 Okay, well welcome to today's Encompass session. Encompass is the Nebraska Library Commission's online event that we hold weekly. We try to cover topics of interest to Nebraska librarians. My name is Susan Nisley, and I'm sitting in as guest host today since your normal host, Krista Burns, is at the Computers and Libraries Conference. Today's speaker and presenter is Sally Snyder, who is the coordinator of children and young adult services at the Library Commission, and she's going to be talking about the summer reading program and how they choose themes, how that all works. So without any further ado, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Sally and see what she has to say. Take it away, Sally. Thank you, Susan. I do want to say first off that while I'm talking, if you have any questions about the information I'm sharing, or maybe I forgot an important point and you're curious, please go ahead and text or use your microphone to stop me and ask your question. That's just fine. I'll be happy with that because then I know you're involved in the conversation. So I called this who chooses the theme because I think that people are not always clear who the Collaborative Summer Library Program organization is, and our abbreviation for that is CSLP. And I'll often say, oh, the CSLP is going to something or other, and people say, well, what is that? And then I'd say, Collaborative Summer Library Program, and that doesn't help any, really. So this is an explanation of the organization and also about how the themes are chosen for each of the summers, how the concept is chosen, and then how we choose the slogan. So first I'd like to say that on the CSLP webpage, which we'll visit after a while, under the section about us, we do list the guiding principle of CSLP is librarians sharing ideas, expertise, and costs to produce a high-quality summer reading program for children. Now we do have to adjust this a little bit because when we first started, we were only talking about summer reading programs for children, and since that time we've added teens and now we're dabbling with adults also. So I think we need to go back and rework this statement. However, some basic information, Sally Snyder is your state representative to the CSLP, and I am also the current president of the group of the organization. We have right now 47 states plus the District of Columbia, and each participating state has one person who's designated as the state representative. The reason we do that is really twofold. One is we send messages, we meaning the CSLP sends messages to the state representatives for them to share with the librarians in their state and that simplifies things if we know who it is in each state that this message should go to. Now I'm going to need a drink. Most states have a position like mine here in Nebraska, which is the coordinator of children and young adult library services. Some states do not have that position at their state library, and in that case, often a public librarian is chosen by their state to have that role, though it's not as cut and dried as it seems at first. Now we'll go on a little bit. Another basic is for Nebraska we have me and then we also have two public librarians who help do the work of the CSLP and attend the annual meetings each year. Karen Drivo from North Fork Public Library is one of the two children's librarians representing Nebraska, and she has been one of the representatives for quite a few years, and she's also been the chair of the vendor committee for several years, and that's a busy job and she's done excellent work with that. Beth Troup from Gearing Public Library is the second librarian who is currently representing Nebraska at the annual meetings, and she is serving on the children's manual committee and the adult manual committee right now and maybe a couple of others that I don't know about because people can be members of more than one committee as long as they're willing to do the work that the committee needs them to do. So I'm very proud that Nebraska has hardworking librarians helping us get the work of that organization taken care of. So I'll give you a little bit of a history of the CSLP, which started out as the Cooperative Summer Library Program. In 1987, 10 Minnesota, I don't know where Wisconsin came from, 10 Minnesota library systems joined together to have a common summer library program, and I know they have more than 10, but I don't know how many systems they have in Minnesota. So they decided that was a good idea and they worked together. They did manage to contract with well-known illustrators, and so it wasn't very long before North and South Dakota said, may we join you? And why wouldn't you when they're getting artwork that will represent the program and a manual done by collaboration? And that makes it easier for everybody if they're all pooling their resources together. So now we travel on to 95 when Iowa and one more system in Minnesota joined the collaborative. So now we have four states, still very manageable group working together. There was a president of sorts for several years from, I believe he was from South Dakota, but there were no bylaws, no formal setup of president and secretary, et cetera. 10 years from the beginning of the organization Nebraska and Utah joined, that was the year we had thrills and chills at the library. For those of you who remember our different programs, I thought I'd plug those in there. So 10 years after they first formed, we now have six states involved in it and working very well together. 