 All right, so welcome to our 2 o'clock session here on Big Talk from Small Libraries 2021. Next up, we have Samantha Bodine, who is from Ocom, Massachusetts. Did I say that right? I'm sorry. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And she's going to talk about what they've been doing at their library with their community programming, and I'll just let you take it away, Samantha. Thank you. Yeah. I'm really happy to be here. My name's Samantha Bodine. I'm the director of the Phobes Memorial Library in Ocan, Massachusetts. I've been here for about seven years, and sorry, I'm just like concerned that you can't see my slides, but I should stop worrying. I've been here for seven years, and throughout that time community programming has been one of the biggest things that we focus on. So when the shutdown happened last March, it was really important to me and really important to my staff that we continue finding ways to connect with the community in completely new ways. And we've been working really hard on that for the past 11 months, I guess. Everything that I'm sharing today has worked really well for us. It's been so well utilized by our patrons. It's generated so much goodwill for the library, which is so important, especially for small or tiny libraries in weird, uncertain financial years. So I hope that you find some inspiration for some things that you want to bring to your library. I also just want to point out that everything that we've spent time and energy on this year, we've tried to put together thinking about the fact that we may have to close down again. We may be stuck in this limbo of kind of like open but limited services, or we want things that can continue working well into the future. So don't feel like there's a time limit related to COVID on any of these ideas, because I think realistically, a lot of libraries have been doing them for a long time. And we plan on continuing them far into the future. This year has just really forced us to think in new ways about programming. So it's actually been kind of a small positive amid the strange, strange year. So just a little bit about OCam in our library. OCam is a really small rural town of about 1,900 people located right in the center of Massachusetts. We're actually almost the geographic center of the state, but not quite. We have very limited community services and activities. We don't have a gas station. We don't have a grocery store. We don't have a bank. We don't have a sit-down restaurant. We don't even have a traffic signal in town. So I'm sure that many of you listening today can relate to working in towns of that size. As far as community activities, especially free offerings going on within the town, there's very little again. It's basically just the school, the church, the senior center, and us. But that does put the library in a really great position to be able to fill in those gaps. And we've seen that just a lot of people do want to participate in what we have to offer because there's nothing else here. And also the surrounding towns are also small and rural, so they're not finding many things there either. The library itself is staffed entirely by part-time employees. Our town limits part-time employees to less than 19 and a half hours a week, so it's quite limited. The great thing about this is that there's almost no burnout among the staff because they're just not here enough. So it allows us to kind of operate at a very high efficiency level because everyone's just excited to get here, get to work, and serve our community. We are open currently. We're open to the public 29 hours a week. And that is our normal schedule, so that's not a reduced schedule. And we have a 1,500 square foot building on two floors, one dedicated mostly to children, the other dedicated mostly to adults. And our budget for the current year is around $73,000. So hopefully that gives you a good sense of size and you can kind of compare yourself to us in terms of what we've been doing and the numbers of activities that we've been putting out and the number of take-home things that we put out. As I said, programming has been a big focus for us for the past seven years. When I first got here, the library had what I would consider to be a pretty typical calendar of events for a town of this size and a library of this size. They had a weekly storytime, a weekly Lego club, a monthly adult club, and then some special events scattered throughout the year. The story I always tell is that when I first came to the library, it was the week before school got out for the summer in June. And I did what any good librarian does, which is to just copy other librarians. So I copied my sister-in-law, who's also a librarian, and offered a slime-making program for children for the first week of summer vacation. And again, this was like one week after I had started. There was very little advertising. I would have been happy to have five or six people show up. And what actually happened is that the building was like mobbed with children to the point where I could not navigate around the tables that we were rapidly trying to set up to get like slime-making materials out to more kids. So right after that, I was like, I think this town really could use some more free programming opportunities, specifically for children. And we got to work and got to the point where before the shutdown, we were offering nine or 10 programs a week every single week. Sorry, the phone is ringing here. And we just loved it. We did it in a way that was pretty manageable for us. Of course, we were doing it twenty-nine hours a week. So it was very busy and not only were we doing all those programs, but I would say about 90 percent of them were filled to or beyond capacity. So it was like it was very busy here, but we loved it. Our community loved it. And then when the shutdown happened in March, we were obviously looking for ways that we could kind of continue those things in a safer format. So I put together some pictures just as like the good old days, just because looking back through like our face of photos, I couldn't help but like really love seeing people's faces again, seeing people's minds. But this to me really represents the spirit of the library and what we've been trying to keep alive for the past for the past 11 months. We were lucky to be able to start offering curbside services and take home craft kits like right away in March when we shut down, because again, benefits of a small town, we could do it all with just one staff member here. So it always felt very safe. And we did at the same time start offering virtual programming. But within like two weeks, we had to stop that for a number of reasons, including lack of high speed internet in our town was problematic for that. And also my own lack of childcare once our governor issued a stay at home advisory, working at all became really complicated. So we started looking so sorry, I'm getting off track because of the phone