 Good morning and welcome to the 10th annual Big Talk from Small Libraries online conference. Yay! We made it into the double digits. I am Krista Porter. I am the Library Development Director here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And Big Talk from Small Libraries is our annual online conference where we highlight what's happening in the small libraries all across the country. All of our presenters today are from libraries or work directly with libraries with an population served or a FTE full-time enrollment for our university and school libraries of 10,000 or less. And actually, everyone today, I believe, is below 6,000. I'd have to double-check that. But that's our criteria, is below 10,000 or less. So these are our little libraries. They have great things to share with everyone. And we have some awesome topics on the conference today. We are broadcasting using the GoToWebinar online meeting system. If you have any questions, comments, thoughts throughout the day, you can type into the question section. I'm monitoring that here in my computer. We are recording the entire day. So if you're unable to watch for the whole day or if you are missing, you have to miss any sessions, you can watch the recording afterwards. We will post that onto our previous conferences page after the conference. May take a week or two to get all that editing done and posted by me, but they'll be up there. So you can watch at your convenience later. The big talk from small libraries is hosted and sponsored by here the Nebraska Library Commission. But we are also co-sponsored by the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. And I am going to switch over to you, Kathy. All right. You're the presenter control. And so we're going to have a little welcome here from Kathy, who's from ARSL. Arsel, depends on how you pronounce it. I've heard it both ways. I prefer ARSL. But as long as you're joining, we don't care. Yeah. If you want to, you can do your slides full screen there. They should automatically. How's that? Nope. I think you need to use the other screen. You've got multiple screens there. It's showing the, if you go to show screen, you should be able to switch. You know, all right. Let me go back to my other screen and see if it'll let me. Hold on. That's OK. We got this. If you have dual monitors, it should say screen one and screen two. Yeah. It's just not letting me. So I'll try this now. Hold on. Oh, it's just still not letting me. We did test this ahead of time, guys. We did. I know. And it was fine. I am so sorry, everyone. That's OK. But you just have my small screens, yes? Right. Just the interface. Yeah. OK. But if you go down on the bottom where the PowerPoint icon is and hover over that, no, dead center and choose the one on the right. It's on the other screen, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. It's not coming over. I really apologize. Ugh. You know, biggest nightmare coming true. You know, this is the way it goes. But you know what I'm going to do? Can I talk? Can I just talk? Sure. Let me just talk. OK. This is a much easier thing to do for me, anyway. And I'm going to tell you this, arsl.org. That is exactly what you need to know. But first of all, just thank you. Thank you so much for allowing us to co-sponsor this and kick off this with you today. Big talk for small libraries. Great partners. Great, great partners. So I am president this year of ARSL. And what we are is the voice for rural and small libraries. Thank you. That's great. This is exactly where we need to be. This is where my information comes from. So this is great. So you know, the important thing to understand about ARSL is that, you know, we are the small and rural library voice. And it's not just for the United States. We've got friends up in Canada as well that we have members. And at last check with my office, we are at 1,758 members currently. And so, yeah, you know, and that's something we're proud of. We're growing, but we're growing in a way that I think is a really healthy growth and really trying to look at things differently. And one of those is, you know, we're the national voice, the state voice, but we're adding regional to that. Because sometimes things are specific to regions. We've restructured our board to reflect this as well. And I think that's a really important thing to think about. So what are the benefits for joining ARSL? This website that we're on right now is one of them. And so we are really, really working hard. The office staff is working hard, making sure that everything on this website is click and ready to go. And it's formatted for you, you know, those that work in small and rural, right? And that's what makes it a one-stop shop for whatever it is you need. We have a tab on here and we're collecting news articles from all of you guys, from all of us that are involved with ARSL, plus our membership and anyone else. We want to hear what you guys are doing as well, right? We are all out there, we've got a lot of feet on the ground and everybody is working hard and we're all marching and talking the same language. So we're collecting all of those news articles and we're putting this as a one-stop shop for even those policies that you need and different items that are really just specific to small and rural. So this is a one-stop shop, but I've got to tell you the other thing that I know that we're known for, you've heard this before is our listserv. So our listserv, once you are a member, that's a great benefit because our listserv is where you're going to find your cohorts, you're going to find your colleagues. And whatever you put on that listserv, you will get all of the information that you could possibly need and more. And you'll make a lot of friends and it's a really cool thing to watch happen too. I know that I really super enjoy it. But I have to tell you about something new that we were doing at ARSL and it's called the train. So we want you to catch the train. And it's meeting up with like-minded colleagues for training, roundtables and informational networking. These are once a month via Zoom. Again, it's a member benefit. So some of these are just regular roundtables. We've held many of these during the pandemic. And I call it- As many