99 brought Idaho and Kansas with the Treasure Your Library theme. We're still very Midwestern, a little bit West there, but mostly Midwestern. And then we had an organizational name change in 99, Minnesota left the CSLP. They decided to go back to just working together within their own state. So Iowa assumed the administrative duties of the organization. And in Iowa, the word cooperative has specific legal meaning, so we could not use that word for our group. So we had to change our name to collaborative. I guess we needed to keep that C at the beginning. Then with cosmic connections at your library, we added Montana and Alaska. Reading Road Trip USA brought us Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. We're starting to fill up that upper part of the map there. 2002 was joined the Winter Circle Read, Arkansas, Delaware, and one system in Washington state. So that's why that state is orange instead of the pinkish color because it's not the whole state that's a member at this time. Laugh it up at your library. 2003 brought Maine and Missouri, and it was also the first year that we started a teen program. And we had a teen theme and teen manual and teen art work. And you might say, well, it took us long enough, but we're getting bigger now. You can see we're from east to west now. I'm not sure that that's really what Delaware on the map. It's really hard to click on those. Okay, then 2004 just blew us away because Discover New Trails brought us 10 more members. Illinois and California were only part of the states joined. One or two systems in each state, but that really, our growth was incredible and it was tricky for us too. It was at this point at our annual meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, that we voted and adopted the bylaws that had been written for us. We did not have bylaws until 2004, which is, you know, with this much happening, it's kind of surprising that it took us that long to get everything organized. So starting in 2004, we have our new set of bylaws and our new organization direction. 2005 brought in four more states with Dragon Streams and Daring Deeds and Chow Street. And I keep saying, when are we going to have our annual meeting in Hawaii? Since Hawaii joined in 2006. But since Hawaii has not been able to attend our annual meeting yet, it's hard for us to say that we're going to go to Hawaii. People say, well, my state parks not going to let me go on that trip. Paws, claws, scales and tails and creature feature were the themes that year. In 2007 again, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven states joined. We still have a partial with Florida and a partial with some of Minnesota. Some of Minnesota came back. And last year Georgia and Maryland and the District of Columbia joined us. So there are very few little spots that aren't pink anymore. And for 2009, Louisiana and Tennessee are joining. Now I know that you can't read this and I don't really expect you to. This is just kind of a demonstration of the number of states that are members of the CSLP. And it's everybody but New Hampshire who has committed to join our organization in 2010 and Massachusetts who's been talking with a couple of our board members and they might be deciding to join our organization. And Texas who has talked with us but really doesn't want to join our group because our rules are more than they want to follow. Excuse me. And that's okay. It's their choice. And people can join and then they can decide, well, no, I think we'll just back out of this for a while and that's all right too. We'll welcome you back if you decide to come back again. It's up to you. So you might be asking, well, why did Nebraska join in 1997? And here are a few reasons. We get more for our money than if we just did our summer reading program individually. Sorry. It's a huge bargain. We have right now, as I said, 47 states that we have input to ideas for the manual, suggestions for artwork. Whoever wants to participate is welcome. All of this comes to all of us to share and reap the benefits. So you can't really go wrong, I think. We get professional artwork by well-known illustrators. How do we know our theme two years in advance? People have told me how much they appreciate that. And sometimes they email me and say, now, what's our theme for two years from now? And when I know, I send it out, the information. Also, we have what I think is a good timeline. We get our manuals to usually in October. Now, you've just gotten done with your summer reading program at the end of July or whenever your program ends. And already in October, here comes your manual. And some people say, well, I just set it aside and I don't look at that manual until about January. But some people like to start planning right away in the fall. So it's great for the people who want to do that. And for people who want to wait a little bit, they just set it aside and take it out when they're ready. There are professional connections with librarians from all over the U.S. If you want to serve on a committee, if you want to come to the annual meeting, it's in Omaha this year. So talk to me if you would are interested in stopping in for a little while and seeing how we do our work. And also for libraries who have not yet offered a summer reading program to teens, this is a good way to start because you get the manual, you get the artwork and everything and you can just give it a try and see how it goes. Each state when they join, they lose something. And I went to Georgia, let's see, the fall of 2007 to talk with their librarians who were just joining and they were asking questions about, well, but we've always had this handout that the state library's done for us and it looks like this and it has this information in it. Will we still get that? And the answer is if the Georgia State Library wants to keep doing that, it's up to them and that would be fine. But the collaborative isn't going to do it because we already have a lot invested in the things we're doing right now. So the collaborative means give and take, you gain some but you lose some too. And the only thing I could think of that Nebraska really lost when we joined was some local