here. But we started looking at this as typical of how it is. You're the one person there. So this is exactly how it works. I like silence my cell phone, but the library can't really do that. Anyway, so we so we had to stop virtual programming, but like we stopped it after I think about two weeks of virtual programming, virtual story time and not a single person from the community reached out to say, what are you going to do more for? Like, what's up with your virtual programming? So that was an indication to me that that was like not an avenue we should focus on, because obviously time is very limited. You know, we have very few staff hours, no one works full time. I was having my own like childcare issues. So we decided instead to start looking at ways that we could bring programming outside. And the more we talk to people through the curbside services and just messages and emails from our patrons. We decided that what we would focus on is screen free programming activities that could keep children happy and engaged throughout like such a weird time. Well, their parents were busy trying to work from home without childcare and also just joyful experiences for families to have together because so many of those options at that point were just closed. So the first thing, does anyone have any questions I should say up until this point? No, no, not really yet. If anyone does have any questions, type into your go to webinar interface so I can grab them. We do just have some comments. And since you have this slide up here now, I'll have to mention that that the gorgeous library, gorgeous building, someone wants to live there. And someone says they've lived in Massachusetts my whole life and never been there, must visit and see the library. So, yeah, the building there, the stone building is awesome. Yes, beautiful. Yeah, and we do like I didn't mention it on that previous slide, but we actually sell t-shirts that say where in the hell is OKM? And they like sell so fast. It's like what you get asked when you live here. They say, wait, where do you live? You even have people from the next town over, right? Like, not know this town existed. So it's one of those counts. And I'm sure. Like. But so moving on. So the first thing that we did when the warmer temperatures started to arrive, and you can even see in this picture there, there's all those like posts lined up right outside the exit, was we installed a permanent story walk outside. So it begins and ends at the library. You can kind of see in these two photos, that's like one side and the other side of the library building. And those are my kids there. And so it begins and ends at the library. It's 18 posts long, which seems to be a really good number, because we've only had a few stories where we've had just too many pages and weren't you know, weren't quite sure what to do with them. So mostly they fit on 18 posts in the middle. It also goes like around a large field behind the library. So that's nice because it's like a kind of a mixed terrain. Unfortunately, like the only downside about our story walk is it's not at all handicap accessible. Like there's a very steep hill involved. The ground is very uneven. But OK, I really did not have any sort of area that would have worked for a more accessible version because we don't even have sidewalks here. There's literally one sidewalk in town and it is up a steep hill and it's like crumbling apart. So that wasn't going to work. So if you do have a better area in your town where you have like a nice flat paved pathway, I would recommend utilizing that for your story walk. For us, it just wasn't feasible, but it does kind of well represent OK, I'm like how how kind of rugged you have to be to make it through our story walk. We actually asked a patron of ours who is a hobbyist carpenter, if you would build it for us. And he was the one who talked just into doing these really sturdy looking permanent posts. We had originally been thinking of something much more temporary. But he designs them himself and he actually he's a science teacher as well, who likes this very instruction. So that's the link down below. Is it's a link to an instructional that he created. So if you go to that link or you can also, yeah, you can also find it really easily if you just Google Instructible Story Walk. It'll come up. It's like the first link there. But it gives you all of the materials you'll need to even link to like online vendors and places where he bought online. It gives you the exact process he went through, all the trial and error he went through. It tells you like how to install them. So it's like a wonderful document if you're looking to do this, especially if you want to do it on a budget because for the 18 posts, they only cost us $900 for materials. And we did pay him because we were using repurposed cultural council grant funds for this. So we did have the funding to pay him for his labor too. But if you have a patron who maybe is interested in the community, interested in the library, they might be willing to do it for very little in labor costs or possibly nothing. And they could follow this design if they wanted or create one of their own. It works really well for us. We've never had any issues. It's really easy to change out the books. You can see there's like three nuts down there at the bottom that you just unscrew and put in a new book. You do still have to eliminate the books because there's some moisture buildup underneath that usually occurs. But it's a very good design overall. And I do have some more pictures. You can see the way that we do our story walk is we install a new story every two weeks, which is pretty ambitious because it's quite time consuming, but it's worth it to us because it keeps it really relevant in people's minds. It keeps it exciting. It's never like the story walk has been sitting there for like a month or several months and you're not excited about it anymore because it's always new and always fresh. So we change the story every two weeks and we also include with every new story a new take home craft kit for kids or whoever wants one. So you can see this was one in the fall. We had the scarecrow story and then the little terracotta pot scarecrow craft. Oh, cute, that's what it looks like, cute. Yeah. Yep, that's what that is. Let's see. We also have done some fun things with it where, again, those are my kids, but you can see it here too, kind of like the wooded area that it goes through, which is really nice. And this was the story walk we put up for Halloween and we were actually able to light it up for Halloween night using just like clip-on book lights. So that was really great because our town did do trick or treating this year, but they had to cancel a lot of the events that they normally host. So this was a nice add-on to Halloween for a lot of people because it was just, again, like safe, like it has to be socially distanced because it's like a big area that you're covering. And