 Switch over to Rebecca Siep, the Outreach and Humanities Liaison Librarian at Wyndham Robertson Library in Virginia, programming exclusively for university staff or blind dates with books and DVDs. Go ahead and take it away, Rebecca. Hi. Thank you. As he mentioned, my name is Rebecca Sine. And so before I start this program, I just wanted to mention a little bit about our library and the population that we serve. We have about 1,000, just under 1,000 full-time students here at the University Undergraduate and a small graduate program. And approximately 200 staff members are on campus full-time. So this program we came up with because it seemed like we were doing a lot of things that were exclusively for faculty. We do a lot of programming just for students. But for staff, we had never really done anything. So this was kind of our way to show them the love. So we came up with this blind date with the Booker DVD program. And so I'm just going to kind of go through each step that I took to create this program. And then at the end, I'll have a few tips and tricks and time management things I've come up with, and then time for a question. So to start with marketing, we marketed in two different ways. The first was through these Valentine's Day cards that we sent out. I guess we sent these out early February, probably a week and a half before the program actually was going to go out, which was last year, was our first year. And that was on, everything went out on February 14th, actually Valentine's Day. So it worked out. As you can see, the cards are very cute. My inspiration for these was kind of the Valentine's Day card that you might get whenever you were in elementary school. And also, this was a branding opportunity for us. You can see the very distinctive font that I used. And I used that in a lot of different places for this program. So the cards kind of just have a brief explanation of the program on there. And in addition to the cards, after those went out, I sent out three emails that were just to the staff. And this is the actual email I sent out for our very first year that we did the program. As you can see, it explains a little bit more about the program. It has my contact information, which I could not fit on the original card. So it has my email address. And then again, with the branding, I used the same red color for the heart that I had used on the card in that same distinctive font. So after I marketed this and I had people signing up, it came out about even actually. I think we had both years slightly more people sign up with cards than emails. But the emails are a great reminder that they should send those cards into me. So after that, we get to a really fun portion of this, which is the material selection. If you read the email that I had on the last slide, you'll notice that it said that we were picking everything from our bestseller collection and our film collection. We did this just because we wanted the materials that we chose to be as appealing to the masses as possible. I'm sure there are plenty of people that work here that love poetry or maybe a great history of nonfiction, but we wanted to make sure that the selections that we chose would be easily appealing to everyone. So the first year we did just bestsellers. This past year, we expanded that to bestsellers and older favorites. The reason for this is because we cut our bestseller collection here in about half. So we had only about 200 bestsellers to choose from. And also making it older favorites kind of opens up what you can choose for these blind dates to send out to people. Which that brings me to my second point, which is crowdsourcing. I asked everyone in the staff to send me suggestions for things that I could send out as blind dates. And by opening it up to older favorites, people were able to put in their favorite book from whatever or their favorite movie. And so that really helps us with coming up with different things that we could use and send out as blind dates. So I definitely encourage asking people that you work with to send in suggestions or even just your friends. I had a few friends send me suggestions as well. Of course, browsing is another method to pull materials. I had a larger response than I anticipated the first year. I was hoping for maybe 15 or 20 people to participate. And I actually got 55. So that was a lot of different things to pull. So one thing I did both years actually is I did a lot of browsing. Once I had my list of things that I was going to pull, I browsed through the entire bestseller collection. And then once I went upstairs to pull older favorites, I kind of browsed in the peas around from where I was pulling books. Along with material selection comes keeping track of everything because you are going to have to check these out to people whenever you send them the blind dates. So what I did was just a simple Excel spreadsheet. I had a column for people's names. And then I had a column for books and DVDs if they were having just one or the other or both of them. And this also brings up an interesting question for you. Obviously, we don't keep track of what people check out. But if you're going to do this program multiple years in a row, you might consider keeping track of who you send out blind dates to because you don't want to run the risk of someone getting the same thing over and over again, or probably not over and over again, but more than once. So that's something that you'll just have to talk about amongst