control. When it was just Nebraska, Nebraska librarians could vote if they wanted to and say, this is what I want for the theme for next year or for the concept. This is what I want for the slogan and then the Nebraska librarians decided. Well now 47 states decide and next year it'll be 48. But I think the benefits far outweigh the loss. I hope you agree with me there. And also there are ways for you to get input which I'll get to in a minute. So what is the CSLP business? First I wanted to mention that membership is open to states as a whole or to regional library systems or county libraries in states where the whole state does not want to join. And when a state or a part of a state joins, we ask for a two year commitment for them to start with. And then if they don't think it's worth it, they can drop out. But CSLP has one and only one business, the summer reading program. So this whole organization is all put together to help public libraries and school libraries who might be operating as a public library in the summer, to help them with their summer reading program. The CSLP determines the program theme, has an opportunity to talk with the vendor, gives an evaluation of the proposed artwork that's committee work. And also an evaluation of the proposed reading incentives, those gadgets and gizmos that are in the catalog every year. Also the CSLP asks the state representative to request ideas from community librarians for the various manuals. If you have a great idea for water, well, we're already almost done with our water manual, so we'll have to talk about world cultures and travel. If you have a great idea for some of those topics, please send it in to me and I'll send it on to the manual committee chair. And I hope that you receive my emails. If you're on the ChildLib-L email group, I send out a request. We'll hit that in a little bit. Asking you for ideas of slogans for the theme. And then later, like yesterday, I send out an email saying, here's the whole list. Which of these do you want? Or would you most enjoy having as the slogan? And also we review the draft chapters of the manual. We conduct a lot of business at our annual meeting. That's when we hope most of our membership attends. And by membership, we mean at least one state representative from each state. This year we know for certain that four states are not going to be attending so far. And that's not the way we want things to be, because we make many of these decisions at the annual meeting. We want people to be there to give their opinions and their state's ideas. Just so you know how this works, the dues for belonging to the organization are $65 base plus $2 per public library in the state. And we recently adjusted our account, and we're going with the federal government's definition of a public library building. We're counting buildings, not entities. And so that's changed a little bit as to how much we pay. But still, overall, we're paying around a little over $600 for Nebraska to be a member. You can't go wrong with that. Is that what you would say, Richard? Yeah. Richard's in here in the room with us. At the annual meeting, as we vote on things, each state has three votes. We used to go by a weighted vote system where however many public libraries you had in your state determined how many votes you received or were able to give. And that got quite cumbersome and frustrating. We voted to go to the three votes per state because why three votes? Because when the themes come up, if people in Nebraska, if a third of the Nebraska librarians I heard from want this slogan and two thirds want that slogan, I want to split our vote that way. One vote for the thing that one third of the librarians wanted and two votes for the other one. Because when you add up votes from 47 states, that could be a factor. So, when we get to the annual meeting, we have narrowed things down to the top five suggestions for a slogan for 2011 for this year. That's what it'll be. And let me tell you, this is such a much better system than we used to do. In the meeting, the first one I went to in 2003, I walked into the room and they had notepads all stuck on the walls, all through the room. And we were supposed to go up and write the theme ideas that we brought with us up on the wall. So there were, say, 80 theme ideas up there and then we started voting. And then we'd vote again. And then we'd vote again. You don't even want to hear me talk about this. They were great ideas, but it's much better for us to sift down through all of the ideas till we have the top five at the annual meeting. And that's where the decision is made. So Nebraska has three votes for that. And because I'm president, Karen Drivo and Beth Troup do the discussing and deciding for Nebraska based on what I have from this survey, if you want to call it that, of librarians. And then we also vote on the top five suggestions for the concept. I use the term concept because we've been struggling with how to separate the theme or the slogan, which is the specific phrase, be creative at your library, from the concept, which was the arts or, you know, make sure their concept was water. Then we came up with make a splash read. So it's a little confusing. More business that we conduct is we vote on our slate of officers. There are any bylaw changes that must be voted on by the membership. There are reports from the committee chairs. We do have the discussion with the vendors, which is a very popular time because we get some information from them. These vendors give us information about what items were purchased in each state. So I know of the items that were on the list. Nebraska librarians buy and that helps me to say, yes, we really want to continue to have these items and these other items are just important to us because they'll ask us those things. And then there are other topics or issues that may be