it gave people a little bit more exciting things to do for that evening. We have some questions about the story. Sorry, sorry, so it's in our chat. No, no, no, I'm happy to answer questions now, though. Yeah, so you just started this last summer was the first time you set this up last year? Yeah, this was the first time. We had never considered it and we probably wouldn't have ever considered it unless the pandemic happened. Have to go out, yeah, figure out some way to do things, yeah. And then we have a couple of questions about the process of using the books. I don't, well, the questions are, what is the process you go through to use the stories and do you need to get permission to, well, someone says to copy the pages. I'm not really sure if that's exactly how it's done though, right? I mean, by a copy of the book and nobody panicked, but you tear out the pages and you take it apart, you take apart the book. And yeah, it's an extra copy. Like, so StoryWalk itself, the idea is a copyrighted thing, so you do have to give credit where credit's due and you can kind of see on that blue-bladed page that says, welcome to the StoryWalk, that's like crediting it to down at the bottom, crediting it to the person who developed the idea. But yeah, you don't have to get permission to use the book or photocopy it, you're not photocopying it, you buy two copies of the book. This was like something I learned the hard way and panicked about because I had not realized you need two copies of the book until I was trying to install it on the first day. You need two copies of the book, you cut them as close as you can to the binding. I think hard covers work better than soft covers and I think I've seen that online when I've seen people discuss StoryWalks, they also feel that hard covers work better. And I should add that my assistant director Heidi does this, so I'm not as familiar with her process, but you cut them up and then we laminate them. We actually have two different laminators that we use. One is like just an Amazon Basics, like eight and a half by 11 laminator that does the smaller picture books. And then we did buy kind of an industrial sized one. Not Hingooch, it was maybe like about $400 and that can laminate any other size picture book that we've come across. I don't think we found one that couldn't be handled by that one. And then obviously there's like two different size laminating sheets that you need, but it's easier with the smaller one to just like with that one out if you can. So that's why we use the two. Hopefully that answers that question for whoever asked. Yeah. Okay, good. And someone suggested another way of doing it too. I mean, you've got that new elimination here. And I see this too. Someone said, I recently saw a StoryWalk in business windows. This person said, I had trouble, I had problems with weather in my StoryWalk last year if it's not sealed in there good enough or laminate and you could have that. So I'm gonna try and go that route. So that would be another way to do it. If you've got like a Main Street or something where people can walk window to window and do it and then the pages are a little more protected. Yeah. Yeah, no, I've seen that idea a bunch and that's so great. But yeah, we just have no downtown or Main Street or anything anywhere where you could put any, like even a single book page where they have a hard time finding a readable spot here. So that's why we had to go this way instead. And you can kind of just see in the second picture that like that's the whole, or that's kind of half of the field maybe that you can see and they go all the way around that big field. So it is really nice. You can't tell in the picture, but when you're standing at the library on top of the hill you can see like the whole StoryWalk all in one go just like spread out nicely around the field. But I'm happy to answer any more StoryWalk questions before I move on if anyone has some. That's it at the moment. Great. Good. So the next thing that we did was... It's okay. So one just quickly came up. How long does it take do you think to walk the whole? Oh, thank you for asking because I meant to mention that. It's a really, it's like a time-consuming process which is why I think every two weeks is ambitious but like we're committed to it. So we're not stopping. It takes probably like there's the planning part where you have to pick the story and we obviously pick the craft too and like just buy all the materials you need. Then I think it probably takes about an hour to cut up and laminate two copies of the book. Probably pretty close to an hour. And then actually installing it. It takes a while. It's maybe an hour and a half depending on like how freezing cold your hands are too. Depending on how many you need to like step them up for a minute. Cause yeah, I did it a couple of weeks ago. I don't usually do it. Like in my amazing assistant director, Heidi like takes care of this whole thing but I did it a couple of weeks ago. I was like, wow, my hands are really stiff right now. So yeah, I would say altogether it probably takes four or five hours for every book. We're also of course assembling all of those craft kits. So it's a lengthy process but like I can't expect to you how much the community has loved it and how well utilized it is. I really thought it was like, oh, you know, one of those trendy things that everyone's doing when we first installed it. But then like I took my kids on it and I was like, this is so fun. We just get so many positive remarks about it. And I just think it is like a really worthwhile offering overall. Yeah. And someone has a different timing question. How long do you think it takes to go to like do the walk the whole walk? I got to read it from beginning to end. I mean, I guess depending on how quickly you read I suppose, yeah. It depends on your group. Yeah, because like at the age of the children that are going along with you, I would say not more than 30 minutes unless you're really like getting distracted with whatever is going on out there. And maybe like it was taking a little bit longer. I would say in the snow. What was that? It will depend on your kids level of attention too. I mean, that's a thing. Exactly. Yeah. So I feel like I often saw especially over the summer months kids like going from one to the next and then just like wandering around in the field for a while. So like whatever, you know, they're having a good time. So the amount of time it takes and that would completely depend on how far apart your posts are spaced, ours are spaced. Like you can see the next post from where you're going especially the way it's read out. But it's a nice walk between them. It's not like you're just going like one to the next to the next. Okay. All right. Go on onto the music garden. Okay. So the next thing we did after we got the story walk up we were really lucky to get funding from and I'm actually going to like read this off because I kind of think that I