. We want to make everyone that can come available to come to our conferences. But in addition to that, as of this month, as of February 2024, we've also provided more than a million dollars in grant funding and conference scholarships to librarians and library professionals nationwide. So that is exciting because, you know, there's never enough money to go around and if we can help and pass some along, that is always a good thing. So ARSL, just like every organization, we do have a mission and a vision. We strive to be a supportive and valuable resource for our members and not only just the members, but everyone who is a part of the small library community. Our organizational leadership is guided by this mission and vision, as well as our organizational values, which basically means that we recognize small and rural libraries are unique, both in the strengths that we share and the challenges that we face. It's really necessary that these libraries have an organization to turn to, and that's prepared to support their success in the ways that they need us to and always doing that with the uniqueness of small libraries in mind. That means that when we plan our events, our conferences, other things like that, we do that much like big top-frontal libraries in ways that we don't need to scale down to fit our attendees or fit our members focus on advocacy that highlights the ways that our member libraries are small, but also that they're mighty. We can do many great things and ARSL is there to brag about it when no one else has the time or effort or ability and availability to brag about themselves. We're here to do that. So, obviously, members are great, and you get some stuff when you become a member. My favorite thing is the E-List. I don't know how many friends I've made off of that. I don't know how much help I've gotten because you can just pop out a question and everyone just replies to you, replies also that everyone received a chance. I don't know. There's been so many questions even just this last month that have popped out on that that people have saved all of the answers to and then shared out with the rest of the group because it's a question that everyone is facing at that time or something like that. Also get access to the membership directory which, of course, if there are privacy concerns, you can pop out of that. We also provide Zoom rooms for our members if they need to do library programming and don't have that full access. I'm hoping the train behind me is not too very loud, but we're doing great. Oh, is that what I was trying to figure out, Wudu? We're right on the train tracks and it decided that now's the time to come through. Small libraries is great, right? Anyway, we also provide Zoom rooms if you need that Zoom license but can't afford it. Our members are able to use ours for library programming or staff activities, trainings, things like that. We also provide reduced cost of tenants at ARSL and free access to some specific members only round table and networking events, and obviously the opportunity to serve on one of our boards or one of our committees that we've got going forward. Membership starts at just $20 for individuals and $70 for organizations. At ARSL we have intentionally kept our membership costs low because we want to ensure that as many librarians, library professionals, libraries as possible can afford to take part in the association and can afford to get the help and the advocacy and the training that they feel they need. Mentioned our upcoming continuing education series. We call them train. It stands for training round tables and information networking. We have, as you can see on the slide, upcoming series on community mapping, managing staff relationships, grant funding, business support, and I'm really excited for the one in June on addressing food and security in small and rural communities. It's been a good partnership that we've had going on and we're finally presenting some things that we found on that. So that one is exciting for me. Also mentioned the professional networking groups. These are, these have just started up in the last year, year and a half, realize that sometimes it's good to get together and just vent. And so we provide a way so that people who have a different affinity, whether they're solo-ish librarians or directors or readers advisory, focus on that, as well as our LGBTQIA plus library workers, workers of color, neurodivergent library workers. We try to provide a space for folks to get together and just be with other like-minded individuals. That's one of the best parts about conferences. That's one of the best parts about when we get together as librarians is that we can find our people and we're trying to provide spaces for us to find our people. Also, I would get in trouble if I didn't mention our conferences in the fall. We're going to be in Springfield, Massachusetts this year. Last year, I mentioned we're in Wichita. We do try to rotate through each of the West, Midwest, South, Northeast regions of the country so that people from that region can come. But very excited. It is September 11th through 14th in Springfield, Massachusetts. And I hope to see you all there. With that in mind, like I said, my name is Patrick. On the screen, you'll see my contact information. Please reach out if you have any questions about ARSL. There's anything that I can help you with. If you have questions about sourdough bread baking, I'm happy to be here and chat. And of course, the ARSL office, they are open Monday through Friday, 7 AM to 5 Pacific time. They're located in Seattle. But that means that our Nebraska folks, I saw that map beforehand, we have folks from across the country today. And that is exciting. But that means that we try to be available to folks no matter where they're at. They're very, very responsive as well as follow them on social media and reach out to them that way. But that is, yeah, that's what we've got. Very excited. Leave that slide up. No, wait, I'm going to leave that slide up for a minute. We'll still be able to see your contact info there while we grab things up here. I saw you did have mentioned on the conference page about scholarships coming for attending. Yes. They'll open up late next week, I think it was. The 27th, so next Tuesday. Awesome. So definitely look for those if you need to funding to travel. And also check with your state library here in Nebraska. We hear through the Nebraska Library Commission and our regional library systems do offer continuing education grants that you can definitely use to help cover the cost of attending ARSL, both registration travel costs, all of that. So you're in Nebraska Library, look for our grants opening up in March, actually, I believe for the fall for continuing education grants. In 2012, that's how I attended my first ARSL conference as I got a grant from my state library. Yeah. There are lots, there's lots of money out there from your states. Yeah. And I will mention too. So thank you so much, Patrick. This is great. I'm going to see you again. You've been on other online things that we do together. So yeah. All right. I am going to pull presenter control to my screen now briefly. Get our schedule for the day going. And yeah, hello, Megan. Yeah. And I forgot, I realized I didn't mention the beginning. Patrick explained what ARSL is. For those of you not from Nebraska, what is the Nebraska Library Commission? What's that all about? The Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries here in Nebraska. So similar to your state library. We're just a commission. So we are just a state agency, just like your state library would be. And we provide resources and training and services and grants and databases, et cetera, et cetera, to all the libraries in the state. And we have this go-to webinar account. As Patrick said, we have over a thousand seats available in the conference today in our go-to webinar accounts. We have plenty of room for everyone. Today, we have pre-registered 426 people, which is awesome. That's a great number. But anyone who wants to can come in on the fly during the day. As you can see here, the login instructions are posted publicly now on our website. And they have been pushed out to our Facebook and Twitter accounts, the link as well. So if you know someone who would want to attend or you think should be attending today and they didn't get pre-registered, not a problem. Send them to our website and tell them to log in on the fly. Come join us. And see what's happening in our small libraries.