brought up by the membership that we discuss during the meeting. It's three days, three full days of meeting, but we also have fun. The CSLP also has board meetings and they're pretty much bi-monthly, but it's a little bit off because we always have a board meeting at the April annual meeting since we're all there anyway. And otherwise, board meetings are usually conference calls and we keep our organization moving ahead that way. Each committee chair, the board is comprised of the officers, which are president, president-elect, past president, secretary and treasurer and each of the committee chairs. So each committee chair sends a report to the board prior to the meeting so all of us can read the report and know what's been happening with their committee. And then the committee chairs can also ask for items to be placed on the agenda. The committee meetings are conducted, the first committee meeting for each year is conducted at the annual meeting. And that's when people who are attending the meeting can say, I want to be on this committee and write their name on the piece of paper. Other than that, committee business is usually conducted via email. If there's a topic that they really feel they need to talk about on the phone, then they can at any time hold a conference call meeting as well. So what are the committees? Well, there's quite a few. The children's and the teen and the adult manual committee. The adult manual committee is right now ad hoc. It's not an official full-blooded committee because we're determining if we want to continue in that direction or not. We haven't decided yet. Vendor committee is the one that, again, I said Caradrivo is the chair of. And they work with our vendor that we contract with the vendor contracts with the artist for us. So we don't have to deal with that. They also find the incentives. They contract with people to write the manual chapters. And the suggestions that you send in for ideas are submitted to the people who are contracted with to write the chapters. So there's quite a bit going on with that committee. There's the rules of use, which maybe you've heard of before, which talk about when people can use the artwork and when they cannot, among other things. There's a membership committee, which we're looking at ways to change this title because initially it was for people to contact if they were interested in joining. Well, we're pretty much done with that part of our process. But the membership committee has been doing now is working on a set of, what's the word again? Not guide lines, but how we operate, how each committee operates. What is it that they are responsible for? What is it that they do? What's their timeline? They're putting all of this together so that future committee chairs can look at it and say, I see this is what we're supposed to be doing. We have a diversity committee who works with language and also disabilities. There's a website committee. We'll show you our website in a little bit. We have a marketing and PR committee, budget and finance, and the long-range plan committee was also at HOP. We just finished our first long-range plan draft that we'll be submitting to the membership at the April meeting. So I'm fresh from doing long-range planning, which was a very good process for us to get accomplished. Now, how can you, as a Nebraska librarian, participate? Well, in approximately, usually in February, I send out an email to the childlib-l email group and talk to me if you're not on that group. We'll get you on there. And I ask you to send in your suggestions for the slogan for whatever year we're talking about and also your ideas for the year after that. What topic or concept are you interested in? Do you want it to be dinosaurs? Do you want it to be time travel? Things like that. And then in March or April, late March or early April, I ask you to vote on all the list of the slogans that were submitted and also the concepts and tell me, do you think will be the most popular with your kids? Because that's what I'm going to take to the meeting and say, here's what Nebraska librarians say, here's what our vote is. Also, you can participate by any time of the year. Let me know your ideas or if you have some concerns about something. Recently at the Summer Reading Program workshops, some of the time I was wearing the blue t-shirt with the emblem down on the bottom of the t-shirt and I had some people tell me, oh, they liked that way and other people told me they didn't really like having the emblem down on the bottom of the shirt because they trimmed the shirts off and that cut through that emblem. So things like that are things also that I will take to the annual meeting and let people know here's areas of concern. Also, a limited number, and I don't really know how many, we just have to see. Anyway, children's routine librarians in Nebraska can become committee members without going to the annual meeting because what the committee does is the vendor committee, they work with the vendor looking over the artwork, the drafts of the artwork and also the ideas for the different incentives. The manual committee members look at drafts of the manual and make suggestions for, you know, it's a craft not explained clearly enough. Do they need more ideas for younger children? Things like that. You can be on those committees. The only thing we ask is that you participate. If after the committees are set up again in April, you'll be sending an email saying, are you receiving this? We have you down as being on the committee. And it might be a while before you get another email from the committee chair saying, okay, here's some things for you to look at. Please send me your responses. If you do not reply to three emails, then you're going to be dropped from the list. And that's just a decision that we made to keep things manageable and to see how many