have to for the grant. So we got CARES Act funding to the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. So I just wanted to say that that's where it came from. So it is CARES Act funding that we got via a grant from Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. I know they just like, this was the first cycle of this and then they did another cycle this winter but it's closed now. But we were like shocked that they gave us money for this. We did not want to pursue any of the virtual programming options that they had for the reasons I already mentioned but we applied instead for this. We were trying to think of just more things that would be like joyful family experiences for outside of our library. And we saw, I think it was actually my sister-in-law who had the idea for these instruments and just immediately fell in love with them. They're so gorgeous. They really do just bring a lot of joy to people and they're like kind of a novelty thing and that a lot of patrons from out of town come here because there's the instruments, there's the story walk and it's just, especially over the summer it was a really nice family-friendly activity for people to do. And they still get some use in the winter time to that stuff again, my son. And you can kind of see to like the way they're positioned is as close to, or we tried to position some right next to the story walk post. So basically if you're on the story walk, like you have to interact with the instruments as well, they're right there. We thought that would be a great way to kind of combine those things together. So yeah, any questions about the music gardens? Yeah, lots of people want to know where did you get them? Where did you purchase those instruments from? I should have linked it. And I would be happy if anyone wants to have my contact information at the end. I could, if you want to contact me, I could give you the name of the representative that we worked with. They were from Grounds for Play. I'm like almost a hundred percent sure. So they have like a rainbow collection of instruments. They have a lot of other instruments too, but we also looked at a number of other companies that offered similar things that were also like gorgeous and looks amazing. So there's a lot of options out there. These seem to be incredible. For Play, yeah, they offer outdoor, creative, yeah. Another thing, yeah. I'm almost confident that they must have come. Because we looked at a few and now I'm kind of, I like looked it up the other day, but now I'm kind of doubting myself that that's actual. Because there was another one called Percussion Play and that maybe was where you got them from. So I'm happy to get that information for you and I can pass on the name of the representative we worked with, because she was super easy to work with and I'd recommend her. But yeah, they actually, the only thing to know about these is that they did have several different mounting options. We opted to cement them in the ground. And that took like all day. I should have put a picture of like my husband and like all my kids performing him, like just like trying to do this. And it was quite a process. So worth it obviously, but just, you know, hopefully you have like a maintenance person or like a ground keeper or like a highway department that could help you with this type of thing. We decided to just do it ourselves because we were not fully understanding how much of a project it was. So it took a long time to install them, but otherwise like really great offering for our community and we're so happy to have them and then we were able to get stuff to them and for them, it's amazing. Yeah, and is the, how are they holding up in the winter? I mean, I see you get your son out there. I mean, they're all, they look like they're all wearing metal, so. They're all metal. They seem completely fine. This is what they're designed for. I had seen similar products at like local museums and they've been there for like decades. So we're anticipating. It's outdoor playground equipment. So they're made to be outdoors. Yeah, on purpose. They're made to be outdoors. Yeah. And they're like, they sound just so beautiful too. The only one I wouldn't, but that doesn't sound as, like it's more stylish is the flower one. I love the ones that are kind of more real musical instrument sound better, but the flower one is really pretty. And I think. You had a grant for this. How much did the, how much do these, do you remember the cost of these or? Yes. I think the grant we got was for about $3,600 and then we spent another $2,000 in state aid funding to get one more. So $3,600, I think covered the three. I'll go back. Oh, you can't see all three. Sorry, there's three that were covered by the grant and then the flowers we purchased on our own. Just thought it would be nice to kind of have one more in front of the, or, you know, closer to the road where you could see it. Sure. Cool. So yeah, well worth it. And then of course, like again with the story walk, there's so many great ways that you can theme it. So when we did install the instruments we did our story walk as play this book and the take home was make your own maracas, which were very fun. So there's a story walk like has endless possibilities. The Girl Scouts just reached out to me because they're doing a particular project. Maybe you've heard of it called peace pinwheels. I had never heard of it. So we're gonna like work with them to do this pinwheel project and also do a related story walk at the same time. So it's like there are infinite possibilities all the seasons, all the holidays. It's just wonderful to have. So I'm gonna move on unless there's any more questions. Seems like no. Okay, so that, here we had, or like at the same time that we had got these going still in the nice summer months, we wanted to just add a few more ways that people could kind of extend their time at the, you know, outdoors at the library. So we bought just a bunch of outdoor toys. There's some pictures here. That's not like an exhaustive list of what we got. It's just a few, but just things that, and we put them in like those nylon sports bags with a barcode on them. So you could check them out. We originally were thinking that people would check them out and play with them in the field down below. And some people did, but a lot of people actually opted to take them home, which will find the best as well. So it was just another way that you could like find some joy with your family and have something new to do. And it was, you know, so simple. The scavenger hunt kits in the next picture were also really popular. Those were something that we like reassembled and we never saw them again. They were like constantly checked out. So I think we will do that again this summer, but we'll have to make a lot more of them. So what we included in there is just like a printout scavenger hunt, two pairs of binoculars, two pairs of magnifying glasses. And what's not in the