of us have, yes. I call it the V and V. It's kind of like vent, but also validate, right? Sometimes we just need to talk about what's happening in our buildings and our staff and our other colleagues and our patrons and then validating what you are doing too. So we've held many of those. These are all listed on our website. But we're also talking about financial literacy too. So we have very specific ones set up here in the future that would be something that you guys can jump onto and get a part of self care, community wellbeing. These are all topics that we're covering each and every month. Future planning, which is important. What is the future of libraries, right? What does it look like? How is it changing? And how is it changing what we do? Leadership, we wanna build leaders. We're trying to jam-pack not only our website, our train and our listserv with those tools that we need to build leaders all across the United States and Canada. One of the ways that we are doing that is with outstanding in their field, our new Leadership Institute, which is made possible by an IMLS grant. So we're very thankful for that. Now, sorry everybody attending right now. I think you've missed the deadline. So we are looking for 30 applicants and they were due on February 24th. But I want everyone to keep an eye on this because we are going to be selecting those candidates. We've had an overwhelming response. They're going to be going through an 18 month course through leadership training. And this is really designed for those accidental library leaders that are already out there maybe doing a little bit of it and thinking, oh my, what am I doing? I am in a leadership position, but I don't maybe have all the credentials I need. And you kind of found yourself in those situations. And so I really want everyone to keep a keen eye on this because I'm sure this one will be successful and we'll be rolling out others in years to come. So affordability of ARSL membership. Our membership starts at just $15. And so again, right on our website, you're going to see that, and I really, really want to stress this that we have limited time, energy and money. Personally, in our businesses, in our libraries, right? And so ARSL, I really do believe it in my heart is such an affordable way to get the information and connect you with colleagues. And so again, all of this is on our website. But I cannot possibly even talk to you this morning without mentioning our great conference. And so this year we are going to be in the Reno Sparks, Nevada area. And it's going to be October 20th through the 23rd. We got to pet that last year and we held an online conference and you folks in the Nebraska Library Commission, you know how to do this really well. We sort of had to plan two conferences last year and last year was just completely online. This year, we're planning both as well. We're really keeping our fingers crossed. We want to see everyone in person. And I believe that we're moving in that direction. We're learning how to live in this new reality and do it safely. And so I really hope that we are all together in Sparks and Reno, Nevada. And this conference, if you've talked to anybody from ARSL they've told you this before, it is a conference that you just don't want to miss. You're just going to walk in and go, oh, yes, this is where I belong. I finally found my people. I found others like me. So the last thing I want to leave you with is go to our website, make sure that you check out who your regional representative is. That's a very important aspect of our new board format. We've spent several years working towards a governing board in a more sophisticated way of running our organization. So you have a regional representative. I talk fast and of course I didn't get to share my slides with you but it's all right here in front of you on the website. Find out who your regional representative is and reach out to them and say, hey, what is this all about? And can you tell me a little bit more and they would be more than happy to talk with you? And I will say we will have the slides available afterwards along with the archive recording. So Kathy will send me her slides and you will be able to look through those if you want to, but definitely go to the website because like you said, that's got everything. It's all there, it's all there. My presentation came 100% right from that website. All right, thank you so much, Kathy. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for inviting me. Hey everybody, have a great day. Yeah, yeah, we're really happy to have you guys supporting us throughout this whole, as I said in the beginning, this is the 10th annual conference we under 10 years. And from the beginning, ARSL has been with us supporting and promoting it and making sure that everyone knows what's happening with it. So we are really thrilled that they're still here helping us out. We, in Nebraska here in the Midwest, it's small. Most of our state is our small and rural libraries. They, almost all of them with populations of 5,000 or less. So we are talking, these are our people from our heart. And I will say, and we'll switch into our first session in just a second here. I will say we have almost 1,000 people registered today, officially 989, we almost got to 1,000. I was hoping we'd break it, but... So we're really thrilled to have all of you here with us today to join us and to hear all the great sessions that we have scheduled for today. I will mention quickly too, before we get to our first presentation, we will be continuing education credits are available for this conference. For, at the end of the conference afterwards, everyone will see an email directly from GoToWebinar. It's automatically generated that says, this is proof of you attending. You get a PDF certificate. That's to the person who logged in. In Nebraska, we have a special CE reporting form. We've set up on our website and it's linked here on the Big Talk site. So you can go there if you're in Nebraska library looking for continuing education credits to submit to us. If you are from another state, you'll need to check in with your CE generating department whoever handles that in your state to ask them how you would apply for the CE credits in your state.