people there were that were actually participating. When there are votes, we need to have a certain number of the committee participating. And if you are participating, then you're holding things back. Okay, enough lecturing. Here's our timetable. So in April, every year is the annual conference. In June, June 1st, the new officers take over. That's when the, also when the state representative, me, will send in my order for the state how many manuals we want in our state. In September or October, the manuals and the catalogs or the incentive forms are shipped. And then by late November, you can be ordering your things you want from the vendor because then it will be delivered hopefully in beginning March. Now you can go to the CSLP website anytime you want to. It's a pretty easy thing to remember. I think it's CSLPreads.org. And there you can read about the membership. There are some links and things to do with the manual and an overview of the manual. The bylaws are online there. We do have a connection to the online order form. And then there are also the rules of use, which again is when you can and cannot use the artwork. So this is what the website looks like. And now if I remember how to do this right, I'm going to take us to the website itself. I try to make sure that it's not a text chat. Oh, I forgot all about that. Okay, good. We were just checking to make sure if anybody had been trying to chat and I was ignoring that completely, I'm sorry. Now we're going to go to see. I just draw it out like this. So here's the website. This is the front page and this picture will change from time to time as you go to it. And this is just some basic information here. But at the top, if you look at it, see here's about CSLP. A little bit about our history. That's when you can find that statement. I said about librarians sharing ideas, expertise and costs to produce a high quality summer reading program for children. Also on here are our bylaws. I'm not even going to make you look at those right now. There's also our rules of use. The rules of use right now are very text heavy, but we're changing that so it'll be more user friendly soon. So hopefully you'll find an improvement there. Here's a list of the officers, and I just did that so you could see my picture. They made us put our pictures up here. So here's the officers. You can look at that and say who is responsible for different things. And then remember, this is where you can go and just look at all the states. Each of these people listed out of the state are the official state representative for that state. So if you want to talk to Montana, maybe you want to email the librarian there and say, well how are things working in Montana? You can do that. We have programs. Here's a list of people asking me what's the upcoming summer reading programs you can go here and find out. 2010, make a splash read, make waves at your library read, and then the general theme for 2011 is World Culture and Travel. As soon as we have our annual meeting this will be changed to update to what things are decided at the annual meeting. Then there are some different things you can go to. There's a family literacy section. There's a section about diversity and then there's some information about the research about summer reading if you're interested in math. And then there's a connection with the order of form here. So these are some things you can look at, learn a little bit more about the CSLP. And right here there is a section called the state representative section. And for that when you do need to have the password to get in there because we have some things in there that we need to keep a tighter control on so that people who are not authorized do not use the artwork. It's part of the contract with the vendor and with the artist that we protect these things. So that's not really as secretive as it seems. That's just how that is. Okay now do I just X out here? Oh yeah. That's right. And then quit. Okay now I'm going to see how I do not have to go video. Oh yeah, this is working. So that's just a little bit of information about our webpage. I talked about all the themes. These are just a list of some of the themes we've had recently. And the upcoming themes. This year be creative. Make a splash as I said. The other ones. And oh I forgot that I was going to show you speaking of how we've grown. This is the catalog from 2002. Seven years ago. It's four pages. That's the cover. Here's the inside with the order form on this side. And then the back. See this was the year before we had a team program. It was all children's four pages. 2009 be creative. This is 24 pages. And three pages of it I think are order form. Because we have, no it's more than that, it's four pages of order form. Because we have so much more happening now and so much more options. Things to choose from. Okay now I'd be welcome to answer any questions you might have. Maybe I've just burned you silly. I hope not. I'm going to check on this chat thing and see if anybody's asking any questions. I have a question asking how do we get book suggestions for summer reading programs. And the manual itself has several, for each chapter it has a list of books that relate to that chapter topic. And I think starting next year we're going to have a cumulative list of all of those recommended books. So hopefully between the manual and the total list you'll be able to find lots of book titles that would interest you or interest your children at your library. Thank you that was a good question. Richard is just asking me a question about the adult summer reading program. And look Debra has said is there a summer reading program that we are doing for adults? And yes, last year the collaborative contracted with upstart high Smith who's our vendor right now because they had already an adult program in place and we just used their