picture were just some specimen boxes. So you could like capture your little finds and view them. Whenever we do any take home, we found it's really good or like take out. We found it's really good to have just pairs of everything because it seems like most families have at least two kids. And so if you have just one of something, it doesn't serve them quite as well. And we're usually also, I mean, we're not usually, we're always happy to just like throw in an extra one or an extra two in case we have larger families that want these things as well. So I'm gonna move on to now our actual take home activities, but I'm happy to answer any more questions before I do. Oh, I just have a question about those, of course, anything that you're sending home and checking out, having bring back. How did you do with the cleaning and sanitizing because of COVID, for those outdoor games? Yeah, we quarantined everything. And then, you know, if it needed a wipe, we would wipe it down, but we were working under the recommendation of our local board of health who just said, just quarantine it, you know? And- Just like people are doing books and things too, same thing. Yeah. We weren't like, we initially, I think started like wiping down all of our books. And we realized that's just like totally unsustainable, like wiping them down and quarantining them. So we started to just quarantine them. That was our board of health recommendation. So we felt comfortable with that. Any of the toys that were actually dirty, we would like clean. But if they were just like returned, but not dirty looking, we would just quarantine them. Cool. Yep. Go ahead. All right. So moving on to the take home activities then, I'm sure this is something that like a lot of you have already assembled, but I thought it'd be good to just show what we've included in ours. This was the first thing we put together right when we reopened in July. I don't know if I mentioned that before, but we've been reopened since July, just without in-person programming and you know, health and safety guidelines fully enforced. But storytime bags have been really popular. We have, I think, 13 of them in total. So that might give you an idea of if you want to implement this, how many you would need. We've got 13 for a town of about 1,900. So maybe you can multiply and that would give you a good idea. We usually have about like two or three on the shelf or on the rack here. So it seems like, you know, with that number, there's always something in stock for someone to take home. We could certainly add more, but we've run out of those nice bags, so no can do. As you can see, each bag has a different theme and these themes in this picture, those are all gone now because we've rotated them out a few times at this point to just keep things fresh. But, you know, like garden, butterflies, pirates, cats, that sort of thing. And they also all have like age recommendations. It's pretty much the same two groupings, which is like, you know, baby to two-year-old and then three and up. And of course, people are completely welcome to take whatever they want, but some of them have just four books and like a very baby-friendly craft project. So that's why they get that younger age rating. You can see in the next picture what's actually inside of them. So there's like a series of books on the theme and then there's everything that we would normally use for a story time here, which is scarves, musical instruments, rhythm sticks. And then we also included some toys. So we've got like that letter spinner there, which is great for just like letter recognition and early reading skills. And also you can see that one, that particular kit has an LCD writing tablet. We just kind of integrated some newer toys into them as well, because originally we had like more similar toys throughout all of them, but people really, I hadn't realized that first that people would just check one out and then check another one out and check another one out and then just keep repeating. So the feeling, I think a little repetitive, so we tried to switch it up a little bit. So that writing tablet is just like, I don't know if you've seen them, it's like a little black screen and you can write with a stylus. Every toy that we chose, we tried to have to be just like one piece. So there wasn't a bunch of things that could go missing. There's also some like those little bubble sticks down there. And then there's also a craft for each story time bag. So it's like a themed craft. And we tend to keep those separate because we feel like the craft materials will just get squished if it's like trying to be in there with the books and the instruments and everything. And also it gives us a chance then to just give out the correct number for that family. So if they have one child, two children, three children, we can give them the right number of craft supplies easily like this. Here's just another one that was had a light theme. And it's all the same stuff, but this one has like the project there. You can see it's a little paper lantern with just some markers that kids could scribble over and there was a light inside and all the things you would need to string it up. And there's, I just put together like a sample of the toys that we have in there. So you can see pretty much all of them are just one or two pieces connected together. The only one that has more pieces is that like, I know that magnetic drawing board has the stamps on it. But we wanted to make sure that it wasn't complicated for parents to like manage these things. Also on the back of the label that has the theme of it. So under that light slash sign label, there would be a list, a contents list that would have everything in it. So it'd be really easy for parents and us to check and make sure everything came back. We're really like, we don't care if we lose a shaker here and there. But it just, I think it's nice to kind of have some idea of how many shakers you're losing. So the bags, that picture there is the bags that you ran out of or was it the other ones? Yeah, this is actually funny that this worked out because I ordered these as a sale item, like for our friends in the library have just an ongoing sale of those t-shirts and some other things. And the company that made them for us screwed up, like they ordered the wrong type of bag. So they, this was not what we wanted and they didn't end up selling very well, which we knew because it wasn't what we wanted. But we ended up having 13 of them, I think, to create these storytime bags with and they worked great for that. But you could easily just do like some less expensive bag off of Amazon. Well, somebody does wanna know what company was that that you got those from? They like the bag. It's a company in Worcester called, yeah, it's not an online company. I would really, I would have to look up the name, but if you're really curious and live close to that area, I could, you could email me and I could send you that. Cause