your staff if you feel comfortable keeping track of those or not. So after material selection, we have the actual delivery of items. For the packaging, I have a picture right there of the blind dates for the first year. Again, they were very cute. I used red and pink wrapping paper. And each blind date had a label on the front. I used that same branded font that I had for everything else for their name. And then I had that poem that I came up with to remind people of when their items were due. If you decide to do this program, you're more than welcome to use that masterful poem that I came up with right there. For delivery, one other thing I should mention about packaging is that the reason everything came with string was because it seemed that actually most people got books and DVDs. So if everything had a ribbon around it, it was an easy way to keep those two things together. And then I did put a piece of chocolate on everyone's as well since they were getting it on Valentine's Day. So for the delivery, I found that it was easiest to organize everything by building and just put it into boxes by that building rather than keeping track of things alphabetically. It was easier whenever you actually went to give the person their blind date to have it that way. And I should mention that that's kind of how this program differs than a lot of other blind date programs that you've probably heard about. We actually sent these out to people rather than people coming in and just taking a pre-wrapped thing and checking it out. These went out to everyone's office that afternoon. For the delivery, I used student workers. And this was for two reasons. One that I anticipated. One I did not. The reason I did it to begin with last year was because I did everything else by myself. And by the time Friday came around, I had other work that I needed to do. So I asked student workers to help me just to take everything out that afternoon. The unexpected consequence of that and the reason I had them do it again this year was because they really, really enjoyed that. They mentioned to me after the program that everyone was really excited to get their blind date. And so they had a great time brightening people's afternoon. So I had them do that again this year. Lastly, a few tips and tricks and things I learned along the way. You should just anticipate special requests if you do this program. Even though it says blind date, people are going to tell you kind of what they want. Some of them are really specific. I do not want first-person writing. Some are more general, like a movie that's family friendly. And you'll need to keep track of that on your spreadsheet as well. Just know that's going to happen. Another thing is legible handwriting can become an issue for the cards. So if you have a directory or a list of everyone that you sent that out to, that you send cards out to, it's good to keep that handy. That way you can kind of decipher a few letters and then look through your directory and then send them an email confirmation once you think you've figured out who it was that sent in that card. The next tip I have for you is to ask for wrapping help. As I mentioned earlier, the first year I wrapped everything myself. That was 88 items. And that took an extremely long time. So this year I actually solicited help from staff members. And so we just met in a room. It took about an hour. They each had a sheet of, I think, six people that they were wrapping their items. And it just knocked everything out. It was so much easier. Another nice thing about having people help you wrap is that you also have other input for what blind dates you're going to send out. These are the same people that gave suggestions. So it was really nice to have their perspective of what they can send and of things that they might have submitted as their favorite book or movie they could send them to people in the staff. Another tip for the spreadsheet that you keep, I suggest organizing the spreadsheet by department. So I mentioned earlier your package is going out in a box by building. I recommend keeping your spreadsheet organized by department. And that way you can quickly go through and then have them by department and then put those in the box by building. And the last thing, returns, just let your circulation coordinator know that they're going to get a lot of questions on renewals. And also they might have things returned in a different manner than they're anticipating. We had a lot of things that were returned by inner office mail, which was kind of unusual for us. All right, so that's basically how the program worked. If you have any questions, that's my email address there. I will also be at ACRL this year in Portland, which is next month. So if you want to talk about programming, I'm more than happy to meet up. Rebecca, do you feel like you're getting a lot more staff members coming in the library now, do you think? I think so. We do a monthly bookmobile as well. And it was really great. We see staff members that way that are going into the dining hall. That's where we do it. And so it was really nice last year to have a lot of people come up to us and tell us how much they enjoyed that. And then I think that we have had more people come into the library because they're like, oh, yeah, we can get this DVD from the library instead of trying to get it on Netflix or running it online. And we have these books to offer them. Great. All right, great. Well, thank you for that, Rebecca.