materials that they had already developed. So this year for, we're kind of doing that again. They did already have a master the art of reading concept. And so we kind of hooked into that again. And if you still have your brochure you'll see that on pages 18, 19, 18 and 19 are ideas about adult summer reading program. And so there's a picture of the Mona Lisa or some art by Van Gogh that is used in the posters in the bookmarks. There's a canvas tote bag and there is a small manual They are following the themes right now. Right now we're working on developing a manual for next year the adult manual committee which is really the adult program committee I guess I should say is working on that. So they will have a manual and it won't be even close to as long as the children's manual but we'll also give ideas of programs and activities that you can have for your library if you want to follow an adult theme when we had requests for an adult theme for several years before we really got to looking at doing this. So right now we're going to we're going to not analyze but evaluate the response this year and next year and then we'll decide if we're going to continue with an adult theme or if that's kind of out of our daily wick anyway. More questions? Richard just asked me to talk a little bit more about the rules of use and the issues with that are because we contract with Highsmith to contract with the artist to create the artwork and then they also create other things for us like the manual that there are you need to be a member of the collaborative in order to use the artwork or the manual and items within it and with Nebraska being a member all of the public libraries in Nebraska can use the information where things get tricky is when a commercial entity wants to use the artwork in support of the summer reading program and we have two different pieces of art one for the children's program and one for the team programs that are authorized for example if the pizza place in town wants to print up some placemats supporting the summer reading program telling kids to go to the library and they want a logo on there they can use that particular logo on their own items anything that's created by the public librarian to be dispersed anywhere that has anything to do with their summer reading program during that summer and the couple three months beforehand when you're promoting it you can use the artwork on things that you at the library produce there's no problem with that where we get into trouble is when another commercial entity uses our artwork or our logo on their product and they are not our contracted vendor then Karen Drivo calls them on the phone she gets right after them and says now that's not right take that off because we don't want people thinking that we are what's the word I want encouraging people to use a particular vendor we have a contract with one vendor to produce the things that we want and that's as far as our connection goes we don't want, because we're 47 plus states we don't want our influence to be misused I guess is the wording right now I see a question from Debra that says has Sally done all of her SRP events in the state for this year and the answer is yes we had a wonderful time Alice Beckman was our presenter for music and craft ideas and readers theater and I was at each one also talking about new books that people might want to get for their libraries we had a lovely time lots of excitement I think it's a terrific way for librarians to really get motivated to make plans for the upcoming summer are there any other questions Richard just asked me about using the artwork after the summer is over and that is an issue because the artwork ultimately goes back to the artist they own the copyright on the artwork we are allowed as a member of library to use the artwork like I said for the summer that it's designed for the few months preceding that because we're doing promotional things for reports at the end after the summer is over you're doing a report for your library board you can use the artwork there but otherwise no that illustrator's artwork is available for your use and that's a kind of tricky thing too Jevred just said am I going to talk about the summer reading program email on voting that I said yesterday and I did talk pretty briefly about that so maybe I'll kind of emphasize it a little more I've had a wonderful response so far I was amazed at how many emails I received yesterday and this morning and what I'm asking people if you're on the childlib-l email group from the commission I'm asking you there's this whole long list of suggested slogans for 2011 for the world culture slash travel theme I want you to tell me what the top 5 you think are and I'll add that all together and take the top 5 Nebraska voted for to the annual meeting I also asked about the concept the teen slogans too whole list of those and then I asked for the concept for 2012 what do you want the concept to be and then I suggested things like dinosaurs time travel fitness heroes I've heard these different ideas so if you're not on the childlib email group contact me and we'll get you connected there and I'll send you the email out again and you can vote too I'd like many librarians in Nebraska to send me their ideas so I think that what I take to the April meeting is representative of the state Richard says it's time so thank you all so much for listening and for your questions Laura says she would like to vote so let me jot that down and Laura I will send you an email about that okay anything else we need to do Susan I don't know I think that I think that's it and I'll go ahead and take care of all of the getting the recording set up and then this will be available later on for people who missed it so that they can watch this thanks for doing this Sally we really appreciate it thank you thank you everybody bye