it was a long time ago now that we ordered those. Okay. We've done t-shirt orders through them too, for those t-shirts. So it's good to support local apps, all of that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, so the next thing we did, oops, there we go. We wanted to create something for older children that would not be into a storytime bag. So we put together these book and activity pairing take home kits. And the way we did this is we took over an entire shelving unit in our children's room. And it happened to have, I think it has eight shelves in total. So it's not a huge amount of space. If you have a larger library, you could really expand upon this because these have been so popular and so well loved. So each shelf in that shelving unit, we give a theme. So what you can see too, is the themes here are like winter and also unicorns. And we've really like stretched some of these themes, but we make it work. And then we come up with a project that goes along with that. So for the winter one, it was like a make your own snow globe. For the unicorn theme, it was unicorn slime because you can never do slime enough, it seems. We've got these wonderful art bins off of Amazon. It's just called art bin, if you wanna search for it. They come in several different sizes and these have been awesome because they close securely. I am shocked to say that like, I don't think a single one has been returned to us broken, which like I was not anticipating these lasting that long. But yeah, not a single one has been broken as far as I know. So kids can come in, they have a wide variety of books at different reading levels. We were originally saying that these were for independent readers, or children who were reading independently, but the little kids, they just see these things and they love them. So we started adding picture books to the collection of books as well. So each shelf has a collection of books on the theme. We find as many as we can in our own collection and put them up there. And then right next to the books is the craft kits, however many we happen to have in at a time. I actually looked before this to see how many of these art bins I had bought to get us to the point where like, we were able to kind of keep them in stock to some extent. And I think we got 32. So we basically have four bins per theme and that seems to work okay with us. Like sometimes, you know, a theme is just completely out of stock, but usually we have one kit sitting there for whoever might like it. The other thing is that again, each kit serves two kids because we ran into the exact same problem where parents were saying, oh, do you have any extra materials so that my other child can do this? So we just started stocking them for two each, some of them even you can extend to three. But that works really well. And a lot of times if a family only has one child, they'll just return the extra materials and we can repurpose them in a new kit. So yeah, I would highly recommend these if you can find the funding for them because these have been extremely popular. A lot of people I think have said that this is like their favorite thing that we've done so far. Oh yeah, I have some other pictures here of them. So this one was a monster one. I loved this one because it's like little monster. And those little kids that made them are just so sweet. And then I think I have some more pictures. So we did a sports one that was like a DIY Suze ball table. That one actually works really well and it's really fun. And then we did galaxy in a jar for the space theme. So we've gone through, again we've gone through maybe like two or three sets of themes at this point just to keep things fresh because, you know, people go through, they check them out all out one by one and then they're looking for something new because again, we only have space to have eight available at once. So yeah, any questions on this before I move on to something else? A couple of you. Yeah, the books that go in the kits, are they then since they're part of these kits are they didn't just like always checked out or are they also, are they only checked out when someone wants to take out one of the kits or are these like duplicates of the books, other copies you have and how is that all? These are straight from our collection. We didn't order anything special, but we do it like most kids just check out one book from the, like we'll pull like 20 or 30 books on a particular, like sports, you know, we'll throw 20 or 30 sports books of a variety of reading models. They'll all be sitting there. And then the kid can just choose one and take the kit. Ah, okay. So the kid is all the stuff to make the craft and then pick a book you want from this selection we've pulled that are late. Yes, yeah, I sort of explained that better because we originally were thinking, oh, we'll just put one book in the kit and it'll be like this book goes with this activity kit. But we decided that was much too limiting and like, you know, who knows if the book would really appeal to whichever kid wanted the kit. So they just have to pick any book from that theme. Sometimes if they don't see anything on the shelf too, we'll help them find something else in the collection that's like vaguely related. And that's fine with us too. We're not very, we're not very strict. They do the craft and then what they return to you is the book and the empty bin. They return the book, the empty bin. There's some like reusable materials that go out to like things like hole punchers or like measuring cups sometimes go out. And so, you know, people seem to, we don't mark them specifically to return but people seem to know just like return the reusable stuff. And they'll also often return just any other, like if they didn't use one of the paint colors or if they didn't use all the materials, we'll return those too so that we can re-purpose them. So are these available in your catalog for them to search and see what kits, the kits themselves as like- They are, but they're not, they're not foldable. It's like a first come, first served thing. So they are cataloged like the bin itself has a call number. And we found pretty quickly because like we're just restocking the kits that are out of stock when a bin comes back in. So it's not necessarily like the sports bin goes out and then when it returns, we'll refill it with sports stuff. We'll refill it with whatever needs restocking. So we originally tried to catalog each bin like as a specific, like as like activity kit sports or whatever, but we decided pretty quickly that didn't work. So we just, they're all cataloged as like activity kits and they, so we know that Patron has an activity kit on their card, but we can't really see which one, but like we haven't had any issues with patrons not returning them or it hasn't been very confusing for us. I think because we have such a small town, if you had a larger patronage, you maybe wanna be more specific about the cataloging. But again, we just found it wasn't working for us to try and keep like each bin specific to that project because we wanted more flexibility in being able to restock certain projects. Sure, sure. Only one more here. So how are you funding the materials that are in these kits and in the story time kit, the craft materials? Is this just part of your budget as a regular thing or is this part of that grant? Great question. We don't have any of our budget of our like municipal budget is allotted to programming. So we don't use any town funding for this. If it's like an item that we can catalog and lend out again and again and again, we will sometimes use our lending materials budget, but sometimes I like to have more flexibility and like not feel like that necessarily has to be a lendable item. So we'll just use friends of the library funding. We have a really great friends group. And I think because we offer so much to the community, our community members are really willing and really generous when we are asking for donations or asking for funding specific things. There's so many libraries I see put post out on their in flyers or in the communities or on their Facebook saying next month, the craft for the kids or something is gonna be this if anybody has a bag of cotton balls or whatever. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. No, I was thinking actually more of just like money donations, but we do get a lot of like craft supply donations. But yeah, I really think because like we offer so much to our community, they're willing to offer so much back to us. So it's like you have to build it up over time. But at this point, when we, even when we do like a very simple fundraiser, we have a lot of success with it and are able to go for a long time on that. Cause you know, we're buying like clothes pins and paint and cotton balls and things like that. It's nothing crazy expensive. All right. Go ahead. These are the newest add-on to our take-home offerings. And they're like my favorite thing we've ever done. The family book club bags. So included is everything that you would need for a family book club at your house. We put all the books in that you would need for like an average size family, I should say. We actually have a family in town that has 15 children. And so they reached out and said, do you think you could arrange a larger bag? And we're like, yeah, we can. But it has like everything you would need for an average sized family. And we included all the books you would need. The audio, like Captain Underpants, the audio book hadn't arrived when I took this picture, but we do now have the audio books. All the books we chose have a movie that was made from the books. So that kind of worked out well. It wasn't necessarily something we planned on, but all the titles we were choosing were really popular titles. So it just kind of worked out that way. We also include like a series of discussion questions. You can see they're printed out on those laminated cards. They're kind of like five by seven size. And in with the discussion questions, we also included like a card about the author and a card about the book's genre because that's something that like some people just don't know. So we thought that was really fun information. And that's how I learned that Star Wars is considered a space opera. I didn't know that before. Then we also created like a take home project that was very family friendly and kind of like multi ages. So for Captain Underpants, the take home is creating a flip book. We actually just like bought those flip books off of Amazon and then put in like writing utensils and markers and stuff like that. What's not pictured here is we also put in like a box of hot chocolate mix and some popcorn because people love that type of thing. So the other book on here is Wonder. And this was one kind of a couple different titles that we chose where there was like a picture book version too, which I think works really well because you can draw in the younger members of your household. And of course they won't like be getting the whole plot of the story, but they'll still be able to participate in the conversations and like especially the prompts from the discussion questions. Because for Wonder it's about like friendship and kindness and things like that. And the craft there is a cleanliness jar or like a good deed jar that you can make with your family. And then I just had pictures of a couple others. So Wrinkle in Time is another one that we've done. And then I am Malala. I am Malala works wonderfully of course because there's like the original book meant for adults. There's the junior novelization. And then there's the picture book, Malala's Magic. And so then I can't tell, I can't remember. But so that one works really well because it's like all ages. And there was two copies of the audiobook and the movie. So these are like one of my favorite things that we've ever done. I feel like this is such a good offering. Again, this was like a stolen idea from another library. So I'm really happy. I spend a lot of time like looking at other libraries on Facebook and it pays off hugely because this is like one of my favorite things. Does anyone have any questions about this? I know we're like really running out of time here. Yeah, we are getting close to you. And we got about 10 minutes left so we'll have to get through things quickly. So if anybody does have any questions, as Sam said, her email address will be in the end of their slides, you'll be able to access it there. The slides will be available afterwards. Also when we put up the recordings, you have all the information to reach out to her there as well. Okay, I'll just move on then. Yeah. So we've done some take-homes for adults as well. Like again, I'm sure that most of you are also offering these. Like this like dried orange garland one was like our most popular one ever. So please feel that idea. It worked out really well. I just like dried a bunch of oranges at home. What we look for in these take-homes for adults is just like creating things that would be widely popular, but also things that the prep work is kind of annoying if you were trying to do it on your own. So we take care of all the prep work for you. And then it's just like a easy fun project that you can display in your house or not. I think next month we're actually gonna try like the spice, like the spice take-home that I've seen a lot because that seems really fun too. But just taking the work out of it and again, like offering something nice. A lot of adults when they come in, they're like, this is for me? Like, because they never do so much stuff for kids but they're like particular that we offer stuff for adults too. Okay, I did some tips for successful take-homes here. So I'll just read these really quickly. We decided it's been much easier to pick the activity first for any of those themed things like the story time bags or the book and activity pairings. It's so much easier to pick an activity that you love and you know will work well as a take-home and then choose the topic in the book based on that. Then it is to go the other way around because you get like we were trying to figure out a great activity for like an outdoor one and we're having trouble with finding one that was just right for a take-home that we could get the materials cheaply and that it would be a project that was great for any like a wide range of age groups. So we found that picking but picking your favorite activity first actually works better for those. We didn't do that I should say for any of the like the one-off like the family book club bags. Those we picked the book first. Always take the process art for young children. That's just like something I couldn't not include in here but like young kids, so developmentally inappropriate to be like following step-by-step guides for projects. Just like give them a bunch of materials and let them have fun. It also saves you and your prep time, like so much time to just like throw materials together. Include all the necessary materials. This is kind of like an if you can thing. We always do this like even if they need a pencil, we are putting a pencil in or like glue, whatever. We put it all in because I don't want people to get home, open their bag, be excited. And then like have to like search through their house for like a measuring spoon, that's the right size or something like that. We just put it all in there and make sure that they can open the bag and do the project right away without having to like do any of their own prep. Consider dexterity issues for adult offerings. Some of the ideas we've loved and thought would be really popular. They're just so fiddly. We didn't want to like exclude adults that couldn't physically be doing those things with their hands. And like the offerings that we've done like some of those darlings that you just saw, we tried to make it really easy for people by like taping the edges of the string so that it was really easy to just slide it right through the holes that we created. And if you're on a budget, ask your surrounding libraries to offer similar services if you have a good relationship with them because we're in this position, and I think probably a lot of people are, if you're in a rural small community, you're surrounded by other rural small communities. So the services you offer, if they're not reflected back in the other towns around you, you might find yourself having to provide a lot more for the patrons coming to you because the service is kind of unique to your library there. But if you don't have a strict budget, that's not so much of an issue. Availability and accessibility, if you can, make it available during all open hours. Don't make people come to like a certain window like a Tuesdays, Tuesdays, two to four PM or something like that. It's just so hard, especially for children things for parents. It'll add a little bit of staff extra work, but it's so worth it to just be able to get things more widely available to people and make it much easier for people to pick them up. Make enough to supply everyone who wants one. I'm not a fan of the while supplies last idea. I really think if you're offering this, offer it to everyone. If you have to choose kind of a less expensive project to make it available more widely, I would totally do that than just only offering like 30 or 40 of them and cutting it off at the end. Skip the registration if you can. It's just complicated for people. Again, this is not gonna be possible for some people. It works really well in small, small towns like ours. But I think like I just saw on Facebook the other day, a library posted about a particular project. They posted the registration form. And then there were just a stream of comments underneath from patrons who were confused about the process, confused about when you picked it up. And it dresses so much easier if you're just like, this is available, it is here, come and get it, we have it. Just like anything else, the library come whenever you want to. Exactly. Yeah, and offer delivery, that's always the class. We've delivered to like moms who've broken their ankles. Like we do a delivery as much as possible. It's easy cause a lot of our employees live in town. But just like that's a great service that small libraries can offer. We do offer homebound delivery services. So if you can do that as well and like think of it more beyond just like strictly homebound patrons, but people who just like their car broke down or whatever, you know, just bring it to them if you can. It's wonderful. We also did a dial-up story program. I'll like just point out that we did it cause I'm so out of time, but this has been really for us, this was like an alternative to virtual programming. It gets a lot of use. I know because like people can use the messages after they listen to the story. So I get all these messages from toddlers saying like, I love this story, thank you. So this is a really wonderful offering for us. Homebound delivery, we've been doing this for years, but if you can swing it for your small library is such a great thing. You may only find that you're like reaching an extra 10 people, but it's so worth it because those 10 people would not be getting services from you otherwise, most likely, unless they have someone willing to drive them or to pick up materials for them. So if you can get this going, it's really like it's very little work, especially if you can find volunteers to do it or if your staff can do it kind of as they're leaving for the day, so worth it. And the last thing I wanna say is just marketing and advertising. It is so worth it if you can find the time to do it regularly, do it thoroughly, like post all of your offerings, really take some time to make sure that you're advertising everything that you have at the library. Use high quality, well thought out images and survey your community to find out how they prefer to receive information. We just did a community survey and we found that like 75% of people said they wanna hear about it on social media. So that makes it really easy for us because we don't have to put so much pressure on ourselves for like our e-newsletter or things like that because we know people are really just using social media to find out about what we're doing. And this is my contact information. I would love to hear from you. If you have any ideas that you think like would work well at my library, please send them to me. I will totally see you in the back. And if you have any questions about anything, just send them away. I'm so happy to answer them for you. You can call me, you can email. Love to hear from you. Yeah, definitely. Take down her email address and number there while we have the slide up. If anybody does have any other questions, we are running into our next session. That's okay, not a problem. Try to make sure we get as much as we can through done here. Thank you.